The emotionally healthy childhood

Photo by Annie Spratt

An emotionally healthy childhood can’t be particular. It can’t be dependent on one kind of environment. It can’t, we hope, just come down to good luck. There are distinct themes to identify. With the best possible outcome in mind we can start to form a map of what an emotionally healthy childhood looks like. Using that map, it becomes more obvious where we are taking a left turn. We see where we can express more gratitude. We see what causes us to feel our greatest shame. At a societal level, this is how our definitions of success start to form. We can see what there is to achieve in order to create a more emotionally stable and therefore slightly saner world.

An emotionally healthy childhood could give us the following:

A lifelong advocate. Someone will put themselves profoundly at our service. If as adults we have even a measure of mental health, it is undoubtedly because, when we were small and dependent, there was a person (to whom we essentially owe our lives) who pushed their needs aside for a time to focus wholly on our own. They understood our babble and heard us into speech; they gave us their best guesses on treatment when we were sick; they calmed our fears, consoled us in our insecurities, and protected us from harm. They provided a protective barrier from the chaos of the world, showing us just enough of it—carving up our experiences for us in manageable pieces. Without thanks or sympathy, they didn’t expect us to ask how their day went or how well they slept. They catered to our needs, so that we would later on be able to submit to the rigors and slights of daily life. This lop-sided relationship was temporary, but by modeling with consistency, made certain our ability to form a healthy one.

We generally think of egocentricity a quality resulting from too much love or attention. But it’s actually the opposite. An adult who is ego-centric never got their fill as a child. Self-centeredness has to have a clean run in the early years if it isn’t to haunt and ruin the later ones. Those we regard as narcissists are simply unfortunate people who never got the chance to be exceedingly admired at the start.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, our advocate is there to give us the benefit of the doubt. They offer us a positive spin on our behavior. We are assessed by what we might be one day, not by what we are right now. From this we learn kindness and charity.

If our advocate is a harsh critic, for example, they might say that we were ‘attention-seeking’. They imagine that what we most need is a hug and some encouraging words. We might have acted meanly. Our advocate adds that we must have been feeling threatened. If we dropped something accidentally or were negligent; our advocate remembers that tiredness could have explained it, or they were distracted by a new visitor.

Our advocate constantly searches for the story behind the story. They look under the surface for more compassionate explanations. They help us to be on our own side, to like ourselves. If we actually like ourselves, we learn not to be too defensive about our flaws. We learn there is always something to work on, constructively, and we learn to accept ourselves as we are.

In a healthy childhood, the relationship with our advocate is stable, dependable and long-term. We have faith they will be there tomorrow and the day after. They aren’t explosive or fragile. They are almost boringly predictable—so much so, we might start to take them for granted. As a result, we project this trust on to other relationships we develop throughout our life. We are able to believe that what has gone well once can go well again. This belief influences our choice of friends, adult partners, bosses—everyone. We aren’t fascinated by people who are abrupt with us or unreliable; we don’t relish being punished, judged, or mistreated. We can pick out influences who are kind and nurturing, and don’t view them as weak or deficient for being so.

If trouble strikes with our kindly partners, we don’t go into an instant panic. We don’t immediately try to defend ourselves by turning away, avoiding or cutting them off. We can confidently set about trying to repair a love we know we deserve.

In a healthy childhood, we aren’t always required to be wholly good. We are allowed our emotions. We can get angry and sometimes be disgusting. We can say ‘no more, absolutely not, no way’ when we disagree, or settle a dispute with ‘because I feel like it’. Our advocates are adults and know we all, no matter what our age, have our own flaws. As a result, they do not expect a child to be fundamentally better than they are. We do not have to comply at every turn to be merely tolerated. We can let others see our see our shadow sides.

This kind of freedom within our family systems prepares us one day to submit to the demands of society without having to rebel in unproductive, self-defeating ways (rebels being, at their core, people who have had to obey too much too early). We can tow the line when it’s in our long-term interest to do so. At the same time, we’re not overly cowed or indiscriminately obedient either. We learn to find a sound middle point between being completely submissive and self-destructive defiance.

In a healthy childhood, our advocate isn’t jealous or competitive with us. They can allow themselves to be overtaken and superseded. They have had their moment in the spotlight, or else are having it elsewhere beyond the family. They can be proud rather than resentful of the achievements of the (usually same-sex) child. It doesn’t need to be all about them.

The good advocate doesn’t live through the child’s accomplishments. They want them to do well, but for their own sake, and in their own way. There is no particular script that the child has to follow to be loved. For instance, the child doesn’t need to become a doctor or a famous soccer player because that is the path their parent chose. The child isn’t required to support their advocate’s self-doubt or pump them up to others.

In healthy childhood, the child learns that things that break can be fixed. Things that spill can easily be picked up. Plans can go awry, but new ones can be made. The advocate models for the child how to self-soothe, calm down, keep going, and remain hopeful. A voice of resilience, originally external, becomes the way the child learns to speak to themselves. There are alternatives to panic.

Notably, even emotionally healthy childhoods suffer from thins going awry. No one has hung their reputation on the notion that anyone’s childhood could ever be perfect. The advocate does not see it as their role to remove every frustration, pad every sharp corner, or remove every obstacle. They sense that a lot of good can come from having the right, manageable kind of friction through which the child develops their own resources and individuality. Having contact with bearable disappointment, the child is prompted to create their own internal world, in which they can dream, generate new plans, learn to self-soothe and build up their own resources.

Even emotionally healthy childhoods suffer from things going awry.

The child can see that the advocate is neither entirely good nor wholly bad, and therefore is worthy of neither idealizing on a pedestal nor casting out in disparagement. Just as the adult accepts the child with its faults, the child learns to accept the adult with theirs with a blend of melancholy, maturity and gratitude. They learn that, like their advocate, they need to accept that everyone they come into contact with will be a mixture of positive and negative, and that the presence of negativity or flaw is not cause for banishment. As adults, they won’t fall deeply in love and them (becoming fast friends or quick lovers), nor will they become furious at the first moment of let-down (by ghosting or giving off a vibe of being cast out). They have a realistic sense of what can be expected of life alongside another human who is, like them, good enough.

Unfortunately, despite all our advances in technology, education, and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than previous generations. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives keeping up with some external image of success shows no marked signs of decline. We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are malicious, apathic or uncaring but because we still have so far to go before we know how to do that most apparently simple yet infinitely complicated of things for ourselves: emotional intelligence.

