The Balanced Ego
The “I”, the “Self”, the thinking and feeling you is the ego. Ego is what gives us conscious awareness of ourselves and the world that is external to us. The ego has a positive and negative side. When functioning in a positive way, ego gives us the ability to be self-aware, to grow and evolve, to aspire to achieve goals, to turn ideas into action, to be creative, to protect ourselves from danger and so forth. When we have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a feeling of superiority to other people or when we feel inferior to others, that’s when negative ego behaviours come into play. How it works is that we let our sense of self-importance or insecurities become the lens through which we interpret everything said or done to us. From a place of our own self-importance or insecurity we tend to be quick to take offense, to take issue with whatever is said or done in our presence; we tend to interpret what others say and do as an intentional arrow or attack aimed at us. Consequently, we respond defensively or aggressively. Hence we bring about conflict in our interactions with each other because we are reacting from our negative ego.
Conflict can for many of us develop into an addiction as we become more and more hooked on the struggle to gain power, to be right, to win, to assert ourselves and our individuality. When we don’t win the argument or whatever it is we are seeking to gain the upper hand on, our ego feels defeated or diminished. And so goes the cycle of the negative or unhealthy ego from either feeling like the victor or the victim.
We need to learn to count to ten so to speak before we react in order to consider that the manner in which another person interacts with us is more likely than not about who they are than it is a personal attack or a slight targeted specifically at us. Then can we stop the cycle of negative ego responses that create disharmony for ourselves and others. Conflict will continue for as long as we insist on taking other people’s behaviour personally. Conflict will endure for as long as our ego chooses to feel that our sense of self-worth is at stake when the ideas, proposals or recommendations we put forth are not adopted. Taming the classic internal voice of negative ego and re-educating it to make more neutral and fact based observations on what people say and do begins with a reminder to the self that, “everything is not always about you”! In other words, a person’s life experiences, upbringing, cultural background, and life skills are among the various dimensions that impact how we interact.