It wasn’t until I had grey in my beard late in my 13-year pro sports career that I realized an unchecked ego is the enemy of team success and meaningful progress. Being aware of the ego changed how I engaged and connected with my teammates in the sports world. Instead of wanting individual status and personal success, I found a new type of success (yes, more on that later).
My personal growth as a better teammate helped our Antibes team reach the ultimate goal: winning a national championship in France. To this day, team sports success was, and still is, one of the most meaningful human experiences I’ve had.
In many ways, every human on Earth is part of a team — the human team.
After my basketball career ended, I sadly realized my ego was still making most of the decisions inside my human team — in business, family, relationships, education, government, youth sports, coaching, and startup life.
This is how I keep my ego from ruining the most meaningful parts of life.
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What Is Ego and How Do You Witness It?
Everyone might have their own definition of ego.
The ego always wants to protect you from pain, death, or suffering. It wants to make sure you have more than enough. It stresses about the future or pontificates on the past. It’s an operating system that ensures survival. It incessantly compares you to your peers, and it wants you to be worth more than they are.
Yet, if you always listen to your ego, you’ll constantly do what’s best to ensure your survival, not collaborate with your team or the world of humans around you.
This is why violent histories and patterns of humankind repeat themselves — the collective human consciousness hasn’t learned what living in ego does to our chances of thriving together.
But I get why. The ego is a mystery. It’s sneaky. It wants you to be safe, powerful, increasing status, and in control or constantly vigilant of what might happen. It prevents us from allowing love to connect and flow between all the moments, humans, teams, partners, animals, and things we have left to experience.
Why?
Because the ego only wants what’s best for you. It cares not for what’s best for the team and all the living things around you. It doesn’t want compromise. It wants validation. Control. It wants safety or retribution for the fear, pain, or trauma it experienced.
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The Antidote for Ego
Is love. The purest source of energy and teamwork to tap into is love.
Love would rather dialogue through conflict and abandon attachment to right or wrong. It would let others shine just as it allows itself to shine. Love listens. Love finds many solutions to the same problem and agrees to disagree without hate, spite, or violence. Whether loving your partner, building a business, raising a kid, motivating a sales team, or finding your ikigai, this antidote for ego always wants what’s best for every living thing at any moment in anything they encounter next.
Love is a verb. It’s a constant action and awareness of how to act, not only towards yourself but the constant happenings in the world around you.
Love doesn’t rage or hoard or gossip or want more than it needs. It gives and serves like the spiritual leaders we’ve all read and studied. Jesus, Mother Theresa, Dali Lama, Laozi, the Buddha — they all lived in the higher consciousness of love and letting go of their egos.
The ego doesn’t want to heal you; it wants to keep you safe. It wants to make sure your heart doesn’t get broken again. It wants you to look important to the world around you. But suffering is part of this human existence, and the only way to heal ego is through love: love of yourself, love of the people and community you care for, and love of the kid or child or teammate or partner who needs you.
The ego will try to stop you from engaging in authentic, compassionate, and vulnerable ways with the world around you. It will pass violence or shame or fear and kick the heavy suffering pop can down the road to the next generation because of what happened to it.
The only way to stop this vicious cycle is to become aware of the ego.
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The Types of Love I’ve Learned About As I Get Older
If you dedicate yourself to dissembling your ego and being valuable to a team, let’s hope it starts with love. In my humble opinion, feeling love for the team of humans around you and what you do while you do it — is where a thriving life starts.
And as you begin— a relationship, a running club, a startup, a career, a calling, a retirement— maybe you’ll want to enjoy what you do, who you help, and the meaningful progress you feel. But regardless of material success, the most rewarding part might be the love you experience while helping others do while you do.
Experiencing these types of love happen when we let go of our ego and become aware of how it robs us of the most meaningful human progress.
For example, winning a national championship was my lifelong dream. Still, in the end, it was just a byproduct of how the team interacted, how authentic we were, how we treated each other, how we pushed one another, and how we cared for each other on and off the court. I realized being a better teammate was constantly letting go of my ego to serve the greater good of the team’s success.
And then, I learned there’s another level to ego awareness: how you treat yourself, how you interact with a stranger, how you care for all the living things around you, or how you immerse yourself in whatever you do.
I’ve realized love can be as simple as talking to myself kindly or feeling how my brain cheers when I sip my first steamy cup of espresso in the morning.
Yet, I know now, the ego will always try keep me from feeling, embracing, and giving myself to these different moments of love.
And with all the eight billion humans we might encounter on Earth, love can take different forms between human species — in ways that are platonic, familial, or romantic. Love can appear in gargantuan waves or build up your soul in invisible micro-sized ripples.
