Self Growth - The First Step [Conquer your Ego]by Satyadarshini Sharma

Self Growth - The First Step
[Conquer your Ego]

"Learning never ends", told the principal while addressing students at the primary school I studied. She told a whole a lot of things but what remain etched in my mind forever was her all white hair and what she said about "learning". She told "I am 60 years old but I am still learning, learning never ends, all our lives we need to learn". As a child these words really amazed me. I thought "Why should a 60 year old lady need to learn? Its we children who need to learn". When I look back now and reflect on that incident, I realise the importance of those words told by my principal.

All these years I have always concentrated on self growth besides other important aspects of life. I do a self assessment quite often, checking what areas of my personality I have been able to improve and what still needs improvement.

As we know there are so many areas of self growth we need to look into but I found the initial step towards self growth lies in controlling one's ego, "Conquering the Self"

One step and the rest of the areas are taken care of like a cascading affect. Keeping a check on one's ego can remove so many problem areas in a person like "Anger", "Resentment", "Hatred", "Fear" etc. In Naveen's case he is very happy with the software code he has just written. His Boss isnt happy though and finds some sections to be improved upon. This angers Naveen because his ego is hurt.

Its just one thing to concentrate on "Check your Ego" but it isnt as simple as most of us would know. There should be awareness towards one's action and thought process. Like ask questions to oneself, "Am I feeling superior?", "Am I getting angry because I am thinking about myself" etc.

Ego can kill or dampen one's core skills. The focus shifts from the "skills" to the "self" and the person is not able to continue as before. We see how this happens with Ravi who is a good athlete but once he begins to feel that he is the best he no more is able to time his run as good as he was before.

There is a very thin line between pride and ego. We dont realize when pride gets converted into ego. A simple way of checking the difference is to see if you are beginning to feel that the other person is inferior to you. This is a very good sign to check if the ego has entered into our mind. Lets see how Priya goes through this feeling. She loves the beautiful house she has constructed. She prides in the fact that her home is beautiful. After sometime though, Priya starts feeling that her friend's house isn't as good as her's. She feels her friend is inferior to her. This is the time Priya is beginning to develop an ego.

My daily prayer to God is to help me conquer my ego. I have shared this with a couple of friends but after sometime I realized I have a newfound ego that "I keep a check on my Ego". Funny it may sound but friends we need to keep a check on our ego else it can empty us totally from within. So if we need to grow "Conquer the Ego".


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