One tool that might just get us there is coaching.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Markers of emotional intelligence (and health)

Photo by Alex Blăjan

Coaches with a background in psychology are grounded in theoretical perspectives of family systems and the impact a family template can have on adult development; how our lopsided natures can hold us back from the progress we wish to make; and, how denial can lead to blocking learning and remaining stuck—among many other aspects of human development.

It is a great myth, and one that we have bought into, that we are one person at home and another at work. The fundamentals we just reviewed—how families work, how our lopsided natures are formed, and how we become stuck—give us a very high level, basic understanding for why “conscious leaders” and “emotionally intelligent leaders” are so highly prized in the work environment.

One way to start understanding just how lopsided we have become from our earliest experiences is to identify a range of markers of emotional intelligence and general emotional health, visualizing how we rank in comparison. In therapy we would direct most of our repair work and attention toward healing those early experiences that generated the most hurt, and therefore contributed to the greatest gaps in our emotional health. In coaching, we recognize that these experiences occurred, gain awareness and insights about how they contribute to our present, and determine actions that will increase our effectiveness and performance.

At least five qualities come to mind.

1.       Self-love: the ability to like oneself, wholly.

Before we can empathize with other’s experiences, we must learn to empathize with our own internal experience—the emotional reactivity and interior monologue that is generated when we are under stress.

Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves, learn to become our own (caring) advocate, and commit to constructive choices that suggest we are on our own side.

When we observe a stranger having things or experiences we don’t, how quickly do we feel less than or resentful? How long is it before we are making assumptions of how they came by those things and experiences or questioning the fairness of things? When another person irritates or demeans us in some way, can we let the slight go? Can we see the action for what it was (senseless spite) or are we left brooding and lose ourselves in overwhelming sadness, indirectly agreeing with the verdict of those judging us? How much can the disapproval or neglect or public opinion be counterbalanced by the memory of the steady attention of a few significant people in the past?

In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive partnership? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an unspoken belief that mistreatment, disapproval, or outright abandonment is all we deserve? In a different vein, how good are we at apologizing to a lover, a family member, or dear friend for things that actually might be our fault? How rigidly pious do we need to be? Can we dare to admit mistakes, or does an admission of guilt or error bring us too close to a sense of complete insignificance?

How do we regard our desires? Therapy will venture into family histories and the bedroom for those answers. Coaches will seek to understand how we define and self-edit our desires for success. Are our desires clean and natural or alternatively disgusting and sinful? are we a little off, but not bad or dark, since they originate from inside us and we are not wretches?

2.       Candor: the ability to be truthful and authentic about oneself.

Candor is about being “real” when you might feel vulnerable to judgment and open in the face of difficult ideas and troubling facts. It determines the extent to which you can consciously open your mind, to thoughtfully explore and accept facts without denial—without lying to yourself (and then others).

One question both therapists and coaches get equally: “Am I normal? You’ve seen this before, right?”

The fact is, there is no normal. And, yes, we’ve seen it before.

The essence of candor is intimacy, with ourselves. How much can we admit to ourselves about who we are—even if, or especially when, the material is unflattering? How much do we need to insist on our own normality and sanity in order to accept ourselves and admit our inner natures? Can we explore our own minds? Can we, as one psychology professor challenged, confront “the dogs in the basement”? Can we shine light in those darker and more troubled corners without flinching too much? Can we admit to foolishness, envy, sadness, confusion, and galactic mistakes?

Around others, how ready are we to learn? This matters for parents and partners as much as it does for newly minted managers and CEOs. Do we need always to take a criticism of one part of us as an attack on everything about us? How ready are we to listen when valuable lessons come, painfully, over and over again through multiple contexts?

3.       Social Skills: the ability to communicate, persuade, influence, and listen.

Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalize pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage?

When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and retreat into sulks? When the desired response isn’t forthcoming, do we ask others to guess what we have been too angrily panicked to spell out? Or can we have a plausible second go and take seriously the thought that others are not merely being nasty in misunderstanding us? Do we have the inner resources to teach rather than insist?

 4.       Motivation: having an interest in learning and improving oneself.

Do we have the strength to keep going when there are obstacles in life? Motivation is about setting goals and following through with them.

When something deeply interests us, we take initiative and demonstrate the commitment to complete a task. If we are truly passionate about our goal we will persist through adversity, boredom, frustration and find creative ways through setbacks.  

Embracing better health, taking steps to advance our career by attending graduate school, saving for retirement, and paying off loans are examples of goals that motivate us internally and result in self-improvement.

Marrying at the “right time”, getting the best grades, having the latest gadget or car are examples of chasing goals that flaunt wealth or status and can represent a slippery slope. Failure in the face of these kinds of goals is unlikely to result in a constructive learning opportunity. More than likely failure to maintain the perfect house, keep the kids in private schools, avoid divorce and poor performance at work will result in increasing self-doubt, and reducing one’s ability to be their own best advocate (and friend).  

5.       Self-Management

How do we react in the face of risk? And, how do we manage our impulses in relation to those risks? Do we think before we speak/react? Do we express ourselves appropriately?

How well would we perform a challenge in the form of a public speech, a romantic rejection, period of financial strain, immigrating to another country or lengthy physical illness? Sometimes a small cold can set us back in ways we didn’t expect. How close are we, at any time, to financial, professional, or personal disaster? What mettle are we made of?

Is the stranger dangerous or benevolent? If we lean towards be a little more direct than most, will they accept us or ghost us? Will unfamiliar situations end in a disaster? Around love, how tightly do we need to cling? If a lover, parent, sibling, friend is distant for a while, will they return? If a boss neglects regular touch points, stakeholders go silent, or direct reports fail to check in are they sabotaging us or will they still support our efforts? How controlling do we need to be? Can we approach an interesting stranger or colleague to connect on some interest or other? Or move on from an unsatisfying relationship?

Overall, do we think the world is expansive, safe and rational enough for us to have a genuine shot at fulfillment, or must we settle, resentfully, for inauthenticity and misunderstanding?

