This is Part 4 of a series on Ego Aggression, the ego trait that reacts to its core wounding by rejecting vulnerability and pushing for external power. See links on my Substack page.
When we make the shift from egoic seeking of power to realizing our own intrinsic power, everything changes, even though nothing situationally may have changed. It is as if the filter through which we were seeing reality somehow was lifted, and instead of seeing work through the ego filter of the world being against us, we start to see that in fact, we are unified by an inherent kind of connection, and we experience this as a kind of universal power while at the same time knowing it as available and accessible to us individually.
On an individual level, we are able to let go of the rigidity and aggression of our ego and its ceaseless striving for power i.e. protection, its continual conquest for expanded influence, and instead focus our energy where it is most appropriate. We are able to let go, to release the ego’s grip on its need for control, and begin to relax into a sense of unfolding instead of pushing. We start to see that the ego typically only operates in one gear with the highest intensity instead of adjusting different amounts of energy for different situations.
As a leader, we start to regain contact with our emotional life and begin to attune to our team’s feelings more easily. Where the ego’s inability to be vulnerable kept us from feeling real contact in our relationships, our contact with true connectivity and power through vulnerability puts us in touch with our tenderness and sensitivity, and we realize that this is actually more powerful and impactful that our ego’s attempts at power. When this happens, we naturally begin to regain and build psychological safety on our teams, and the more we become in touch with our emotional intelligence, the more we begin to be able to see things from other perspectives. We no longer push to get our way, but our focus naturally shifts toward mutual understanding.
The leveling up of psychological safety and emotional intelligence brings about the natural consequence of more authenticity, which has profound affects on productivity, innovation, and problem-solving. Whereas before, the ego was limited to pushing its own agenda, having contact with our intrinsic power gives others space to operate from their intrinsic power also. When the ego was running the show, those around it likely felt unsafe to express their own perspectives, not dared to challenge the intensity and aggression of the ego, or simply felt like there wasn’t enough space any other perspective. How many times, after all, have we thought, “what’s the point?” because the person we were talking to had no room for new ideas.
If enough of us who are constricted by this particular quality of ego aggression are able to transform it, the way we work and the subsequent culture would shift from the current status quo, characterized by toxicity and insensitivity, to a culture of empathy. We are seeing hopeful signs of this in certain pockets of the business world, where organizations and leaders are prioritizing relationships over profits and truly operate and function from a source of intrinsic power and connectivity. We would see that decision-making naturally encompasses the impact that a strategy has on the entire organization and its employees instead of primarily being focused on revenue and bottom-line profit. Our meetings would be characterized by empathy and psychological safety, where team members could admit freely that they need help or that they disagree. Innovation would naturally arise as teams tap into their own autonomy and power instead of feeling the doubt of whether some approach may cause the wrath of their manager.
We could call this shift heartful, like we are bringing more heart into the daily fabric of our working life. Heart encompasses vulnerability, sensitivity, connection, trust – all aspects of our humanity that we generally have lacked in the current culture to date. But the shift is also more than heart. A possibly more accurate way to describe the shift is an opening or expansion to include what is real beyond simply the material endeavor of making money. As we see through the need for ego aggression and as we trust more in the matters related to the heart, we can clearly recognize what has meaning and what doesn’t, what has wholeness and what doesn’t – and collectively, when more individuals are less imprisoned by the ego’s compulsive aggression, we will reap the benefits because the way we work will inevitably come from a source of real and authentic power.
