How To Make Sure Your Personal Growth Is Not Manipulated By Your Ego
Have you ever found yourself reflecting on your self-development goals? I hope you did. Maybe you even thought something like:
Many of us are so used to the goal-oriented mentality and the culture of achievement that personal growth becomes just another ego-driven pursuit in our lives. Instead of treating it as an organic process which it is — we perceive it as yet another task on the already too long to-do list.
I believe that this is simply not healthy, in the classical Buddhist sense (more on that below). You might be missing the entire point.
Are you trying to subject your most intimate experience to a plan? A plan which is — let’s point it out — created within that very same experience?
Quite possibly, you are deluding yourself to believe that you can control something that is by default uncontrollable: your own growth.
This is not to say that you cannot consciously intend for your personal growth to unfold in a certain way. But setting an intention is not the same as saying: I can have complete control over how I develop as a person.
Why not? Let’s dive into the subject and try to answer this.
You are probably used to thinking that personal growth is, by definition, something you do solely for yourself.
By that same definition, it would also mean that you don’t benchmark your growth against how others are doing. You also don’t use it as a means to become “better than others” — right? After all, what matters is the difference between the point you are at today and the one you inhabited yesterday.
That’s a nice theory — yet, the practice is often different. We are so used to treating each undertaking as a win-or-lose game, that we often look at the sphere of personal growth through the same lens. And this is how the ego-driven motivation forms.
You can recognise that it is present when you notice yourself attached to particular outcomes of your personal growth journey. You use those outcomes to construct and maintain an image of who you think you are (ego). This is usually when judgment and comparison start colouring your experience of growth.
This is exactly what I mean when I talk about ego-driven personal growth. You use your perceived “achievements” or “failures” to define your identity — often drawing on some kind of comparison with those around you.
At least in the beginning, this is mostly unconscious — because, contrarily to what you might think, you are still not aware enough to notice what is happening. It takes quite a bit of humbleness and courage to acknowledge this kind of internal process.
But I am sure you know this already — after all, you are actively working on your personal growth, aren’t you?
The terms “healthy” and “unhealthy behaviour” that I will use further in this article, are derived from the classical Buddhist psychology. Let me just clarify that I mean “behaviour” in a very broad sense of the word. That includes thoughts we cultivate, words we speak, feelings we cling to and deeds we perform.
The ego-driven motivation is also something I understand as a kind of “internal behaviour”.
According to Buddhists, every behaviour can have two possible consequences. It either reduces the total amount of suffering in the world — or adds to it. It is not possible for a behaviour not to influence the state of affairs in one way or another, i.e. be “neutral”.
I am a big fan of the healthy/unhealthy distinction because it doesn’t concern itself with judgement. It doesn’t point to the “right” and “wrong” categories, which are so deeply embedded in — let me risk this assumption — the majority of the Western minds. There is no abstract moral quality attached to human behaviours; we are simply concerned with the practical consequences of various thoughts, deeds and intentions.
So I prefer to use the adjectives “healthy” and “unhealthy” when commenting on the motivation for personal growth. If this motivation is ego-driven, then I’d argue that it is unhealthy — primarily for the individual, but also for all the other beings around that individual.
This is why I think it is so important that we detect it when it becomes present in our experience. And in order to detect it — we first need to open ourselves to the possibility that it might be present.
So why exactly is the ego-driven motivation unhealthy?
We tend to see the pursuit of personal growth as something that is inherently healthy and beneficial. After all, we are establishing helpful habits and developing traits of personality, which — we believe — serve us. The obvious conclusion: this is healthy because it reduces your suffering.
But what if, by clinging too much to your beliefs about what serves you, you are actually creating more suffering in the long run? According to my experience, this is possible. Here are three examples of “wrong turns” that I took on my path when I didn’t realise that my motivation to grow was ego-driven.
So the question remains: how to (1)cultivate personal growth while (2)maintaining the benefits that derive from it, and at the same time (3)abandoning the ego which steers the whole process?
Once again, I look into the Buddhist tradition — and I discover the way of Buddha. The Middle Way.
Some 2500 years ago, after experimenting with ascetic practices — such as starving himself close to death — Buddha dropped the idea of tormenting himself. He didn’t find it useful in discovering any profound truths.
This is how Buddha formulated the concept of what is now called “The Middle Way”. The core of it is very close to the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean, which is all about finding the sweet spot between two extremes. Because, as Aristotle said:
So how does The Middle Way translate into pursuing selfless personal growth? Well, it is exactly about that: finding the golden mean between two extremes.
In a nutshell, the viewpoint is that you are responsible for the way you experience life — but not guilty of it. In any given moment, you are neither a helpless victim nor the sole creator of your experience.
You are the sweet spot between the two. How is that?
For one thing, you cannot be a helpless victim because, as a human, you always have a choice of how you respond to the situation. This is thanks to all the cognitive functions of your brain and the advanced consciousness.
This notion of response-ability is very present in the coaching culture, which builds on concepts such as “you create your own reality” or “if you can dream it, you can do it”.
But an equally important component of The Middle Way is the realisation that you also don’t have absolutely free will in any given moment. This is because of your past karma (which can be, in this context, understood as “conditioning”), which is with you at any point in life — and inevitably affects your thoughts, words and deeds.
You can, of course, work through this conditioning over time — but in the present moment, the conditioning is what it is. You should accept it as a valid factor in creating your current experience.
I want to draw your attention especially to this latter component of The Middle Way — because I have a feeling that there is an imbalance in the mainstream understanding of personal growth. An imbalance that highlights the “you can become anything you want” part, while neglecting the “your unique karma/conditioning affects you at any given moment” one.
Embracing the “karma part” means something that we are not quite good at yet: letting go of controlling our experience. Dropping the habits of judgment and comparison, in the name of realising what is happening in the present moment. Maintaining the intention — but abandoning the attachment to any particular outcomes as indicators of “success”.
These are the necessary parts of selfless personal growth.
What I find very inspiring is the distinction between personal growth and personal development that Miisa from Driven Woman makes in her blog post.
She understands personal development as something we are trying to have control over. A linear process that is supposed to take us from A to B in pursuing personal goals. A pre-designed algorithm applied meticulously to transform ourselves in a very specific way.
This might even be possible — but how limiting! What she encourages instead is “wild” personal growth — a journey in which many aspects are beyond your control, and often beyond understanding. It means letting life do the work while remaining attentive and open to learning from what is happening in each moment.
This is how The Middle Way can be applied in practice. You do your best, but also accept that not everything is up to you — even in the realm of personal growth.
So you make an effort not to react with aggression when a co-worker is accusing you of losing important papers. You exercise empathy for other drivers on the road, even if the most polite term you can find to describe them is “assholes”. You try to establish a routine of going to the gym three times a week — just as you vowed when setting your New Year’s resolutions.
But you also forgive yourself for making that rude comment at the end of a workday during which everything seemed to have gone wrong.
You remember how as a child you regularly witnessed your father screaming at other drivers as if it was a pleasure for him. You acknowledge that this shaped your own reactions, which are now difficult to transform.
You also don’t punish yourself for choosing Netflix over treadmill one day. Because this punishment is exactly what would create suffering — much more so than skipping the gym itself.
Can you walk The Middle Way?
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How To Make Sure Your Personal Growth Is Not Manipulated By Your Ego
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