Often ego is not brash Narcissism, rather simpler and quieter in our personal struggle between our own value and self-worth. While others grapple with their value and self-worth amid everyone’s past experiences, life lessons, hard knocks, baggage, stinking thinking, false beliefs, and genuine effort to solve problems the best we know how. The more we are aware of our ego, we can more quickly recognize when we are falling in an ego ditch.
It is important to be constantly learning, growing, and developing ourselves. Ironically, the ego often develops at the same time. Therefore, leaders must constantly practice humility, self-awareness, and personal reflection, ensuring they are in service of others more than self, working through their ego issues and ditches to use their ego for positive advancement rather than personal and naively immature conflict. Ego can be sneaky and intertwines itself in our self-talk. This is also why so many leaders have coaches and mentors to be a checks and balance and sounding board.
Keep working to increase yourself awareness – your ego might tell you that you don’t need to, and then you will know exactly what we are talking about (the deception of the ego). Until we die there is always room for growth and development.