Ego is a word that is being discussed more often these days. Ego can mean different things to different people. From a neuroscience standpoint, I define it as formed by the area of our brains that form “autobiographical memory”. It is the story of “who we think we are”.  Our sense of identity I call the “Mental Me”.

Who we think we are is a story based on perception and our interpretation of experience that we have as we evolve from childhood throughout our lives. I say perception and interpretation, as it is not what happens to you, as much as it is HOW you interpret the meaning of the events.

Based on the meaning you assign, particularly in early childhood before the age of seven, you start to behave, or shape your personality to help you to feel safe. For example, when I was a young child, due to my position in my family, I often felt unnoticed and “not good enough”.

So I went out of my way to be a “pleaser” personality. Notice within the word personality is “persona” which means, “mask”. When I became a teen-ager, due to my environmental circumstances, I changed my personality to more of an aggressive “warrior” to adapt and feel safe. As adults, we wear many masks based on our environment.

We have a persona for work, for play, for parenting and often for when we are with close friends. This is all fine, however, if you think you ARE these roles and versions of yourself that you present to others, you can start to box yourself into thinking that you are “just the way you are”. Actually, we can consciously choose to adjust these self-defining roles if they limit us by realizing that some parts of our personality were formed by the logic of a three-year-old!

Until I understood this, I used to behave in ways that were no longer serving me in my present circumstances as an adult. Believing I’m not good enough was directly connected to ego “storytelling” formed in my early childhood. At the time, it was the best I could come up with to adapt to my world.

However, the more aware we become that we, our “spirit self”, what quantum physics would call “The Observer” or “consciousness”, is not the ego’s version of who we think we are, the more empowered we can become. When we realize that we are more than our thoughts about our life experiences, we can learn how to release the cellular memory from our body’s cells and re-create consciously a more empowering version of how we present ourselves to the world as “characters” on the stage of life.

Ego presents “Enormous Growth Opportunities” when understood from this point of view. Have you noticed that your personality is subject to change?  It is really emowering to be able to heal those parts of yourself that are holding you back from living the best version of your life that you can create for yourself.  Consider updating your “storytelling ego” and re-write who you “think you are” in a way that expands your life instead of keeping you constricted, stressed and playing small.  Empowerment really is an “inside job”!

Tags: Confidence, Ego, Empowerment, Self-Esteem, Self-Mastery

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Ego. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.