Our first answers to these questions are not our fault, or anyone else’s. They are merely the first responses that were wired into us during a galvanizing experience. Many of these questions are so hard to answer sincerely in a positive light. But, by considering them, we are at least starting to know what sort of impact our primal wounds have and, therefore, what we need to do to address it.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Denial, blocked, and stuck

Photo by Tomas Tuma

Our childhood experiences are the single greatest cause of how we function emotionally as adults. Therefore, what is surprising and unfortunate is how little of the past we can really remember. We can recall the basic facts and a few occurrences here and there, but in terms of grasping detail with camera-like precision, how our present is influenced by the figures and events of our early years, we are often beginners or simply skeptical as to the point of examining the past. In many cases, it would not be too strong to speak of kind of willed mental block.

The tendency, and sometimes desire, to forget the primal wound of childhood is not hard to understand. To be presently impacted by events so far into our past feels implausible and crushing, but also humiliating. To subscribe to the notion that our personalities might remain forged by incidents from before our sixth or seventh birthday leaves us feeling helpless. No amount of blunt (“just get over it”, “let it go”) or cliched-sounding mental health determinism (“think positive”, “reach out to more people”) denies our hopes for a more dignified life of adult autonomy. We would like to make sense of our moods in terms of what is happening in the present. If we feel angry with someone, we would like to believe the cause lies with them and their actions, rather than something tripping a low-lying frequency laid four decades ago rendering us especially sensitive and flinty.

Over time the lens on the past softens. What was a challenging norm becomes and endearing exception or quirk. This is aided by family photos, almost always capturing happier moments, even if they were staged. There is much more likely to be an image of one’s mother going down a playground slide with a carefree expression than of her yelling at her children about the misery of everything she gave up for her current predicament; there will be a shot of one’s father genially posing with the children or family friends in very on-trend plaid pants, but no visual record of his long, brutal mealtime silences. A lot of editing goes on, encouraged by all participants, anything to be remembered as a softer version of themselves.

As we age, we lose the idiosyncratic and peculiar perspective of a child and instead view the world through the pragmatism of an adult. An adult observing a toddler’s tantrum in a bookstore is judged as frustrating, dramatic and bad-tempered. While that one perspective has merit, it might be harder for us to access the support or empathy and attempt to recreate the strange inner world of a small person (an inner world we once had) in which he might feel tired and confused, exasperated that naptime is so far away (even though admitting that he’s tired is admitting some kind of defeat), or lonely and shy by being the smallest person in a large store with beige carpet and books that have no dragons in them, far from his teddy bear, left by mistake in the car outside.

When an adult locks the door to the spare bedroom to ensure silence for an hour-long business call, we don’t typically picture the scene from the perspective of the young child on the other side, for whom this repeated exclusion may seem proof that everything magical and good has suddenly gone. Or when the parent has after-hours obligations that help raise her profile at work and she misses opportunities to support after school activities. Or when the parent is incessantly on his phone, laptop or other gadget—checking in on it like a digital pet—ignoring the needs of the small child seeking connection in the here and now. Adults’ professional responsibilities are no small thing, they maintain a livelihood and enable opportunity for each member. At the same time, these slights to our self-worth and self-esteem, if too numerous, have a cumulative effect. It becomes difficult for us to keep in mind how much in our respective personalities was marked by what are (from a grown-up perspective) almost laughably minor yet hugely potent incidents.

It is not merely that we have forgotten the past. We could in theory re-enter the mental spaces we once occupied. We have our reasons for pushing aside, ignoring the memories and willfully limiting contemplating on our histories.

We maintain a safe distance from our inner selves because what we might learn about ourselves or the people the hurt us will likely be uncomfortable. We might learn that we were really angry with, and resentful about, certain people we were only meant to love—or worse yet, that our anger has been misdirected toward innocent people trying to protect us. We might discover how much ground there was to feel deeply anxious, inadequate and guilty on account of the many errors and misjudgments we have made. We might find that, we held illusions that went in other directions. We might come into recognition just how much happiness was nauseatingly compromised and needed to be changed about our relationships and careers. And we would be faced with needing to take responsibility for our current outcomes.

So we hide. It is part of the human tragedy that as such creative beings, we are such natural self-deceivers of our own unique greatness. Our methods for camouflage are many and we do much to escape being noticed.

We become addicted to the kind of numbness that comes from opting out—a kind of floating above the surface of life. Our addiction isn’t to drugs or liquor (although that can happen to), but to the mundane, everyday activities that keep us busy and distracted. We watch television or clean the house, exercising or continually start mew projects at home or work. We might cook or can food at odd hours, or reorganize the garage.

We tell ourselves we are being productive. To the world, it might even look that way, but our compulsiveness has motives. We watch the television to focus on news or narratives to avoid learning about news and narratives about ourselves; we take on projects around the house or raise our hands for new projects at work as a way to avoid really losing ourselves in something we are passionate about—as much as we crave meaningful work, we run from it. Addiction is not about what someone does, it that they do what they do avoid feeling what they feel and knowing what they know—about themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a twitchy reliance on something—anything—to keep us from encountering the dogs locked in the basement of our minds.

We lie ourselves first, and later others, by being overly optimistic and cheerful. There is a fine line between optimism and happiness that is hard to detect. Optimism doesn’t contain any remorse. It is insistent and upbeat, aggressive even in its persistence but doesn’t necessarily fulfillment. Optimism can’t tolerate any other emotion, especially sadness. So negative emotions are left unexplored to the point where they have the power to overwhelming us with disappointment and grief.

We lie to ourselves first, and later others, by going on the offensive. We attack and demean what we love, virtually guaranteeing we don’t get what we so deeply want. We let go of the people we once wanted or even had as friends. We watch the careers we hoped one day to have pass us by. The lives we tried wanted to match and learn from fade into a fog in our consciousness. To prevent ourselves from feeling the loss of what we might never achieve, we allow desired but painfully intangible goals to erode.

We lie to ourselves first, and later others, by embracing cynicism and calling it pragmatism. We are preventing, we believe, future misery and disappointment. To preserve our dignity, we tell ourselves that all humans are terrible and every activity is likely to fail so that the specific cause of our hurt does not attract examination and feelings of humiliation.

We lie to ourselves first, and later others, by filling our minds with lofty ideas, putting our intellect on full display in such a way that suggests we have little left to learn, thereby stunting what development our personalities may require.

We write dense books on big topics. We earn advanced degrees. We seek positions on boards. Our minds are crammed with esoteric information—facts interesting at cocktail parties and dinner conversation. But we don’t remember much about our own lives, how things really were, back in the old house, when dad lost his spark, mom stopped smiling, our sibling started exhibiting anxious behaviors and our ability to trust in happiness broke into tiny pieces.

