Thoughts on Ego
The relationship we have with our Ego is one of the most important relationships we can cultivate. Through healthy Ego relationships, extending across many areas of our lives, we can establish ourselves as mature adults.
Taking the Time to Understand Ego
There are many ways “Ego” is used and described in psychology, psychoanalysis, books, podcasts, articles, and whatever else people use to share knowledge these days. Contexts of Ego range from basic descriptions of narcissistic, egotistical ex-presidents to more complex Freudian concepts of psychoanalytic theory. Given the extensive writings, studies, and understandings of the Ego out there, I want to be very clear up front that my approach to Ego is from my own interpretation.
I have studied Ryan Holiday and the stoic approach to letting go of Ego. I’ve explored the role Ego plays in “compersion” within open relationships. I’ve listened to Eckhart Tolle and Allan Watts discuss the Egoic state and the transformational paths we take through insecurity toward a true self. Many brilliant minds out there are sharing their work in different contexts, where Ego almost inevitably will play a part. Among plenty of other examples, there have been multiple influences in helping me define what Ego means to me.
What I have come to realize is that a core theme in self-developmental, philosophical, antiracist, and leadership teachings is the mature relationship we are able to establish with our Ego.
Healthy Relationship with My Ego
What I have landed on, at least as I write this, as my definition of “Ego” is our conscious and unconscious efforts to protect our sense of self from existential confusion. It is our internal source of meaning making, memory structuring, image crafting, expectation establishing, and emotion driving. It leverages bias, rationality, logic, and intuition to protect us as best as it can from a world of uncertainty.
When unchecked and undeveloped, our Ego really can be our worst enemy. If channeled in a mature, grown up way, however, our Ego can serve to protect the things that matter most, like character, integrity, and values.
While Ego is inevitable, it is also malleable. I believe that my relationship with my ego is the most important relationship I have. (Even my fiancé Deb agrees, which should say something.) Therefore, it is worth a very deliberate effort to learn, understand, and develop over the course of my adult life.
Ryan Holiday and his writings have been a major influence to my way of thinking, as I have written about, and although he is quite adamant about Ego being the enemy, I don’t think he would disagree with my interpretation:
The real enemy is having a poor relationship with our Ego. When we live in a way that lets our Ego run rampant on decision making and actions we will be led toward a miserable, anxious, and stressful way of being. Channeling its power, on the other hand, and being able to negotiate with it as our values and beliefs change over time, can be a very real benefit to our maturation in different areas of our life.
Our relationship with our Ego dictates our level of maturation as adults.
Ego In Real Life
It’s quite simple: The more we mindlessly let our Ego defend shitty values, self-serving interests, and uninformed beliefs, the more likely we are to be immature assholes.
Ego will get in the way of us growing up by keeping us attached to where we are now. Where we are now is safe, it makes sense, it is comfortable. It is certain.
Sound the alarms. This is a call for people to wake up and become aware of their Ego. If words on the internet could make a loud noise, that’s what I would want to happen right now. Or, as Ken Wilbur would say:
Wake up, grow up, clean up, show up.
I will not try to be academic like a Cook-Greuter or a Wilbur, because I am certainly not academic. Trying to fake it, as one may gather, would be a completely hypocritical move here. Instead, I am going to try a different way to convey Ego.
In Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy, he uses a wonderful array of real-life examples to show how poor relationships with Ego can hinder a person. He also masterfully weaves in ways in which people have leveraged strong ego relationships for success, service, and growth. As mentioned, I am a big fan and will follow a similar path.
I am going to try and convey my evolving relationship with my Ego through examples in my personal and professional career. The hope here is that my journey is somewhat relatable enough for anyone reading to empathize with the challenges a developing Ego presents as well as recognizing the importance of the aforementioned relationship with it.
The first step, I think for anyone, is coming to terms with what your Ego is to you and figuring out where in your life it shows up most. Three areas where my Ego relationship has been the most challenging have been with my physical self-image, my romantic relationships, and my professional work.
The Ego and Self-Image
When I look back on my adolescence and young adulthood my Ego was most invasive in my belief of my own attractiveness and in the projected image that I worked so hard to have others see of me. My Ego developed in this way from childhood and was consistently reinforced along my “maturation” process. My mother never seemed to deviate from the importance and value of how handsome I was. My father, similarly, was always overly concerned about his own physical appearance as well as our family’s image in the eyes of those we encountered.
I had to dress a certain way for every occasion. My hair had to always be styled and cutting it was a monthly dramatic discussion. My parents were always aware of the way I looked and therefore I was always aware of the way I looked. It went so far as us getting scolded at the dinner table when my siblings and I did not look or act like princes or princesses.
With appearance and image being such a focus during childhood, my Ego developed strong protections surrounding looks as an adult as well. My Ego’s meaning making system also made it quite clear that looking good was a top value. It would get me what I wanted and be the reason for my success. A mirror had only one, surface-serving, purpose. More to come on what this did to my relationships in a moment.
A healthy Ego relationship, surrounding my self-image and physical appearance, would have looked more like this:
- Recognition in the value of my Ego protecting my deeper qualities like character and integrity.
- Understanding that life energy is wasted with my Ego focused on something surface and bound to deteriorate.
- Deliberate work on skills to create confidence in my own abilities and contributions.
- Ability to set proper boundaries with myself and others on the need and demand for external validation.
The Ego and Romantic Relationships
It took me about 30 years of anti-commitment sentiment to realize that I wasn’t nearly as great of a catch as I made myself out to be. Being the center of my own self-important, image-valuing universe, of course I thought I was the cats pajamas when it came to potential boyfriends. On the surface, I was everything I thought someone would want in a partner.
