Your Ego Thinks it’s Saving You. But it’s Not.
A Two-Part Equation.
Telling the people who believe in you the least about your hopes, dreams and goals is as destructive as it is helpful. How often do you find yourself getting really excited about a new endeavour and reaching out to the person who has repeatedly met you with tentative encouragement or blatant doubt?
Why do we do this? Some psychological reason, surely. As someone who switched out of a psych degree 2 years in, I am hardly qualified to diagnose a root cause, but I propose this phenomenon is a careful equation; one part ego and one part self-destruction. Let me explain.
Part One: Self-Destructive Behaviours
In my experience, many goals and dreams are as fleeting as a breeze. The fire shines upon them for a moment; before you know it, that anxious, excited feeling you had to write a book, get fit, eat healthily, and travel the world is stifled nearly instantaneously.
When we talk about self-destructive behaviours, we are talking about words we say to ourselves and actions we take against our desires because of our beliefs about what we’re capable of or deserve.
Imagine you’re bowling; each turn, you keep knocking down the pins in one fell swoop; each turn’s a victory; you and that ball are one. Midway through the game, you’re looking at the scoreboard and realize you’re doing well, maybe better than your group. For the next shot, you try something new, fancy, a triple sow-cow before shooting your shot and what happens? The ball trudges down the gutter, and every subsequent shot loses more momentum. What happened? You possessed the skills to bowl like a champ in the first half of the game, so why not now?
Did you lose the skill set? The innate ability to calculate the force and velocity for the ideal shot. Or did you lose your confidence? Did you see the scoreboard, the excited grins of your fellow bowlers and feel a little switch trigger? The switch that screams, “Oh, wait, hold on, this must be some fluke. We aren’t good at bowling, but maybe we are? What if we start to suck now? That would be embarrasing.”
You’ve lost your edge because of that annoying voice and abandoned the smooth confidence you had flowing through you. Now you’d have a better chance at knocking down those pins if you walked down the alley and kicked them than you would by tossing that ball.
Now, psyching yourself out in a friendly bowling match is one thing. Sure, you may have had a better chance had you not thought about it so hard, but you were willing to deviate from the so far successful path because the stakes weren’t that high; if you failed the bowling match because you got too cocky, you aren’t going to think you are a lesser person or have less value. It won’t say anything about your character.
When it comes to larger goals and dreams, the stakes are higher. Where “failure” might mean that everything you think about yourself might not be true. And if negative self-talk isn’t enough, if your positive voice is stronger, your ego will find a different avenue to mope around and sulk in. We are far more likely to deviate.
And if negative self-talk isn’t enough, if your positive voice is stronger, your ego will find a different avenue to mope around and sulk in.
Part Two: The Ego
The ego gets a bad rep. It isn’t wholly evil; it is a psychological mechanism involved in protecting you. Though we all possess an ego, how it involves itself in your day-to-day is affected by many factors and carries from person to person. Everybody shits on their ego or other people’s egos because we don’t recognize it as something trying to do good but going about it in the wrong ways.
Anytime I have started living by the statement “I am a writer.” or “I have a really good idea for a book, and I think I am going to start writing it.” I synonymously have the urge to involve everyone I know and their mom in that, once confident, choice. I convince myself that by telling friends, family, and Instagram followers that I am now working on this new project (either external or internal) that somehow I will be held accountable to finish.
Listen, I know one thing to be true in my short life. Everyone is busy dealing with this exact same process and has no time to hold you accountable, or if they are perpetually stuck in this egotistic cycle of self-destruction as it pertains to their own hopes and dreams, they likely have little reserve of joy and hope to pass on to you.
As shitty as it is to hear, you have likely once or twice been the Stiffler of someone else’s exciting plans, only because you were hopeless and tired with your own.
When you start to behave in ways that align with your greater good. (i.e. bowling really well because you just believe you’re going to do well), In its misinformed but loving way, the ego puts the bumpers up. The ego is there to say, “yep, sure, good job. But, just in case, here are some bumpers.” It fails to consider that you were doing well without them. Though your behaviour is better aligned with what you’re truly capable of, it is not aligned with your beliefs about yourself. It wants to protect you from failing, especially now that things are starting to get good.
Though your behaviour is better aligned with what you’re truly capable of, it is not aligned with your beliefs about yourself.
The ego does not want your beautiful, passionate, brave spirit to be shadowed by failure. Instead, it settles for self-doubt and is happy when it can rest as you wallow in it.
When I say I’m going to write a book, my greater good knows I have the skill and gift of writing well, and I have an interesting story to tell. My greater good is the fire, the warmth and wants the best for me. The ego wants the best for me too, but only if it can be achieved without any risk of failure. Because right now, that innate belief that I can write a good book, that I could be a successful and recognized author, and that people might resonate with my work is unchallenged by failure.
What happens if I put my head down, work for months on something I feel really good about, and nobody wants to read it? Or, worse, they read it and hate it. The ego would much rather stifle your dreams as they start and endure self-inflicted disappointment and some negative self-talk than the dread of its worst fears being confirmed.
So, it knows, because it’s you, what your self-destructive behaviours are. It knows what to say to keep you stagnant. My ego knows that telling everyone about what I’m going to do will guarantee that I don’t do it. I don’t want to be the one saying that I’m not good enough; I don’t want to believe that I have any doubt within me that I can’t achieve what I want to achieve.
But, if I call up that one person who always subtly rolls their eyes and gets that insincere tone when they say, “that’s great Emily.” Then I will abandon the plan.
The ego thinks it’s saving you, but it’s not. I don’t like giving unsolicited advice to strangers, and you are all strangers. So instead, hear my advice to myself, and if you like it, add it to your internal narrative.
Take note of your self-destructive behaviours, and ask your overbearing ego to step aside and remind it that it isn’t helpful. There is only one possibility when you let your ego/self-destructive behaviours take the wheel, disappointment. When you indulge in your greater good, you give yourself the chance to shine.
