The ego is an energy system

 My wife has been exhausted recently: taking care of family and guests over the holidays, endless work demands, helping the boys with school essays not to mention looking after her aging father. Yesterday she showed me the draft of an important presentation to her firm, and I was thinking to myself, “what are you doing, you can be so much more impactful.” Luckily all it took was adding a few powerful reminders of the work she had already done, and a little re-arranging of the material and the outcome was perfect.

 

Everything is about showing up in the moment. Neither arrogant nor defensive, just stating facts as they are without hidden agenda and mistaken belief systems. Observe your words, your posture, your smile, the interactions with others and just show up. When you decide, let me be my “better self”, you are missing truth as is. It just happens. It’s automatic. The situation calls for the action. There is no self to speak of, just an accurate response to a situation. On the other hand, if you spot an error, fix it.

 

What’s wrong with following up a fumbled opportunity with a correcting statement, “That didn’t come out right, let me re-phrase that.” We can see relationships as our mirror and can be constantly on our toes to review our implicit belief-sets in our interactions. That kind of “self-improvement” makes sense. You simply retire the person who feels that he doesn’t measure up or doesn’t feel loved. Importantly, you don’t do this at an increasing rate, or keep that intention as a New Year’s resolution, you do it here and now.

 

The ego is an energy system. Insight and action dissolve it.