The #1 Most Common Goof In Personal Development Is Trying To Get Rid Of Your Ego

One consistent and popular theme concerning the Ego is it is looked upon as bad and something we have to constantly work to get rid of. I myself fell into constantly berating the ego and fighting against it. Doing this unknowingly created an on going and increasing problem for myself. The more I fought against the ego, the more confused I became, and less confident I felt. If you have experienced much of the same, let me explain what happen that changed all that for me.

Somewhere deep inside I was feeling that something was missing in what I could do to help myself gain more clarity, confidence and ultimately live my birth right of health, wealth and happiness. I called out for help. When I asked I received huge assistance in the form of being able to look at life and what was happening in my life more unconditionally. I felt fortune was smiling on me because I came across an understanding of the Ego that I have never seen elsewhere. It was through a course that provided insights and a framework for life, in a very grounded systemic way that allowed me to make giant strides in my life and move me forward at a pace that I had never experienced before because I understood cause and effect, attraction and countless other principles on a much deeper and simpler level.

By using this material (mentioned at the end of this article), I was able to integrate the powerful knowledge this course provided and actually use my Ego, unconditionally and responsibly to assist me and empower me to easily meet my goals.

Let me share briefly upon what this material taught and awakened within me as a level of truth I knew was missing yet didn't know where to find it.

We Are Actually Supposed To Have An Ego

We are supposed to have an ego. I just didn't know how to allow my Ego to serve me instead of distract me. Our Ego is a part of us just as our heart and soul are a part of us. Yet this is the only part of us that is described as "something we need to get rid of." It is like someone telling us that we need to get rid of our left arm, or our lungs. Those are the physical parts of us that we use to function as a body in this dimension, just as our Ego as a part of our being, allows us to function in this dimension. We require our Ego to experience life through our own personality, viewpoint and our own way of being. The Ego expresses our preference for lemonade over orange juice, or our preference for vacations in Hawaii over vacations in London. Our Ego is what makes life interesting for us, our Ego is what allows us to express our unique gift throughout the world. It is the one thing that makes us unique unto ourselves.

Is there any wonder why we have all struggled for years and years attempting to 'get rid' of our Ego? Why would we want to eliminate the very thing that gives us our own unique flavor?

What 'Getting Rid of the Ego' is Confused With

Getting rid of our Ego is usually confused with bringing our Ego back into balance to be expressed as the Pure Ego. Our Pure Ego is the ego that lives as our childlike innocence and wonder of unconditionally discovering the world that we live in. Take for example, what happened when we learned how to walk. We were in our Pure Ego when we learned how to walk. When we realized that walking was a better way to discover the world around us, we began our own mission - to learn how to walk. So we crawled and stumbled and took tentative steps and fell, and got back up again, and fell again, and did it over and over until we had it down. Each time we developed a deeper understanding of how we needed to shift our weight, or where we needed to put our foot, all through trial and error, but each time we saw the improvement and each time we added something new to our movement that improved our balance and stability. We didn't focus on what we did that didn't work, we focused on what we did do that WORKED. We could not have learned how to walk if we were in our Altered Ego.

Our Altered Ego is the ego that comes from fear and judgment as opposed to love. It is when our Ego has become out of balance with Self and sees life conditionally. What would learning how to walk be like if we were in our Altered Ego? Most of us would probably still be sitting and crawling. We would first have gone through a lot of processing about taking action to learn how to walk or not....Would it be safe? What would my family think? What if I fall down? Then we would finally take our first tentative steps, wobble and then fall down. After thoroughly chastising ourselves for falling and believing we are not good enough to walk, or not being sure if we should even attempt it. But we don't want to give up too soon because we really do want to learn how to walk. So we would read several self-help manuals telling us that we are good enough to walk and we can do it, and we're the little engine that could. Those of us that gathered our courage again, would make another attempt, and fall again would go through another round of "what is wrong with us and why can't we get this walking thing right?" Our self-criticism would be extremely high, and our belief in ourselves would plummet. We would begin to fall into the illusion that we just can't walk and will never be able to, and perhaps we just weren't meant to walk and who do we think we are even thinking that we have the right to walk in the first place?

We are so focused on judging ourselves that we don't even realize all of the things that we did that allowed us to stand for 5 or 10 seconds. Instead, we focused on all of the things that caused us to fall down.

If we have enough desire, and our will hasn't been thoroughly crushed by now, we may go through another round of self-help books and therapy to build up our confidence level. For those of us who stay focused on the end goal, we finally manage to walk. For those of us who keep ourselves mired in the mindset of what we did wrong and continue to judge ourselves as not deserving to be able to walk, we never get up off of the floor, and we keep ourselves in the illusion that walking isn't what we were meant to do.

Why Understanding The Pure Ego and Altered Ego Is Important For Our Personal Development

The difference between learning how to walk on our Altered Ego vs our Pure Ego is that when we were learning to walk while being in our Pure Ego, we focused on what we wanted (the ability to walk), and stayed in the joy of the process (what we did right, focusing on the progress we were making and having fun while learning). We still used our Pure Ego, because that is the part of us that gave us the drive and the yearning to learn how to walk. That is the part of us that gave us the passion to persist until we were done, and that is the part of us that allowed us to experience joy while we were going through our experience. Consider this... How many toddlers have you seen screaming in terror, anger, fright, etc. while learning how to walk? Not many right? Most of the time they have HUGE grins on their faces that say "Look what I'm doing!" These little tykes can hardly contain themselves!

When we were learning how to walk while being in our Altered Ego, we weren't having much fun. We were making it difficult for ourselves by over-analyzing everything we were doing and judging the crap out of ourselves for not getting something "perfect" in the first attempt. For those of us that managed to get up off of the ground, we certainly extended the process, and we certainly were not enjoying the experience. We lost focus of what we wanted, which was learning how to walk, because we were so focused on what we were doing wrong and making ourselves "lesser" because we fell down a couple of times. We can choose to be in the frame of mind of saying "well that way certainly didn't work, but there are all these other ways to experience." Or we can be in the frame of mind that says "Boy do I suck! I can't do this! I can't do ANYTHING!" Being in our Altered Ego completely got in our way of achieving what we wanted.... learning how to walk.

We do require an Ego to be in the joy of living in this world, however it is OUR choice as to HOW we want to live in this world. We can use the Ego to support what we want in our lives, or to hinder what we want in our lives. We can learn how to incorporate the Ego into our lives through material such as The Choice Is Mine which teaches us how to be unconditional with ourselves so we can experience abundance and ease in our lives more quickly. This lifetime companion allows us to move at our own pace while we are living our day to day lives.