Our great tragedy as human beings is that we are such natural self-deceivers.

We acquire and share knowledge and seek new ideas that garner respect but also protect us against the essential knowledge from our emotional past. That knowledge that, if left untended might attempt to interfere in our path. That knowledge that bubbles up and inopportune times threatening us to wake up. We bury our sensitive, personal stories like a time capsule beneath a mountain of knowledge and skills. The possibility of a deeply significant and intimate enquiry is consciously judged as weak, frivolous, and inconsequential compared with an allegedly more impressive task of securing an executive for an important meeting, or addressing a conference.

We prop ourselves on the glamour of being knowledgeable ensuring we won’t become too knowledgeable about ourselves. We learn about anything outside of ourselves to avoid the pain of self-awareness and true wisdom.

We lie to ourselves first, and later others, by suggesting that people are really just simple beings. We tell ourselves that too much psychology might be just a little too much static and complexity. We rely on a version of robust common sense denying ourselves deeper connection our own awkward complexity. We imply that not thinking very much is evidence of a superior kind of intelligence and elevated emotional state—when really it is the blankness of ignorance and lack of deeper thinking or curiosity.

When we are with others, people who will judge us, we vigorously ridicule more complex perspectives on human nature. We discount personal investigation as unduly fancy, bizarre, or weird. The very desire to lift the lid on our inner life could never be yield anything of value or good. This kind of sprightly self-ordering is most likely at the start of the week. Our sense of practicality is most keenly felt at 9am on a Monday morning as we muster our aggressive optimism toward our goals. But this energy eventually softens in the late evening when we are confronted sometimes harshly, sometimes by surprise, with more complex insights as when the path we have walked through our life and the choices we have made and the impact we have had on others, and the lost opportunities for happiness and contentment come into relief for the first or perhaps the umpteenth time—all pouring through the nighttime window toward you as you stare into the stark moonlight. With an attitude of forceful common sense, we strive to make our moments of radical discontent seem like outliers rather than anchoring moments of insight they might actually be.

We want to believe that our personalities are non-tragic, simple and easily understand so we can reject the stranger, but more useful, facts of our true, more complicated selves.

Being honest with oneself, and eventually others, has nothing to do with morality or righteousness. Seeing reality and ourselves with greater clarity is actually listening to a cautionary tale. We all could use much more of the truth because we pay too high a price for our believing our own lies. Our deceptions cut us off from possibilities of growth. Large portions of our minds end up uncreative, argumentative and defensive, while others around us have to suffer our touchiness, pessimism, artificial happiness or defensive rationalizations. Neglecting our own awkwardness buckles our very being, manifesting as insomnia or impotence, weight loss or gain, stuttering or depression; revenge for all the thoughts we have been so careful not to have. Self-awareness and an increased self-knowledge are not luxuries. They are preconditions for sanity and inner contentment.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Lopsidedness

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez

Experiences we have from childhood leave us lopsided in our reactions—likely to overreact or overcorrect depending on the stimulus. We are too shy or too bold; too firm or too accepting; too focused on getting to the top or infuriatingly apathetic. We are obsessively eager to succeed or painfully wary and nervous in the face of our own desires. We are naive or pessimistic; we shrink from taking a chance or run toward risk with wild abandon; we are fixed in our belief that going it alone is wisest or are desperate for another to complete us; we are in white hot pursuit of knowledge or impervious to new ideas.

The spectrum of lopsidedness comes in many shades, and more are always being added. What is known is that these lopsided behaviors come at an enormous cost. They leave us less likely to make the most of our opportunities, less able to create or find satisfying lives, and generally make us less fun to be around socially or professionally.

Because we are reluctant scholars of our emotional histories, we conclude our lopsided nature is something we cannot change—that they are fixed. “This is just how I am,” we think. I am controlling, or don’t get my satisfaction out of work I get it from my family, or I am not good with people, or don’t trust my peers, or not good at office politics. These stories we hold about ourselves are not initially adaptable or up for consideration.

The truth is things are much more hopeful. While challenging to us in the short term, lopsidedness (by its very definition) is in fact able to be brought into balance. Our lopsidedness is in response to something specific that happened in the past. We are a certain way (controlling, not good with people, not trusting, etc.) because a primal wound knocked us off a more fulfilling course years ago. Having to contend with a competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement or extreme overachievement. Dealing with a parent disgusted by the body, being seen or noticed, became frightening and hard to negotiate. Being forced to reckon with financial instability, we had to overachieve professionally, seeking economic and social gains. In the face of a distant or dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance and reactive violence. An explosive parent might have moved us toward extreme shyness and aversion to attention or limelight. Constant hovering when we were young could have encouraged nervousness and, around any complex and intense situation, abject panic. A continually busy, distracted parent might have planted the seeds for energy-draining, attention-seeking look-at-what-I-did-or-learned-today behavior. 

There is a logic to our lopsidedness if we look to our histories.

In the presence of conflict (dismissiveness, explosiveness, hovering/suffocating, inattentiveness, etc.) a trigger was established. A way of thinking developed as a result of how we coped when we were children. And this isn’t meant to be harsh, but our lopsidedness enables a way of being that trends toward immaturity—they take us in the opposite direction in which we mean to move. Our first reactions, therefore, are not our fault. They are merely the remnants of our younger selves’ attempt to deal with something beyond our capability—at that time.

When a child suffers at the hands of an adult, they absorb the result as a reflection of something that must be wrong with them. They think they are not enough. If someone humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must be because they are stupid, unacceptable and worth abandoning. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner examination, to understand the truth: that the hurt was undeserved. As adults we learn the importance of context: there were many other things going on, off-stage, in the parent’s interior life for which the child was innocent.

Also, because children cannot leave the big people which they relied upon and were vulnerable to, children succumb to a deep longing to fix the broken person they clung to for security. Children often conclude that it is their obligation to fix all anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they love. They aim to please. It could take decades of inner exploratory work to determine that we might feel sad about, but are not eternally responsible for, those we cannot change—and even longer to decide, perhaps, to move on.

Communication patterns are plagued by similar childhood legacies. When something is wrong, children have no language or logic to understand the cause. They lack the confidence, self-management and verbal skill to get their points across calmly and with authority. Children err on the side of overreactions: begging, insisting whining, exploding, screaming. Or, conversely, to excessive underreactions: moping, resentment, silence, avoidance. It might not be until middle age that we start to shed those initial reactions of screaming or sulking from those who misread our needs and more carefully and calmly try to explain them instead.

