As an executive coach, I hear lots of limiting beliefs and stories when working on growing our clients’ organizations and engaging their cultures. Throughout my coaching career, I’ve found that often, there is a connection between your ability to manage your ego and your success!
“I’m not worthy” is a favorite story of the ego. It keeps us in pain and distracted, constantly looking for people, objects, experiences to make us feel whole, worthy. While we’re busy with these distractions, we tend to lose focus on what really matters.
How Your Ego Works
Your ego is just the unintegrated parts of yourself. In our executive coaching practice we have several processes we use with clients to re-integrate the parts of themselves that they have abandoned. We’ve all done this, abandoned parts of ourselves. We “separate” from ourselves during traumatic experiences. And we’ve all had traumatic experiences of one sort or another. In our book Power Your Tribe I cover an extensive Parts Process to re-integrate a part of yourself. It’s not as potent as a coaching session, but it’s better than nothing if you really want to start to manage your ego.
Here’s a tool I can explain quickly: Organismic Rights.
Take a moment and turn your mobile phone off, turn the volume off on your computer and get present with yourself.
Now check in on your Org Rights. As you look at each table below, ask yourself if you have that Right, and rate yourself on a scale of 0-5 where 0 is don’t have the Right and 5 is absolutely do all the time (so you behave consistently in a way that honors that right)
Right to Exist
Right to Have Needs
Right to Take Action
Right to Have Consequences
Right to Love/Be Loved
How did you do? What Org Rights would you like to increase? Notice that low Org Rights are the cause of most of your upset. Interesting…
Egos Like To Blame Others
Another trap of the ego is how it fights to stay small. The way the ego fights is to make yourself or another person wrong. This is how it stays the same, maintains its status quo, and avoids change. This is how the ego stays stuck, small, scared, judgmental. If those areas tend to be weaknesses of yours, you definitely need to learn to manage your ego.
We’re all working on healing something—our bodies, our emotions, our mind, our connection to our version of God, our life conditions, you name it. That’s ok. It would be really boring if everything was perfect all the time—no conflict, no journey, no journey, no triumph over adversity! Heck, no triumph, no heroes!
YOU are the one you’ve been searching for. There’s nothing outside of you that can truly fulfill you long term. There’s just YOU and investing in yourself. When you invest in yourself by learning, getting a coach, going to a retreat, etc, you are saying you matter—that you are worth investing in. That you deserve to create the life and career that you want, and that you are capable of learning to manage your ego.
The Net-Net
- Org Rights help us understand why we do what we do—and what causes us the most emotional pain
- Your ego will constantly look for things/people/places to be disappointed, hurt, stressed over—don’t buy into this game as it’s perpetual
- Investing in finding out who you pays great dividends
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Enjoy the blog? I’d love to invite you over to my new podcast, Crack the Behavior Code, where you get a glimpse into my strategic approach to business and leadership. I’ll bring you on a journey to leverage neuroscience-based tools in order to promote behavior change and begin understanding what all humans need (and how you can provide it)!