Using Someone to Feed Your Ego
We all want to find our passions. We all want to do work that engages us and makes us happy.
The trick, of course, is figuring out whether what we're doing is genuinely fulfilling... or serves to feed a need, fill a hole, or just promote the greater glory of us.
Sometimes figuring out the difference can take a long time.
That's why I love this guest post from Dr. Shelley Provost, a partner and director of happiness of the venture incubator Lamp Post Group.
Here's Shelley:
Your ego and your "calling" in life can look surprisingly similar. Both pull you toward the realization of your desires. Both can completely consume your waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours with frenetic thoughts and sparks of brilliance. Both can also manifest very similar outcomes—money, fame, and power.
And they can both leave you feeling exhausted.
Ego is necessary and important because it does the work to assemble your personality. It manages your fragile identity while you figure out who you are. It protects you from the onslaught of societal expectations and motivates you to work hard and achieve great things.
But ego alone can also skew you toward thinking that hard work and achievement are the goals in life.
If your ego is what assembles your personality and manages your identity, then your calling is invested in making sure it's authentic—who you really are—not just a persona you show the world.
Here are some ways to determine which is really driving your work:
Ego and calling fear very different things.
Your ego fears not having or doing something.
The lifeblood of the ego is fear. Its primary function is to preserve your identity, but it fears your unworthiness. As a result, ego pushes you harder in order to achieve more. Ego communicates to you through "oughts," "musts," and "shoulds," persuading you to believe that by achieving more and more, you must be worthy, right?
Your calling fears not expressing or being something.
A calling expresses itself quietly, through the expression of subtle clues throughout your life. It is unconcerned with you attaining or accomplishing anything. Its primary function is to be a conduit for expressing your true self to the world. What you do with that expression is less important.
Both ego and calling need to be fed.
Ego needs anxiety to survive.
Ego not only breeds on anxiety, it requires anxiety in order to decide which aspects of your personality will be dominant, and which ones will be dormant.
Wherever you feel the most insecurity is where your ego will work overtime to 'fix.' The ego needs anxiety to pinpoint the problem, then course corrects by disavowing this pesky aspect of your personality. Unfortunately, what the ego finds annoying or disruptive can also be your greatest gift to the world.
Calling needs silence to survive.
A calling, on the other hand, is discovered through observation and reflection, which is rarely found in a noisy environment. Listening to your life and discovering what it's asking of you is your calling and it requires more silence than most of us are comfortable with.
Both ego and calling produce tangible results.
Ego results in burnout.
My favorite definition of burnout is this—burnout is not about giving too much of yourself, it's about trying to give what you do not possess.
Ego ends in burnout because its consuming resources you don't have in order
to push you toward a bigger, better version of yourself.
Calling manifests as fulfillment.
Because a calling is an expression of your true nature, it can only end in fulfillment. You know that feeling of deep satisfaction when you're doing something you absolutely love, that's an aspect of your calling showing itself to you.
Ego is results-centered and calling is process-centered.
Ego focuses on the result.
Because ego wants to manage anxiety by achieving more, it is especially concerned with the results of all this striving. By focusing on the outcome, your ego gets validation that all this work is worth it. Without a satisfactory result, all the striving is pointless.
Calling focuses on the process.
A calling reveals itself through self-discovery. Your calling comes from within and can only be revealed by paying attention to how your life is unfolding. Instead of managing the outcome, your calling can handle the stress of ambiguity. It knows that the tension is revealing something that you couldn't otherwise learn.
Both ego and calling want important things for you.
Ego wants to preserve the self.
Ego is concerned with the self and preserving what it wants. The ego may be interested in helping others. But it isn't inherently motivated by serving others. It is motivated by maintaining and managing your identity.
Calling wants to impact others.
A calling might begin with the expression of the self, but it moves toward the needs of others. Author Frederick Buechner says that your calling is "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need."
While your ego does a necessary job of helping you function in the world, it is your calling that creates a more authentic, soulful way to be in the world.
I also write for Inc.com:
- 5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower
- The Only Definition of Success That Matters
- 9 Qualities of Remarkably Confident People
(photo bigstockphoto.com)
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140526120002-20017018-do-you-feed-your-ego-or-serve-your-calling
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