Another less helpful quality of the family template is that it provokes large-scale generalizations about how people operate. Just as we are unbalanced by those early experiences, so are our heuristics. This happens because we don’t live life in generalities; we live our lives in the particulars. Our wound was formed in highly individualized contexts: with one particular adult who incessantly picked on a certain family member or shouted at their particular partner late at night in one particular three-story house in one particular main road through town. Or the wound may have been caused by one specific parent who responded with fear and disbelief, followed by intense contempt after one specific job loss from one specific company. But these scenarios give rise to expectations of other people and of life more broadly like the partners we choose or the bosses from whom we accept job offers. Over time, we expect that everyone will become violent, sooner or later. We think that every partner will turn on us, eventually. We assume that every money problem will unleash a deep depression and then disgust for the other person. The character traits and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood become our templates for interpreting pretty much anyone and using those templates prohibits our ability to see alternatives. For example, the reliability, focus and determination to succeed at any task that we evolved to keep a deeply depressed and angry mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is no longer present in our lives, we remain individuals who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us, and who cannot listen to negative or discouraging information of any kind. In these situations, we both in the past and the present. When we work our template with others, our sense of the particulars for a given situation, we are standing in the wide-open doorway of the present, peering through a narrow keyhole at drama of the past. Without awareness of this dynamic we both watch and re-enact that drama over and over.

A child in the presence of parents that fight, for example, can carry that experience well into adulthood. One outcome of that could be a desire to avoid (in the extreme) conflict altogether. While the original cause of our avoidance is no longer in the picture, it can carry a heavy price.

Dealing with our lopsidedness can be thorny because we don’t always know why we have them or how they came to be. Sometimes we explain them away as not affecting us. That marital affair happened between our parents, we think, that did not happen to us. As a result, we might not acknowledge them as having any significance in our own minds. So we don’t know why we run away from a boss who is actually looking out for us to a more abusive boss, or why we get deeply angry at small things we think shouldn’t affect us, or are defensive, or adopt an easy come, easy go relationship to success, believing in the end that it was never really ours to have anyway. Because the meaning behind our reactions remains hidden, we miss out on benefiting from important sources of possible sympathy. Meaning, if we lack the context for why we react the way we do, so does everyone else because we are judged by the behavior and decisions our wounds inspire, not on the wounds themselves. The hurt we experienced might have started by being let down by a parent or bullied by a peer, but today we show up as a micromanager, or demand a kind of loyalty from our teams that crosses a line. It might have started with a competitive mother. Maybe a father had an affair and left the family. It could have been a peer we looked up to or made ourselves vulnerable to and who later betrayed us. Today, it manifests as shyness, inability to make decisions or take a strong stand.

Ultimately, it comes down to us to make our lives easier. Instead our paths are tougher than they should be because of the beliefs we hold that people are incompetent, mean and unreliable rather than (as is usually the case) fellow wounded soldiers of what we have all travelled through, a complicated early history.

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This blog post is part of a series related to Driving Your Self-Discovery pending publication.

Book Shelf: Steal Like an Artist

Overview

• To nurture your creativity, follow these 10 tips: First, understand that all artists steal from material that inspires them.

• “Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.” Self-knowledge comes from creative action.

• “Write the book you want to read.” If you’re stumped creatively, work on whatever is the most fun.

• “Use your hands” to get the physicality back into your creativity.

• Your work and your interests can meld to create something totally new, so “side projects and hobbies are important.”

• When you “do good work…share it with people” online. Find inspiration on the web.

• “Leave home.” To be creative, you may have to hit the road.

• “Be nice,” because the world is so small now that, more than ever, manners matter.

• “Be boring.” A routine and a paying job can fuel your creative work.

• “Creativity is subtraction.” Cull what’s unnecessary, and leave what’s brilliant.

Key Points

• Why an artist’s creativity comes from other people, places and things; and

• How to use 10 ideas to nourish your creativity.

• There are no new ideas, only new combinations

Recommendation

Artist and poet Austin Kleon writes in an accessible, breezy, conversational shorthand. Few of his sentences run longer than eight words, and his message is simple: Learn all you can, develop a library of influences and never stop believing in your own creativity. His best advice to artists – get out of and stay out of your own way – recurs throughout the book in various forms, and Kleon offers simple, effective methods to do just that, organized as 10 creative spurs. His little sketches and profound, often humorous quotes from great thinkers and artists from across the centuries feature throughout this pocket-sized guide to unleashing your inner Picasso. While Kleon’s unchanging tone can feel a bit precious, it's still worth carrying his guidebook around for boosts of creative confidence and doses of friendly, workable commonsense advice.

Summary

Creative License

Artists and creators throughout history have known that, as Pablo Picasso said, “Art is theft.” Every innovator has built on the work of others, using ideas, formats or things in fresh and exciting ways. Originality doesn’t exist. Everything is a confluence of influences, thefts, mutations and interpretations. Even the Bible says, “There’s nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Whether you’re an artist or you’re simply looking to add some creativity to your life, consider these 10 ideas:

1. “Steal Like an Artist”First, start by looking around for something worth appropriating. If copying, altering or borrowing it has no value, look for another inspiration. Regarding the world through the prism of “Is it worth stealing?” will keep you from wasting time wondering if something has intrinsic or aesthetic value. What matters is whether it serves you. And it needn’t even help you today. Remember what you reject; you might want to pinch it “tomorrow or a month or a year from now.”

“Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them’.”

Once you acknowledge that what you create will never be unique, any fear of owning and accepting your influences will vanish. You are the sum of your family genetics and of your “genealogy of ideas.” You choose the experts you listen to, the music that moves you, the books that stimulate you, the art that speaks to your soul, and the movies you must see again and again. These influences, along with a variety of others, shape your artistic identity – your creative roots.

“You are...a mash-up of what you choose to let into your life.”

Don’t try to learn the entire scope and legacy of the art you hope to make; you’ll drive yourself crazy with overload. Pick “one thinker – writer, artist, activist, role model” – who profoundly affects you. Learn all you can about that person and his or her influences. Study those influences and learn who influenced them. “Climb up the tree as far as you can go.” Once you’ve climbed high enough, create your “own branch.”When you’ve established your set of creative ancestors, honor them. Regard yourself as the continuation of their work. Put photos of the artists you love around your workspace. Select what you want these artists to teach you and ignore everything else. Read as much as you can. The books you start out with may not help you immediately, but they will definitely take you to the ones that will help you the most.

“Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”

Always carry a pen and paper to write down whatever occurs to you wherever you have an idea. Never be self-conscious about it – you are making yourself smarter and more observant. Note the conversations people are having as they pass by. “Copy your favorite passages out of books.” Photograph what catches your eye. Maintain a “swipe file” – a notebook or tape recorder or cellphone in which you store the ideas you steal from other artists and from the world around you.

“The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them.”

2. “Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started”

You may not fully know yourself, and if you expend all your energy navel-gazing, you never will. Self-knowledge derives from action – creative action. Nobody can tell you where “the good stuff” springs; it comes from being present and doing your work. Think later – work now.Behaving like a writer or a musician or an artist will get you to your own style, so “fake it ’til you make it.” Practice makes perfect. Emulate those who inspire you, but don’t slavishly copy their work; because people aren’t able to imitate anything perfectly, the results you get will be uniquely yours. Try to understand your idols’ motivations and worldviews. If you can see the world through their eyes, you’re on your way to getting to the heart of creativity.

“You are only as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.”

3. “Write the Book You Want to Read”

When writers wonder what to work on, other writers or teachers often tell them, “Write what you know.” That is the worst possible advice. Never mind what you know – write what you’d like to read. Write what makes you smile when you read it. Write what makes you want to read more and write more. If you’re stumped creatively, pick whatever is the most entertaining to you – not the hardest or the most profound, but the most fun.

“Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.”

For example, indulge in “fan fiction”: Come up with the sequel to a popular movie or book. Compose your favorite band’s next album. Study your inspirational gurus’ work and figure out where you’d make improvements or additions. “Do the work you want to see done.”

4. “Use Your Hands”

Work produced on a computer is too abstract. To experience all the joy and knowledge that comes from creating, you must use your hands. “You need to find a way to bring your body into your work.” Your brain learns from your body just as your body learns from your brain. Pick up your drumsticks or your paintbrush or your welding torch or just your pen and paper – get the physicality back into your creativity.

“Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.”

Author Austin Kleon’s first book was a collection of poetry he made by blacking out lines from newspaper stories with a marker. That gave him full tactile engagement with his materials – cutting newspapers, wielding the marker, combining two different lines to make a third – thus following the crucial creative formula, “1 + 1 = 3.”

“If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started ‘being creative,’ well, I’d be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things.”

Try making a workspace with two sides, one “analog” and one “digital.” Your computer and electronics live on the digital side. All the work you do with your hands – which can include writing drafts in longhand or drawing cartoons – happens on the analog side. Keeping these worlds separate nourishes your creative impulses.

5. “Side Projects and Hobbies Are Important”

The things you do when you’re avoiding activities you think you’re supposed to be doing will invariably turn out to be your most important work. That’s why you should never restrict yourself to one project at a time. The activity you pick up to distract yourself from your main work may be what your heart most desires. When you have several projects going on at once, you can “practice productive procrastination” on one by working hard on another. And “if you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes.”

“Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.”

Don’t ignore something you’re passionate about to focus on something else. Your work and your interests can meld to create something totally new. Don’t discard what moves you, including hobbies. A hobby is creative work that won’t bring you money or fame, but “it makes you happy.” If you like to play the guitar, for example, go jam with your friends on weekends. All these aspects – your hobbies, passions and procrastinations – are manifestations of your creative self. “Don’t worry about unity – what unifies your work is the fact that you made it.”

“Your hands are the original digital devices. Use them.”

6. “The Secret: Do Good Work and Share It with People”

When you toil in obscurity, you get to make all your mistakes in private. Plus, you can do whatever you want. Work hard at your art every day. You will get better. And when you do, share it. At one time, you had to find a gallery to show your art or a club that would let your band play or a magazine that would print your articles. Now it’s simpler: “Put your stuff on the Internet.”Sharing your work online requires two steps: 1) “Wonder at something” and 2) “Invite others to wonder with you.” Think about things and ideas that move you or are on your mind. If nothing’s on your mind, don’t worry: You will find ideas to discuss simply by putting yourself out onto the web. The Internet is a potent “incubator” for work you may not even know you’re about to start. Some people fear that going online will drain their creativity, but it’s more likely that the Internet will inspire you.

“A hobby is something that gives but doesn’t take.”

Absorb and learn all the necessary technical web skills. Create your own website; learn about social media and blogging. Spend only as much online as makes you comfortable. If you don’t want to share your full concepts, instead offer some tips or links to help others. Don’t worry about people poaching your ideas: “You can share your dots without connecting them.”

“You don’t put yourself online only because you have something to say – you can put yourself online to find something to say.”

7. “Geography Is No Longer Our Master”

Location means little today. The world is your world, and the world you make is the world people come to visit. No matter where you live or how alienated you might feel from your surroundings, a community of like-minded souls is only a click away. If the physical world discourages you, create your own realm. Fill your area with art, movies, music and books that make you feel whole. “All you need is space and time – a place to work, and some time to do it.”And whether you’re ready or not, you eventually have to “leave home.” You must shed your normal routine and most-loved places to go spend time around people who don’t think like you. Going to new places makes you new and makes your “brains work harder.” As for where to go, “bad weather leads to better art,” so consider someplace where the summers are hot and steamy or the winters are dark and cold. Find a place where artists, writers and filmmakers congregate. It helps if the local cuisine rocks. “You have to find a place that feeds you – creatively, socially, spiritually and literally.” And, wherever you go, your online community will still be there.

“Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art.”

8. “Be Nice”

The world is so small now that, more than ever, manners matter. If you speak poorly of someone online, they will know it all too soon. To crush your online enemies, pretend they don’t exist. To gain new buddies online, say something kind about them. If somebody makes you mad, don’t respond; head for your workspace and let your anger fuel your work. Find people online who are “smarter and better than you,” and, when you find them, listen to what they’re talking about. If, over time, you come to realize that you are the smartest person who’s doing the best work, find somewhere else to hang out.

“In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out.”

You will go through long stretches during which no one will care about anything you do, say, build or post. To get through those lonely days, create a “praise file.” Keep emails or tweets or notes that say nice things about your work. Delete anything unkind immediately. Save your praise file for a day when you’re feeling down or discouraged. Then read through all that wonderful encouragement – and believe every single word.

