Lately, I have come to notice that I have a big ego, and to be honest, I’m not really sure what to do about it.
Now, in my mind, there are two types of people I attribute with big egos – those who are pretending to have a big ego due to really feeling insecure about who they are and those who actually recognize their strengths and actually like who what they see in the mirror.
While certainly over a large part of my life, I fell into the first crowd of people, at this point I couldn’t help to think that I fall into the latter.
So it came as a surprise to me when I realized my ego was getting in the way of my personal growth.
I asked myself what I should do.
Value myself less? No that doesn’t seem healthy.
Value others more? That doesn’t really work since when I do that, it tends to inflates my ego (often falsely).
So what was I to do?
Which is when I realized that the issue is that I attribute any value to myself in the first place. You see, value is relative to another set point, so by assessing my own personal value, by definition, I was insecure and still in the former category.
The only way out is to stop the compulsion to compare myself to others and create figures of value altogether. There are natural effects that I think get in the way of this goal. But with focus, I do think that we can minimize the ego’s menace.
The upshot is that the goal is not to have a “healthy ego” rather to have no ego altogether. Which probably isn’t conventional wisdom, I don’t think. But that is just my ego talking. 😉