What Stories Does Your Ego Tell You?

Which of Them Are Worth Believing?

Recently, I watched a roundtable for composers of this year’s Oscar nominations for best song. One songwriter was a particularly prolific composer in her 30s named Julia Michaels who’s worked as a professional songwriter since the age of 16. She’s written songs for film, television and well known pop stars, resulting in her winning various music awards throughout her career. But to watch her being praised for her accomplishments it was very clear that she had an absolute inability to receive the accolades bestowed upon her. She was admittedly adorable, as she blushed and squirmed and insisted on moving on to other topics. Anything to get the spotlight off her and to remain in the background where she apparently felt more at ease.

Another artist honed in on her, however, and reminded her that young girls are watching and she was a potential role model for some youngsters who might aspire to be like her. She attempted to bolster Julia’s confidence and redirect her discomfort toward acceptance of her apparent giftedness. This only made the discomfort worse because not only were her accomplishments being highlighted, now her psyche had a spotlight thrown on it. She did her best to weather the suggestions and compliments coming her way as she struggled to get everyone to talk about something else.

I also am incapable of gracefully receiving praise. Women, especially, are expected to be so many contradictory things: Be the best but don’t ruffle other people’s feathers, be good but be nice, look good but be humble about it (cue America Ferrera’s speech from Barbie). Along with these gender ideals there are also cultural ones that come into play in how we learn to express our talents and abilities.

In my memory of myself as a child I remember being very self directed, strong willed, and ran around the schoolyard with a determination that was undeterred by any kind of self reflection or self doubt. I was simply a kid high on being a kid, but only to a certain age. By age ten, something was shifting.

Due to many factors, there was an increasing feeling of discomfort in my own skin. There was worry about saying or doing the wrong thing. The immediacy of being myself was disappearing beneath all the second thoughts, guesses, and uncertainty that would arise when I was around other people. I looked to them to be what I believed they wanted me to be and in so doing I lost the ability to freely be myself.

Compounding the problem was that I was raised in Japanese culture by my Japanese American parents. From them I learned not to stick out. I was reminded that the nail that sticks out will be hammered back down. Don’t toot your own horn. Bragging is unseemly. My own parents weren’t the kind to throw light on their children’s accomplishments. If anything, they downplayed everything my brother and I did. Polite humility is the grease that makes the wheels turn smoothly in Japanese settings. These were the guardrails our parents gave to our developing sense of self.

Of course, I am also American and have been trained by this culture to be direct, to call a spade a spade. Our highly individualistic society idealizes being who you are regardless of what others think. I struggled mightily to inhabit both these cultural ideals in my early adulthood but realized early on that the Japanese traits I learned while young were not helping me in the largely American settings I ventured into as an adult. The problem has always been that these two contradictory cultural dictates are like oil and water and don’t mix well together, but both exist inside me. This makes a single cohesive version of myself nearly impossible.

This has particularly hindered me when it comes to putting my own skills and talents out into the world and there is a deep seated wish to get myself back to the playground to run wild in my own skin regardless of who’s watching.

For Julia, I can’t truly know why she felt such extreme discomfort in receiving praise. My guess is that she is probably an introvert and humility was part of the family dynamic she grew up with.

And this made me think that maybe underneath the blushing and struggling to accept someone else singing her praise was a full awareness of the fact that she is very good at what she does. There are numerous statues sitting in her house that tell her so. How difficult is it, and it seems just one step forward, to remove that cloak of invisibility that gives her so much comfort and allow herself to be fully seen, acomplishments included, by moving into the spotlight with ease and grace?

While this sort of unease in accepting praise can be genuinely attributed to one’s humility, I wonder if in myself something quite the opposite is in play.

In an interview, comedian Phil Wang stated that most comedians were shy. But he believed shyness, for some people, was actually a cowardly way of being egotistical. British actress Penelope Keith says a similar thing where she felt that, “Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.”

This idea somehow makes me feel like I’ve dug beneath the surface of my own outward humility into the terrain of my deeply fragile ego.

Eckart Tolle says this about the inner monologue inside a shy person:

The image I have of myself as a very capable person… If I encounter criticism, the ego immediately will be hurt. So, a shy person would not dare say anything because they’re afraid of ego-loss. Sometimes that’s mistaken for an egoless person, a person who’s very meek. It’s not. Deep down, inside the shy person… there’s the desire, the unexpressed desire, to be superior.

It appears that on one side of the ego spectrum we can be loud and direct about our need for the limelight or on the other end we operate with an ego seemingly so quiet that we don’t have one. But no matter how silent someone’s ego may appear, it exists. For that person the need for recognition is sometimes met in a more stealth-like manner.

Humanist psychologist, Scott Barry Kaufman, describes in a Scientific American article what a healthy ego (which he calls a quiet ego) looks like:

In my own research, I found a zero relationship between having a quiet ego and scores on a measure of “self-sacrificing self-enhancement”, which is actually a facet of narcissism. Self-sacrificing self-enhancement is measured by items such as:

Sacrificing for others makes me the better person.

I try to show what a good person I am through my sacrifices.

I like to have friends who rely on me because it makes me feel important.

I feel important when others rely on me.

This suggests that quieting the ego is not about just any sort of other-concern (such as the ego-driven need to appear compassionate). It seems that the quiet ego is related to a genuine concern for the growth and development of self and others…Consistent with prior research, I also found a positive relationship between a quiet ego and self-compassion. It appears then that those with a quiet ego tend to be loving, giving people, but also take care of themselves just as compassionately as they tend to take care of others.

…These results underscore the centrality of growth and balance values to the quiet ego construct, and make clear that quieting the ego does not quiet the self. In fact, I would like to put forward the following equation:

The quieter the ego = The stronger one’s best self emerges

The idea of superiority, winning, and being the biggest ego in the room can exist either consciously or below our awareness. Extreme humility doesn’t necessarily mean a desire for recognition doesn’t exist and can sometimes obscure a strange sort of narcissism.

Making our ego a healthy one appears to include acknowledging our own self regard, one that insists on growth and expansion, but works best when balanced by a compassionate regard for others which includes an authentic desire for their best to come to fruition as well.

All you need to know and observe in yourself is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you. — Eckhart Tolle