And I sometimes lament how our society pushes us to survive in the hierarchy of the capitalistic ego, whether it be working for greedy people who want what’s best for them (not the team), hoarding resources, or working harder and harder to buy bigger, better, and more luxurious boxes (cars, houses, offices, etc.), while their employees suffer to put food on the table.
Maybe an ego-less society won’t ever happen. Maybe the religions and spirituality and Gods and ideologies we create (to help us feel and give love) won’t ever help us overcome a lifestyle of modern consumption, power, greed, hyper-individualism, and comparative materialism caused by ego.
But I wonder: what if every human became aware of the needless suffering their ego constantly creates for their human team around them?
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Love Is a Ladder of Consciousness
Letting go of the ego is climbing a ladder of deeper consciousness and connection to everything around you. Yet, on every rung, there’s love. There’s the love of meaningful work. There’s the love of wanting the best for you. There’s the love of your team, your children, your boss, and the food you eat.
As we move up the love ladder, we’ll find deeper and more meaningful types of love to experience. And yet, I still see ego denying the chance to enjoy the moments of love we have left to experience all around us.
Why?
Because the ego wants to be right, and it will create a dysfunctional reality based on our past pain, beliefs, conditioning, and traumas we haven’t yet healed. Your ego will spill the skeletons onto the closet floor when you least expect it.
Experiencing simple, funny, meaningful moments with anyone and anything should catch you by surprise and splash love through your soul. This is what egoless living is about — having the awareness and presence to allow love to happen without fear.
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How Ego Stops the Flow
Humans allow their egos to mess up their human experience.
It seems easy to live in self-awareness of the ego, right?
I wish.
This is no easy feat. It’s the challenge of a lifetime. It’s the hero’s journey. To face your fears. To be what you love. To care and love something so much it hurts. I lament not applying what I learned from winning a championship in pro sports earlier in my life.
The ego is one of the trickiest, dark, adaptive little bastards this universe has ever seen. It’s quiet. It’s loud. It’s constant. It’s silent. It distracts us and bends the truth. It’s neither here nor there, but yet, look around — it’s everywhere. It’s displayed on every news channel nightly, on every Twitter and Facebook thread, and inescapably part of our human DNA.
Which is why the ego is always the obstacle. It’s the enemy of team and individual progress. It creates a blockage of love and authentic expression, of fear and shrinking, and even if you want to quit or scream or rage-quit the ego— all you can do is pause, look at yourself, see how you choose to respond, and know, love is still an option.
Nothing is more meaningful to our human experience than feeling and giving love (unless you have some other ideas?)
In some ways, I try to remind myself to be thankful for my ego. It allows me to see and feel the duality of the suffering, vigilance, control, safety, and drama it tries to create to ensure its survival.
But at least now I can say,
“Thank you, ego — thank you for helping me survive. Goodbye for now.”
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Unconditional Love Starts with the Conscious Letting Go of the Ego
If you remove the ego’s voice, the monkey mind, the endless chatter, the constant fear-mongering of your mind — you’ll be able to heal and hear and share the parts of you that want to love the world around you.
If love dismantles your ego and allows you to connect to people on a deeper level around you, this is progress.
Choosing love can be at the intersection of every moment in any stimuli or environment.
You can compete and have fun without ego. You can win or lose and still thrive without ego. You can love the game without ego. You can succeed without ego. You can witness violence or the oppression of other people’s ideologies and religions and political beliefs to make progress — as ego.
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And at the end of our lives, I bet we won’t wish we had worked more. Or made more money. Or built a billion-dollar empire for our kids. Or lived or driven in a nicer and nicer box.
I’d bet we’ll care more about what we share and connect with those teams of people, animals, pets, friends, missions, callings, and things we love.
Maybe we can agree we’ll eventually go back to whatever source created us — the stars, the heavens, the hells, the afterlife, the reincarnations, the dirt, whatever that is — but maybe we can feel the mystery that binds and creates and loves and folds and expands our soul’s existence into infinity.
I wish I had understood my ego earlier in my life. And I hope we can understand a healthier attachment to our ego — how we can observe it, see it, and use it for what it is — a survival tool. It simply helps us stay safe and get shit done when it needs to.
But ego doesn’t have to lead our decision-making process and how we connect to the world around us.
And if you want to live in the constant presence and flow of love; with your family, your children, your work, your community, your church, your society — you’ll have to see your attachment to ego for what it is. You’ll let go of wanting to be right at all costs. You’ll cherish the team around you as much as you cherish your connection to the constant uniqueness of the world around you.
Once you know and tap into love, you’ll realize how futile listening to the ego is.
Good luck out there.
How would you describe ego in today’s modern world?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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