How to dissolve your ego—and why you should

Ever want to move forward but find you're in your own way?

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  • Many of us are held back by the idea of ourselves that our egos have built and will do anything to maintain.
  • Oftentimes this manifests as a fear of failure, an inability to start on new projects, or the evasion of responsibility.
  • Here we have five suggestions on how to keep your ego in check.
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Want to be a better leader? Take off the mask.

The best leaders don't project perfection. Peter Fuda explains why.

  • There are two kinds of masks leaders wear. Executive coach Peter Fuda likens one to The Phantom of the Opera—projecting perfectionism to hide feelings of inadequacy—and the other to The Mask, where leaders assume a persona of toughness or brashness because they imagine it projects the power needed for the position.
  • Both of those masks are motivated by self-protection, rather than learning, growth and contribution. "By the way," says Fuda, "your people know you're imperfect anyway, so when you embrace your imperfections they know you're honest as well."
  • The most effective leaders are those who try to perfect their craft rather than try to perfect their image. They inspire a culture of learning and growth, not a culture where people are afraid to ask for help.

Individuals and organizations can learn more from Peter Fuda at enixa.co.

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Why your self-image might be wrong: Ego, Buddhism and Freud

"You" might not be as real as you think you are. Here's what Buddhism has to say about living ego-free, and how Freud misunderstood it.

You first develop your ego when you are two or three years old. It creeps into existence the moment you realize that you are not empty—you are a self, and everyone else has a self in them. As you grow up, it latches onto positive and negative feedback and uses them to build the story of who you are. "The ego likes certainty, it likes security, it likes repetition, and so it’s always reinforcing its own vision of itself, and that starts to restrict us, to confine us, to make us think that we know ourselves better than we actually do," says psychiatrist Mark Epstein. So what to make of the Buddhist concept of 'egolessness'? Should we destroy the ego? Freud seemed to think that's what Buddhists meant, but as Mark Epstein explains, the famous psychoanalyst got it wrong. The full nuance of 'egolessness' is not to be completely without ego, but to doubt the story that it tells you. "For many people [the ego] stays in a kind of immature place," he says. Your ego has been your constant companion throughout life, but was there some point at which it stopped growing? "Maybe some of those fixed ideas that have been operating inside of you since you were a little kid and conditioning the way you interact with other people, with the world, maybe those are not all so right. Maybe you’re not as "really real" as you think you are, and you could start to let go of some of that a little bit." Mark Epstein is the author of Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself.

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Our lives are ruled by ego – but playing is the antidote

The happiest moments of our lives are when we lose ourselves – in art, in exercise, in love. According to Harvard's Diane Paulus, being able to 'play' and engage in something outside of ourselves is a valuable respite from our egos.

It takes a brave adult to play. It’s a kind of subordination, a lessening of your status, a silly exhibition of the child you once were. And that, says Diane Paulus, is why it’s so essential.

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