e.g. “I’ll be more evolved and not tell people I’m giving to charity”… well hate to tell you but that is the ego even more so than ever!

The reality is that trying to reduce one’s ego is a ever more subtle trick.

The next step most people make is to then say “OK, I admit I have an ego after all this work on removing my ego” (however secretly their ego is craving being “evolved”).

The best thing to do is to just be yourself and forget this ego trickery! The ego is brilliant at making us think it has reduced itself but in reality it just becomes ever more subtle.

To admit one is egotistical is egotisitical in itself… their is no winning in this sense.

Great piece of advice.

Put simply, “What other people think about me is none of my business.”

Jonathan this has been a great thread.

My career is about six years strong at this point. The most recent four years were spent working hard at the rat race and rewarded me with solid perks, nice compensation, bigger challenges and impressive-sounding titles.

Capturing those trophies felt good and fed my ego. Still, I noticed I was spending a huge portion of my life in the service of my bosses’ imaginations. I’m much more enamored of my own imagination.

Solution? Quit my job, be my new boss, serve my imagination as my full time job. I don’t think I would have been able to take that plunge at earlier phases of my development either because of lack of preparedness financially and creatively or simple attachment to ego-driving fluff. The evolution takes time and it’s important: I know more, I’m not a starving student any longer and I’ve had time to put the ego stuff into perspective relative to what I truly want.

For one thing, over the years I (being mild-mannered, female and blonde…yes, that stereotype still exists) found that people were often dismissive of me until they discovered I had a degree in physics and was an engineer. In my mind, my engineering title was my ticket to being taken seriously as a professional and being seen as “intellectually relevant.”

Another issue was my fear that people would think that I had been forced out…not that I left of my own volition. Who in their right mind would voluntarily leave a secure engineering career with a prestigious high-tech firm to start from scratch, right? “They” would surely assume that my calling myself a consultant/life coach was just a cover-up for being unemployed. What the hell is a “life coach” anyway?

What helped me come to terms with these ego issues was when I finally realized that helping others improve their lives was far more important to me than what label I used to describe myself professionally or how others might be judging me.

I’m really glad you wrote this post because this topic is rarely discussed in books on career change or starting a business, yet these ego issues can be serious obstacles to creating the life and work that our souls yearn for.

That right there is huge.

I used to be so afraid of what people would think of me, but what I was really afraid of was what I thought about what they were thinking.

You can’t really experience someone else’s thoughts, so they can’t cause a bad experience for you. It’s always your own judgments that hurt.

Great post Jonathan.