Silence the ego that's hindering your success - Success Series 2019 EP6

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

— Walt Disney

Six weeks into our 2019 Success Series, we are now almost in mid February. How are you tracking with your New Year’s Resolutions for 2019? Have you kept the goal of becoming the best version of yourself at the front of your mind, or have you let them fade into the background? In our previous post, we focused on the Three Actions You can Take straight away to become a better version of yourself and kick start your journey.

But even with the three simple actions of: SMILE, BREATHE, and TALK LOUD & PROUD, you may still find that the journey becomes heavy. It’s an ironic part of the life that the more progressed your self improvement journey becomes, the harder it seems to get. In fact, it almost feels like there are invisible barriers that are holding you back. A lot of that is your ego at play. Yes, even introverts have big egos because egos work both ways. Extroverts use their egos to show off. Introverts use their egos to hold them back. The ego is worried that speaking your mind may attract negative feedback. Therefore, to protect you, it forces you to keep quiet. Sure, there is a risk that you could say something silly. But you’re also giving up the chance to be noticed and credited with original ideas.

As Sigmund Freud famously said:

Where I was, there my ego shall be.

So how do you silence your introvert ego? You can’t tackle your ego directly because your ego will defend itself. Attacking a well dug-in ego is futile since it’s been embedded in your mind since forever. So to silence your introvert ego, you need to remove the anchors that your ego feeds off and slowly but surely, starve it. You’ll starve it so stealthily, it won’t even know what you’re doing until it’s done.

REMOVE ANCHOR 1 - REVIEW YOUR SOCIAL CIRCLE

If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong f*&^king room.

Jim Rohn (serial entrepreneur) famously said that you are the average of the five people you spend most time with. Before I started MyCorporateDiary, a look at my social circle or work circle revealed a simple fact… the members of those circles do not contain people that push me or challenge me. They are people I adore, people I’m comfortable with, people who make me feel like I am “the man”.

If I look at my social circle, they are friends from high school or university. People I’ve known for decades. If you look at your social and work circles, I’m sure you’ll have the same realisation. You’re closest friends and associates have remained unchanged for a long time, and they are people you are most comfortable with. Most likely around the same age as you, with the same mindset, outlook on life, and everything you do… “they are OK with.”

But if you’re wanting to improve and grow, then you will need a slightly different (or expanded) social circle. More likely than not, if your social circle hasn’t changed since High School, it’s likely you haven’t really grown as a person since then. I know it’s harsh and you may be offended. But it’s likely a reality. It certainly was for me.

I'm going to use my brother in law (who is on the opposite end of the shy introvert spectrum) as a reference point. He picks up new friends, almost on a monthly basis. His friends range in age from early 20s to retirees, from IT nerds and mechanics to Board members. He meets these people as a dentist and instead of just seeing them as patients (and $$ signs) he also makes friends with them. His personal trainer is now his friend. His group of friends is so diverse that he can draw on them for almost any aspect of his life. From fixing IT issues, to deciding how to grow his business, to getting great deals on electronic gadgets. 

So the action is to review your social circle. Expand it to include those who’s behaviours you want to emulate, who have certain traits that you wished you had. Balance out your comfortable circle of friends who those who you can learn from. Expand the diversity of your friendship circle. If you want to grow personally, you need new friends with different personalities and backgrounds. You need them to challenge you so that you can see the alternatives instead of being stuck in the same mindset.

REMOVE ANCHOR 2 - TAKE LITTLE CHALLENGES

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time - Steve Jobs

Nothing kills ambition or kills the drive to improve more than the feeling of comfort. When you are comfortable, you don’t want to change. You’ve reached the perfect balance in your life, why upset the apple cart right? But as we’ve seen time and time again, being comfortable in life or at work is only a temporary scenario. Things change, the operating environment changes, leaders change, CEOs, change. Then all of a sudden, your comfortable life is facing a massive crisis. You are now forced to react because you are not mentally or politically prepared for change.

Comfort plays right into your ego, reinforcing this false vision of yourself that you are perfect and that you cannot make mistakes. The truth is, it is through mistakes that we improve and grow. So how do we get ready for unexpected changes? How do we stop feeding this ego, which lulls us into this false sense of security that in the long run actually hurts us?

So what’s the action to take? The same thing that we’ve been articulating throughout our entire series. Success is through little actions that you do regularly. If you want to make a change, start small but per persistent. Then over time, you’ll look back and be a completely different person. To get started, simply try small new things daily. Try a chai latte, get off at a floor you’ve never been to to find out what’s there, try a different place for lunch, take a different path to work. Then when you’re ready, do what in my mind is the most effective confidence booster. Try a 30 day challenge and speak to 5 strangers everyday. Just say hi.

All of these little actions and challenges builds in your mind a higher tolerance level for change. Over time, as I have discovered, you actually start to want new challenges to tackle. Comfortable becomes undesirable and you want to push to the next level. Your ego has slowly but surely been silenced.

REMOVE ANCHOR 3 - TAKE UP SPACE

Although our body language governs the way other people perceive us, our body language also governs how we perceive ourselves and how those perceptions become reinforced through our own behaviour, our interactions, and even our physiology - Amy Cuddy

To Amy Cuddy's quote above, a positive and open body language not only impacts how other people perceive you but importantly, it also impacts how you feel about yourself. And through my research, this theory has been reiterated by many other "influencers", including Tony Robbins and his theory on physiology and the often quoted line of "motion drives emotion". 

So how do you take up more space and expand your body? Refer to one my of favourite video advice below from Charisma on Command. It's a relatively short video with accurate demonstrations on body language that makes you more attractive and improve your self confidence. But in summary, the three actions everyone can take to appear more attractive are:

• Action 1: Expand your whole arm and avoid T-Rex arms. I started paying attention to this over several weeks and I noticed that in the majority of times, I was doing T-Rex arms. When I pointed at things or just generally being animated in conversation, my elbows were close to my body, even when there were no physical space constraints. Upon reflection, it really does look unappealing. As I consciously focussed on expanding my arm movements, I did notice more engagement from the people I was having a conversation with.

• Action 2: Be present and relish that the fun is where you are. Let's be honest, we have all done this. We're gathered with our friends or colleagues but we are constantly looking around to see who else we can go speak with or what else we can do. If you haven't done it yourself, you've probably had it done to you. How did you feel when the person you're speaking with keeps looking around? You probably feel a bit insulted and looked for ways to cut the conversation short. Conversely, how many times have you noticed that when you're engaged in conversation, others tend to congregate around you and want to join in? When this happens, bring them into the conversation. 

• Action 3/4: Smile (there's actually 4 actions in the video). This action resonates with me the most as I've been focussed on making eye contact and smiling at strangers per my previous blog posts. But I've picked up an improvement through this video, which I found to have a big impact. Don't just smile when you're talking to someone, smile before you open your mouth. You'll notice that it forces the other person to smile back and before the conversation has even begun, you've set it off on a positive note. 

Blog photo by bruce mars from Pexels