Truth be written, I needed a serious Ego check to realize how unhealthy my approach to women had been. I had this issue with taking from the relationships far more than I gave to it. I also believed that all relationships would inevitably fail because I hadn’t seen healthy examples of relationships in my own life. This led me to treating the women I dated as temporary flings rather than human beings worth getting to know better. Why commit to something bound to fail anyway? I had way more important things to commit to, like my next haircut appointment, for example.
Above all, there was always this hope for someone better. My Ego believed I deserved a more attractive woman (see image-related reasons above), regardless of who I was with. My Ego was looking for some form of “perfection” which of course was a projection of the way I treated myself. Never good enough. Always something to critique or improve. I was stuck with myself, however, so turning that fickleness on females I dated was really the only choice.
As a result, I refused to commit, vowed to stay available and made it quite clear to myself that this meant I would always have a shot at the “upgrade” should she present herself. Told you. Total immature douche.
It wasn’t until Deb came along and began calling me out on this ridiculous behavior that I realized how terrible my approach had been. She is smart and beautiful and so many other wonderful things, sure. For some reason, she stuck with me. And because of her infallible logic in the way she held me accountable, I stuck with her.
Most importantly, our six-year relationship has forced my Ego to reckon with my integrity. We certainly have a life of learning and working yet to do (together or individually) but up until now, I have had to make deliberate decisions on actions necessary for my relational development. I have had to make unconscious behaviors conscious and make conscious choices between allowing my Ego to protect past beliefs and my future maturity. Maturity has won more, Ego has developed, and here I sit, happily engaged, growing every day.
A healthy Ego relationship surrounding my romantic relationships growing up would have looked more like this:
- Developing more empathy with the way it must have felt for another Ego to be treated as expendable.
- Forgoing the Ego’s need for immediate gratification from a relationship and being patient to instead learn and understand myself better.
- Recognition that lying and dishonesty in relationships was a result of my Ego trying to protect my own image.
- Patience to be more deliberate about learning what I wanted in a partner before letting my Ego adhere to uninformed desire.
The Ego and Professional Work
Work is something I’ve written about recently, and the context of image versus integrity absolutely has the focal idea of individual and collective Ego at the core.
Recently, I read Adam Grant’s Think Again, where he discusses the performance culture versus the learning culture in organizations. At the meta level, one could say that an example of an organization with a healthy Ego relationship would be one with a learning culture.
A performance culture, however, has the tendency to fail to address its own Ego. These are the only types of organizations I have worked in. Therefore, for over a decade, my Ego’s development as a professional has been subject to less than optimal environments, creating conflicts of integrity, much like I have written about above.
Important to note here that yes, an organization can have an Ego and thus, a relationship with it. A collective Ego or corporate Ego can form when the culture within does not allow for honest communication and feedback. It begins with the leadership of the organization.
What kind of relationship do the leaders have with their own Egos?
If the leaders have been deliberately working on their own growth over the course of their careers, through listening, understanding, and integrity, it is likely they will have healthy Ego relationships. In my experience, this is rarity in today’s expected corporate culture.
Unfortunately, if a leader’s primary focus has been personal success or climbing the proverbial corporate ladder, it is possible that a few necessary learning steps were missed along the way. The culture of the company, in turn, will reflect these misses and pull unnecessary energy from its employees to fill the voids.
In a performance culture, the Egos within have attached their identity to work. I am a doctor. I am a lawyer. Or for me, I am an Account Manager. Whereas the detached alternatives of I help sick people, I ensure justice, and I build relationships, take a backseat. Our Ego needs this identity to feel safe and thus will likely have no problem with an organizations focus on titles or status to reinforce that identity.
There is also a collective fear of underperforming or being seen as less than for risk of losing the job or, even worse, that identity. For me, that fear has had me show up to work with a mask that made sure my faults were hidden. In turn, the inability to be honest or transparent(a common theme with poor Ego relationships) has led to no true feedback, no true learning, and no true growth, regardless of my title.
Learning cultures, on the other hand, helps to create values that develop better people within an organization. Better people make a better company. A better company makes a better impact. It’s pretty straightforward, but because you don’t see the word “profit” in that equation, the learning culture is often overlooked.
A healthy Ego relationship surrounding the work I have done in my life would have looked more like this:
- Prioritization of learning and honest feedback by company leadership in the employee growth process, over sales goals or retention metrics.
- Valuing innovation and creativity without the fear that failure would mean losing one’s job or opportunities to grow.
- Desire to understand employees and teammates character rather than judge by appearance or perceived way of being.
- Leadership by leaders doing the deliberate work to become better for themselves and taking on a coaching mindset to help grow employees.
The Patience of a Mature Ego Relationship
To recap, our Egos and the relationships we have with them come up in almost everything we do. I chose image, relationships, and work because they have been the most challenging Ego-developing areas of my life.
Where does Ego show up most for you?
What questions are you asking yourself to better understand the role Ego plays in your maturation process?
To reiterate, all Ego ultimately represents is how mature we are as adults. Mature adults have healthy relationships with their Egos, immature adults do not.
Recognize that this simple in concept but quite challenging to navigate its complexity. That’s ok, we are human. We all have our baggage. Years of Ego development from years of experiences that dictate the way we approach any given situation, decision, or action. It is never too late to explore ourselves and our Egos.
For me, it comes down to patience.
- Can we be patient enough to subdue the Ego’s desire for immediate gratification?
- Can we be patient enough to ask questions and seek understanding or perspective before needing to explain or defend ourselves?
- Can we be patient enough to trust that the learning process will make ourselves and others into better people before demanding to see results?
If you were patient enough to read all the way to this point, I hope you’re starting to think about your relationship with your own Ego. If so, I hope you started the thought process with some questions for yourself. There’s no other way to begin.
If you’d like to explore more content, coaching, and self exploration with me, please visit my website www.deliberateself.com