9. “Be Boring”

The biggest problem with pursuing the myth of the self-destructive artist is that, sooner or later, you will self-destruct. Your energy is precious. Apply it to your art, not to burning yourself out.Taking care of yourself also means taking care of your finances. “Do yourself a favor: learn about money.” Track your expenditures. Keep away from credit cards, expensive coffee and fancy electronics. If you can’t make a living from your art, employment will keep you sane and properly disciplined: “A day job gives you money, a connection to the world and a routine.” If you cover your expenses, you never have to compromise on your art for money. You can create what you want until your work is so good you can live off the proceeds of selling it.But how do you find time for your creative pursuits if you have a job? Surprisingly, a routine helps you be more productive, because a schedule lets you identify the finite amount of time you have to devote to your passions. Diligently work that period of time every single day, even on holidays or when you’re ill. Soon enough, you won’t even notice you’re working.

10. “Creativity Is Subtraction”

Paradoxically, restrictions – even conceptual ones – can focus your creativity. Author Dr. Seuss took on his editor’s dare to write a children’s book using just 50 different words; Green Eggs and Ham is now a classic. Cull what’s unnecessary from your work, but leave what’s brilliant. Use what you have now to create. Cut back on your most ambitious ideas. Less is more.

About the Author

Work by artist and writer Austin Kleon has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s Morning Edition. He is also the author of Newspaper Blackout.

Book Shelf: Ego is the enemy

Overview

• Ego seems necessary for success, but vesting in self-importance impedes your career.

• Being great is different from doing great things.

• Engaging in building a “personal brand” confuses accomplishing something with talking about it.

• Cultivate restraint to manage your feelings of pride or anger.

• “Clear the path” for others, and you’ll help determine the path they take.

• Ego undermines the connection and engagement with others that both allow success to grow.

• Goal visualization helps at the beginning of a project, but it can produce a misleading impression of progress.

• Maintain “a student mind-set” to keep your ego in check by acknowledging that you always have more to learn.

• Ego is “the disease of me”; this world is far greater than you.

• Abandon ego’s attachment to success and commit to a path of constant improvement.

Key Points

• Why ego does not help you succeed and

• What strategies you can use to avoid the trappings of ego.

Recommendation

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday recommends that people stop jabbering, forget their narratives, restrain their passions, learn from everything they do, accept failure and never stop working. He offers anecdotes about professional athletes, politicians and business leaders who learned hard lessons about the dangers of ego as well as tales of quiet workers who made enormous differences and remained unknown. Holiday’s conversational style reads like getting advice from a good friend. His chapters are short and easy to understand, though some entries cover similar topics. The partial bibliography directs readers to an extensive reading list on Holiday’s website. His alternative approach is great for people with an interest in self-improvement, not self-aggrandizement. He believes that the best way to move ahead is keep learning and to tame your ego – and he shows you how.

Summary

What Is Ego?

Anyone with ambition has ego. People who marshal their skills to meet their goals have ego. Artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs achieve their objectives by harnessing the focus and desire to create and discover. But, too often, ego drives these activities. Ego is necessary for getting ahead. But “an unhealthy belief” in how important you are has the opposite impact and blocks your progress.Ego encourages lazy, self-congratulatory fantasizing. Defined as “self-centered ambition,” ego undermines the connection with others and the engagement that both allow success to grow. To assess your strengths accurately, embrace a blend of confidence and humility. Recognize that ego offers the comfort of self-satisfaction, but it’s self-absorbed and can blind you to opportunity.

“What makes us so promising as thinkers, doers, creatives and entrepreneurs, what drives us to the top of those fields, makes us vulnerable to this darker side of the psyche.”

Aspiring to Greatness

Greatness is often a quiet act. The late US Air Force fighter pilot and strategist John Boyd helped revolutionize modern warfare across the US armed forces, but the general public doesn’t know of him. To emphasize the difference between working for recognition and working to get something accomplished, he asked the soldiers he commanded if they wanted “to be or to do.” Just being somebody is much easier than actually getting things done.

“Ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success.”

Though popular wisdom encourages people “to find their passion,” that can be the wrong advice. Passion leads to enthusiasm at the expense of thoughtful deliberation. Passion’s energy and excitement can hide weaknesses that will eventually appear. Instead of impatient passion, seek purpose with reasons and goals.Practice restraint. Anger, resentment and pride cloud your thinking. You’re not special just because you went to a good school, work hard, or came from a rich or influential family. You may dislike it when your boss is rude or your colleagues are frustrating, but being reactive and claiming that you deserve better will get you nowhere. Such behaviors stem from ego. Being restrained lets you focus on the work at hand and value the lessons that emerge along the way.

“We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities.”

“The Canvas Strategy”

The canvas strategy builds on the notion of restraint, of being “a canvas for other people to paint on.” Shift away from the short-term satisfaction of resentment and move toward embracing the long-term enrichment of self-development. To follow the canvas strategy, keep these ideas in mind when first starting out in the world of work:

“Once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during your moment at the top that you can afford ego the least – because the stakes are so much higher, the margins for error so much smaller.”

• You will probably need to improve and cultivate a better attitude.

• You “aren’t as good” as you may believe, nor as important.

• You don’t know everything, and you need to learn more than your education taught you.

Your success often will come alongside the success of others. Work to make other people’s jobs easier. While an initial sense of subservience might confound your ego, starting at the bottom gives you an opportunity to learn how something really works. Overcome your ego by finding ideas to share with your boss. Introduce people who might collaborate. Do the small tasks others avoid. When you “clear the path” for other people, you help determine the course they’ll take.

“The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther from actual accountability.”

Problems with Narratives

Be someone who does things rather than someone who talks a lot. Social media encourage talk instead of productivity. Posting updates on Facebook and Twitter misleads you into focusing on speech over action. Filling boxes with text promotes the false presentation of confidence, ability and accomplishment. Don’t believe your own self-promotion. That’s your ego inflating itself.

“It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more.”

Gawker blogger Emily Gould described the challenge she faced in completing her novel. She had a “six-figure book deal,” but her writing bogged down because she was always posting on Tumblr or Twitter or scrolling through websites. These were distractions from the real work she had to do, but she convinced herself that it was work: she was building her personal brand. In the relentless pursuit of building, curating or refining a personal brand, people lose sight of the difference between actual accomplishments and fictional advertisements of themselves. All that posting and all that talk use up the energy you need for your real work. Some people like to mutter the thoughts that are leading them through solving a problem, but some studies suggest that talking aloud slows the process of discovery. Likewise, goal visualization helps at the beginning of a project, but after a while it produces the misleading impression of progress. When a project is hard, talk does not help.

