No, I do not mean that your potential is your problem. I do mean that a promise you have made to yourself—a promise you may not even be aware that you have made that actually limits your potential—can be exactly your problem.
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What Is a Promise?
From Merriam-Webster: A promise is “a declaration that one will do or refrain from doing something specified.”
This definition doesn’t say whether the “something specified” is declared out loud nor whether the one making a promise is even aware that a declaration of intent is being made.
As only one example, I did not realize until long after big damage was done that I had made a promise to myself to maintain emotional composure no matter what.
So, when I was in the ER with not yet diagnosed flesh eating disease and they kept sending me home, I should have thrown a fiery fit and refused to budge, but kept my promise to myself to be composed and cooperative instead.
Had I broken this promise to myself, I would not have a mark on me today, could have avoided the 7 weeks in the hospital, 10 trips to the OR, the $397,000 the healthcare system spent on my care…you get the idea.
Another personal example is that my father had made a promise to himself that he would honor his mother’s deathbed wish that he would take care of his father and the family business. This promise was made before my father had a family of his own.
Since my grandfather’s house was attached to our factory, my father’s way of keeping the promise to himself, to be a good son, was to go to the shop every day at 5am and come home at 10pm, except on Sundays when he came home at noon.
Had he ever consciously reexamined the extent and cost of how he honored this promise to himself, he might have remained alive to continue taking good care of his father, the business, and his own wife and children as well.
I see this in my practice over and over again: The one who made a promise to himself that he will never answer to anyone but himself, and is struggling financially while refusing offers of employment that could help him fund the new business he is trying to build.
Conversely, there is the one who remains employed in a toxic environment because, even though she is in good shape to freelance, she made a promise to never be out there on her own.
Then there is the one who promised herself she would do something extraordinary in life, making it difficult to enjoy and appreciate life’s simple, ordinary, everyday pleasures, although she is working on this and making good strides. It is possible to do both.
There are many other examples and in every one of them I am seeing the Ego involved, so let’s talk about that.
What is The Ego?
Mindvalley’s, Irina Yugay puts is succinctly when she says: “In day-to-day terms, ego is your personality and your identity. It is what you think of yourself.” Yugay discusses the difference between Big Ego (inflated, dysfunctional sense of self) and Ego Strength (realistic, stable, and able sense of self) — and whether we would do well to transcend Ego altogether for a universal consciousness that needs no Ego.
Maybe someday, who knows, but the Ego has been around for a long time, and probably not going away entirely anytime soon.
Would you believe I still have my Psych 101 textbook. So from Introduction to Psychology (6th edition, p.375), and in Freudian terms: “The Ego….plans how to achieve satisfaction….is essentially the “executive” of the personality because it decides what actions are appropriate.”
So, if a person is hungry, Ego decides when to eat what, based on real world constraints and opportunities, whether and when the appropriate conditions in the environment are found.
Okay, so there’s the problem right there. I’m just starting to think more about promises made and broken myself. But from what I can see so far, the problem is the single promise we make to let Ego decide.
I’ve heard clients say outright that this part of themselves, in charge of strategy, has gotten them where they are.
That may be true, but their deference to Ego may also be the reason they are having trouble going any further.
How bossy. Ego, running, sometimes ruining, our lives the way that it does. And we let it.
Seems to me, Ego could make suggestions, without being completely in charge.
And, in all fairness to Ego, if it didn’t get the memo that things have changed, that maybe you’ve grown and changed, that maybe your needs and interests are different now, that maybe the old strategy needs some tweaking, how is Ego supposed to know?
How is Ego supposed to know that you are the grown-up in the room now, and you got this from here?
In other words, how is Ego supposed to know —until we know ourselves—that the promise we made to Ego about who’s in charge of our lives—has to be broken or at least revised.
What is Your Promise to Your Ego?
In an earlier post, I talked about “The 5 Why’s.” Here is an excerpt:
Organizational Politics: Theory and Practice, Practice, Practice… is a training program I first designed and delivered at Harvard Medical School. One of the program’s exercises is the 5 Why’s, credited to Toyota, but dating back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The idea is that asking “why” after the answer to the first question, and then asking “why” after each subsequent answer, will lead us to a root cause understanding of who we are and why we do what we do – or not. Here below is a case example**
Case Illustration: 5 Why’s and the Sleepy, Grumpy CEO
Q1: Why does it bother me so much that my adversary is not on board?
A1: Because I am wasting so much energy trying to bring him on board.
Q2: Why do I need to stop wasting energy trying to bring him on board?
A2: Because I could use that energy to move the project along. (Now the very grumpy CEO is getting annoyed with what seem like stupid questions but persists.)
Q3: Why do I need to move the project along?
A3: To fulfill the organization’s mission.
Q4: Why do I need to fulfill the organization’s mission?
A4: To make everyone happy, even though I know that’s not possible.
Q5: Why do you need to make everyone happy?
A5: So I can feel like a good person.
Time after time, person after person, regardless of age and gender, no matter how high up the organizational ladder – the answers were the same. Everyone wanted to be, to feel, and to be seen as a good person.
After all, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation when the modern human brain was forming, if we did not have a good reputation, we and our kin would not get fed and would be left to die.
So ‘looking good’ matters. And though we may each define our own goodness differently, and differently over time, I believe that we have each “specified something” with Ego too often in charge.
If you want to know what promise you may need to break or revise, try asking yourself: What do I pride myself on the most?
And, then ask yourself: Who is the boss? Is it you or Ego in charge of implementation in your life?
Practice, practice, practice… See what happens, and let us know.
Warm wishes,
Madelaine
Photo by Pexels Marcus Winkler
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