Finding your ego is the first important step to avoid it from taking over your entire mindset. You must notice that little unkind voice in your head and get it out immediately. If your ego is left unchecked, it can sabotage both your professional career and personal life.

Join Tracey Pontarelli as she shares how you can find your ego and address it accordingly. She also talks about the three ways it can destroy you and why you should never risk it influencing your decision-making perspectives. Make sure you stick around and learn not to fall prey to your own ego.

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3 Ways Your Ego Is Sabotaging Your Business

And Your Life

Take a moment, take a big inhale, and let it out. That is exciting. I get excited about the end of 2022 because I love new chapters. I love turning pages. It can also be a time of the year when you can start to feel some anxiety about where you thought you should have been by now and where your expectations for yourself might not be caught up with reality, and you start to put some judgment on yourself.

I want to take some time over this episode and the next episode to talk about our egos, try to understand what the ego is and start to recognize it in your own daily living in your own self. Finding your ego and recognizing that voice inside your head, I’m going to argue that it is the most important thing you can do for your happiness, success, and overall well-being. It is to notice that there is a voice inside our head that isn’t particularly kind or nice a lot of the time, and it is often running the show unless we do deliberate work to get out of our ego.

I’m going to invite you to read a book called A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. You can also hop onto Spotify and listen to the ten-part series that he did with Oprah. I read A New Earth several years ago, and it profoundly changed my life. That is scary because I was in my 30s before I realized that I was not my thoughts. You might still be sitting there saying, “Tracy, I have no idea what you are even talking about.” If you are in that space, I’m glad you are reading this. This is the perfect time for us to be having this conversation because when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Spotting Your Ego

You could have read this many times, and now might be the day you say, “That makes sense for me.” I want to talk a little bit about the ego, and I’m going to talk about three ways the ego shows up in ways that sabotage your progress in your business. Let’s start with the ego. The easiest way to spot the ego is when you are frustrated, annoyed, scared or anxious. When you don’t feel good, your ego is 100% on board. If it feels good and you are in complete alignment, your ego is out of the way because you are in your zone of genius, you are in flow, and you are not overthinking yet.

Anytime you start to compare yourself, start to feel frustrated and resentful, start to be angry with other people, feel angry with a teammate or someone who is supposed to deliver something for you, and you get out of alignment with what you are trying to do with your business, your ego is probably in play. Our ego is a separate little running operating system inside our mind that tells us stories. It originally is designed to help protect us. Things happen throughout our lives. We have bad experiences. Our feelings get hurt, we get embarrassed, and we feel like we failed. Our egos start to build a little character inside our minds to protect us based on all the things that happened to us in the past.

Without checking in on your ego and seeing whether or not those thoughts are real or helpful, your ego takes control. Many people are walking around with their little fear, angry ego, completely driving the bus. I love The Inside Out movie as an example. This is all these emotions, and the emotions are driving the bus. Your ego is going to drive the bus. When you step out of that and get into a place where you notice why your feelings get hurt, why you are hard on yourself, and why you are scared, you start to see the ego.

The number one way to spot your ego is to start meditating. You might be doing an eye roll at me and saying, “I can’t meditate. I’m not good at meditating. My mind never slows down.” The mind not slowing down is the ego. If you can even find some time to meditate, and when you notice that you have started to think, that you that notices is the real you, and the thinking noise is the ego.

I always say my mind is usually running. When I go to meditate in the morning, sometimes I have a great meditation, and other times it is messy. There is a lot of noise in my head. That is great for me to know because I could say, “My mind is on fire.” Sometimes I can wake up and already feel anxious. That is my mind already running through the to-do list of the day. It gives me a chance to say, “Let me see what is going on in my head.” Sometimes I have to give myself some grace and deal with whatever it is, and other times, I can start to quiet the noises.

I’m going to give you three ways that your ego does sabotage your business and talk about what to do. In the next episode, I’m going to talk about resentment and rumination, which are the ego on a repeat loop. We are going to talk about these first ones. These are the three. I’m going to run through them and go into more detail. Number one is when your ego feels like, “We are not enough.” That happens all the time. Not enough happens all the time. It is usually a comparison of something. It is a comparison between us and our former selves or us and what we expected our future selves to be. It is our comparison against other people. It is a comparison. We all feel like we are not enough sometimes, and it is not true.

Number two is we are afraid of what other people think. This has to do with our feelings of abandonment. We don’t want people to not like us because they might decide that they don’t want to be friends with us anymore. I will dig into that. The third is that we don’t want to change. Our ego wants to keep us right where we are. Let’s dig into those a little bit more.

You Are Enough

Let’s start with not enough. It is probably the most common for all of us. We live in a culture now where this is toxic for all of us. If any of you have kids who are on social media, you know how toxic this can be. What we are doing now is measuring our actual lives against other people’s highlight reels, which is not realistic. We are measuring ourselves against unrealistic expectations. No one on social media is telling you everything about their lives because no one is, yet we look at their lives and compare our lives against a little sliver that we see.

This is something that I personally have to deal with. If I’m not working hard or cranking on something, I start to doubt my worth. Honesty, I do on this show. That is vulnerable. Can anybody else relate? I grew up in a small town in Rhode Island. My mom worked 2 and often 3 jobs to make ends meet. I worked from the moment someone would hire me to do anything because we needed the money. The way that people were recognized in my blue-collar town was if you were a hard worker. You were acknowledged for being a hard worker. We placed so much value around this idea that if you worked hard, you must be a good person. Look at how hard you have to work for everything. That is hard to untangle.