Stories of success make success seem inevitable. Looking back at your own story is dangerous because you can reject all the pieces that don’t fit the narrative you want to tell. Such a narrative can offer false clarity and distract you from remembering the work that enabled you to attain your goals. Narratives of success mislead by suggesting they are conclusive, that the story ends after success. But in life, the story continues. After you succeed, everyone wants to beat you. More than ever, you must work hard to maintain the success you strived to achieve.

“Ego needs honors to be validated. Confidence…is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.”

Learning Focus

Pride is dangerous. It inhibits learning. Instead, maintain “a student mind-set” to keep your ego in check by acknowledging that you always have more to learn. Success doesn’t make you a master. Frank Shamrock, a mixed martial arts world champion, teaches that everyone needs “a plus, a minus and an equal.” Learn from someone who has more skill than you, someone who acts as a teacher. Gain from teaching someone who knows less than you, because being a professional requires understanding your task well enough to describe it to others. Working with someone at your level helps you cultivate finesse and dexterity.

“The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility – that’s ego.”

Maintaining a student mind-set is easier in the beginning of your career. Success brings the temptation to overestimate your knowledge. John Wheeler, a physicist who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, said, “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” The more you know, the more you realize you need to learn.

Jazz great Wynton Marsalis once told an aspiring musician to be humble, explaining that humility is evident in those who don’t believe they already know everything. As you learn, discover the processes that enable you to learn most effectively. Repeat those procedures to ensure your continuous education.

“A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach.”

The “theory of disruption” proposes that every industry will eventually encounter a change that no one predicted. When that happens, established business models – already too comfortable with their familiar approach – won’t respond effectively because they’ve stopped learning and growing. Newcomers are more agile; since they’re still in a learning mind-set, they see an opportunity to fill a market need and take advantage of it. They study their competitors to learn which changes would help them grow.

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

“Standard of Performance”

Professional football coach Bill Walsh established a Standard of Performance as general manager of the San Francisco 49ers. Over the course of three years, he took a team that earned ratings as one of the worst in the league and made it a Super Bowl champion. People told the story of this climb by saying Walsh had a vision of the team’s Super Bowl win and executed it. He refused to buy into that narrative. Instead, Walsh described how he focused on what the team members needed to do, when they needed to do it and how they should do it.

Walsh instilled a sense of excellence by insisting on small behavioral rules: Players must stand while on the practice field; coaches must appear in tucked-in shirts and ties; the locker room must be clean. Bill Walsh expected the team to perform well on the field and off. After winning the Super Bowl, the team had two terrible years because the players became overconfident and self-satisfied. The team had to accept that the Standard of Performance was their route to victory before they started to win again and became recurring champions.

“Unless we use this moment as an opportunity to understand ourselves and our own mind better, ego will seek out failure like true north.”

Accept Failure

Mistakes are inevitable. Being an entrepreneur or creative person requires taking risks, and risks don’t always work out. The problem isn’t failing. The problem is identifying with failure. Ego believes that the only options are success or failure. That is ego confusion. Failure isn’t indicative of who you are, only of what you did. Ego tries to prove that failure is, or will become, success.

“At every step and every juncture in life, there is the opportunity to learn – and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let ego block us from hearing it again.”

When Dov Charney was the CEO of American Apparel, his practices cost the company some $300 million and the reputational damage of multiple scandals. When the board asked Charney to step aside, he refused. He then wasted a fortune on a useless lawsuit to vindicate himself. He lost, and faced public humiliation when the media published details that the case revealed about his behavior.

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he founded, because of his huge ego. Jobs was angry and fought the company’s decision, but he didn’t let it ruin him. He sold all but one share of Apple and decided to try again. Learning from his management failures, he funded the animation company Pixar and slowly rebuilt his reputation. He eventually returned to Apple, and made it an even better company than he could have built before learning such hard life lessons.

“You can’t learn if you think you already know.”

As with Jobs, failure is an opportunity to learn. When success begins to wane, don’t attach yourself even more tightly to your job, project or goal. Recognize that something went wrong; try to identify how your behavior contributed to that error and begin to change.

Check Yourself

When people first succeed, they may indulge in wild behavior. Success can transform that confusion and erratic conduct into self-assurance and bravery. If your success came from a surprising guess, recognize that you didn’t know what would lead to success. When others applaud your greatness, stay sober.

Consider Germany’s Angela Merkel, one of the most powerful women in the world. When Russian president Vladimir Putin tried to intimidate her by allowing his hunting dog to interrupt a meeting, she didn’t take it personally or react badly even though her dislike of dogs is common knowledge. In the midst of adversity, she remained “firm, clear and patient.” As Merkel once said, “You can’t solve…tasks with charisma.”Success has the adverse effect of making people feel larger than life. Stress reinforces their sense of importance. Similarly, rebukes or failures hurt people’s inflated egos. Tame your ego by observing the vastness of the universe; “meditate on immensity.” Observe nature. Find something that allows you to connect. Let go of ego’s desire for retaliation or its efforts to reinforce its value. See how grand the world is. Ego is “the disease of me,” but the world offers much more than you.

Do things for the purpose of doing them. Let the effort be enough. When a project becomes focused on success alone, your ego is in control. Your work might incur ridicule or sabotage. Recognition may never arrive in the forms you seek: public praise, financial success or approval from the one person whose respect you want. Focus on your expectations, not someone else’s. Ego drives the desire to succeed. Let the effort you put into your work be success enough. If it’s not, then maybe this isn’t the work you should be doing.

Learn What Matters to You

Ego makes everything about the self. Genuine self-awareness diminishes ego by allowing the self to grow and change. Ask, “What’s important to you?” so that you focus on self-evaluation and not on external measures. Learn what matters to you so you can be true to yourself. Recognize that the world has much to continue teaching you. Abandon ego’s attachment to success. Commit, instead, to a path of constant improvement.

About the Author

Ryan Holiday is the former director of marketing at American Apparel and a best-selling author. He wrote The Obstacle Is The Way, Growth Hacker Marketing, and Trust Me, I’m Lying and co-wrote The Daily Stoic with Stephen Hanselman.