I want to say this to you. We all deal with it. You may have stuff that happened in your childhood where you didn’t feel like you were acknowledged unless you shined. You might feel like you had a sibling who excelled, and you didn’t excel in the same way. Therefore, you weren’t acknowledged in the same way. We all have things that happened to us that erode our worth.

I want you to read this. This is my antidote. You are worthy because you are here. I want you to stop and think about what a miracle it is that we are here on this earth. What are the odds that we are here, that you get to read this, that we get to work on ourselves? It is a miracle that you and I are here. That alone makes us worthy. We are alive and breathing on this planet. We are worthy. All you need to do is to keep working on becoming the best version of yourself. That is your job here.

If you didn’t go as fast as you thought you should have, you are not going as fast as somebody else, and you set a goal for yourself, and you didn’t hit it, you are exactly where you are supposed to be. The lesson is, “Can I love myself for being here and trying to figure it out?” That is all it is. We are all trying to figure this out. Number one is not enough, and the antidote to that is spending time focusing on your worth. I would suggest some I am statements, and I have a great I AM Workbook.

The I AM Workbook that I have is amazing. I give it to my students in the Magnetic Marketing Academy. It talks all about how our brains work. It is one of my favorite modules to teach in the course. You may roll your eyes about I am statements, but you already have I am statements going on in your head. Your I am statements are saying, “I am not enough.” The only difference is you are going to rewrite the script intentionally and rewire your thoughts, which you can do. Our brains are plastic. You can rewire them.

Being Afraid Of What People Think

Number two, let’s talk about being afraid of what people will think. I’m a huge people-pleaser. I will talk about this in the next episode. I like people to like me. I pride myself on being a good person. All my ego is talking. Our egos are part of us. The idea of someone not liking me makes me uncomfortable. We can hold back from going for our dreams because we worry about what people think. It is one of the biggest things that we do. I will tell you where this all came from.

My husband and I listened to a speaker talks about this a couple of years ago. It all stems back from when we were cave people and lived in tribes. If you got kicked out of the tribe and had to go live on your own, you would die. You can freeze and die. Build up inside our ego mechanisms. If you are afraid someone is going to say something, they are usually people that would never take the chance to do what you do because the people that are putting themselves out there and taking chances are going to tell you to go for it. Who cares? What is the worst that happens? It doesn’t work. You found another way, and it didn’t work. That is a good lesson.

I want you to take some time. This is where meditation and journaling come into play. The antidote is to see what is holding you back. For example, one person makes a snide remark about a post you do about your business. Now, you won’t do it anymore because you think, “My ego cannot take that.” Your ego has taken over. If you decide that you are not going to do something because you are afraid of what other people think, it is a clear indication that your ego is in charge of you. That means your little ego is driving the bus, deciding how you are going to live your life.

I’m going to try to shake you out of this now. We are not here for that long, and I don’t want you or me to get to the end of our lives and say, “I worry too much about what other people thought, and I should have gone for it.” Other people are dealing with their egos, comparison and judgments. Their opinion that has something to do with you is about their little egos. If their egos are in check, they are going to support you in trying to figure out what it is you want to do. I want you to do whatever it is that you want to do. If, for some reason, I start to feel I’m not enough or I’m jealous, that is my ego in play. You do you. Work on your own stuff, and don’t worry about what other people’s egos are responding to. That is number two.

Not Wanting To Change

Number three, we are going to get into the not wanting to change. Our brain craves routine. This is why habits are often helpful. Our brains like shortcuts. It likes knowing the fastest way. Our brains are good at conserving energy. This is why our brains come to conclusions and judgments quickly because our brains are like, “I know everything about that. This is what I think about that.” We ignore the stuff that would make us think differently. We are like, “No. I know how you feel about this. I know how to think about this.” Our brains like shortcuts and don’t want to do things differently.

When we go to do things differently, it requires more work, and our ego gets into play because we don’t know. The unknown is terrifying to our egos. Our egos want to keep things the way they are so they can stay in charge. I hope this makes sense to you. Our egos want to be in charge. You do something that you don’t know how it is going to turn out, like that idea of like, “Let’s give it a try and see what happens.” Our egos are like, “No, do not do that.”

Our egos will go into story mode. It will come up with all of the reasons why it is a bad idea. It is amazing how quickly we can talk ourselves out of something. That is the ego. Your true soul has dreams and desires and is looking for adventure, and the ego is working against it. The ego was originally designed to keep us safe, but what it is now is a bunch of faulty stories rolling around in our heads.

I’m going to go back to the beginning. The key is to start to develop some type of mindfulness meditation practice. It is the cornerstone. There are other things that we can do. You start to get some therapy and some psychotherapy. I have become started to become interested in looking at other modalities that can help open the mind and separate the ego. I’m not going to talk about all that on this episode, but in 2023, you are going to hear me talk about all sorts of woo-woo stuff.

If you are reading this and you are like, “What is she talking about that she wants to try?” go ahead and message me separately. We will have that conversation. The only way you are going to have breakthroughs in a meaningful way in your business and life is if you get ahold of your ego. You cannot do it otherwise.

This is important stuff that we are talking about. Next episode, we are going to talk about resentment and rumination. That is the ego on repeat. We are going to start to break off and start to talk about planning. Once you got a check on your ego, we can start to talk about vision planning in 2023, which will be fun. That is my good stuff. That is a layout of what is coming in the next couple of episodes. I love you guys. Please respond back to me. Let me know how this landed for you. I love hearing your thoughts, and I will see you back here next time. Love you.

Important Links

• A New Earth
• Spotify – Eckhart Tolle
• I AM Workbook
• Magnetic Marketing Academy