This month I want to talk about the importance of overcoming your ego.

What I have found in spending the last few years helping people make changes in their life is that one of the things that most often gets in their way is their sense of self. By sense of self, I mean the importance that they give to themselves which limits them rather than the importance they give to themselves that helps them.

For example, if you take yourself and your problems seriously then you will find yourself struggling a lot. If, on the other hand, you regard yourself as important but you don't take yourself seriously then you will find life much easier and better to experience.

Many people get caught up in making a huge deal about their past and what has happened to them. They describe their lives and their problems as if they were the only people on the planet. By doing so they fail to miss the obvious fact that things are much less significant in the grand scheme of things.

Furthermore, the more you make yourself and your problems seem like huge things, the more you forget to appreciate that this causes problems to become more challenging to solve and every problem becomes bigger because your focus makes it that way.

This is where Ego comes in. The more we perceive ourselves to be more important than others, the more we attempt to prove this to people, hog conversations and act as though we are the only important people around. Unfortunately this is a huge epidemic in the world.

Our planet is full of instances where people attempt to position them above others in terms of status. This could come with people using degrees and doctorates as an attempt to gain validation from others or people starving themselves so they'll be thin like others or even NLPers trying to show off to prove that they are 'better' than others. What is essential to realise is that this is where people get stupid.

Overcoming Your Ego requires you to look at things from a different perspective. You become aware of the fact that status is not the same, nor is it in any way as important as impact. You realise that you can begin to focus on making sure that you do your best for yourself and for others. This means respecting yourself and others and caring about yourself and others but not necessarily taking yourself or others seriously.

It means being able to laugh at yourself, accept your flaws and your attempts and improving as well as accepting that it's less important how high you are in status as it is how much fun you have, how much time you enjoy and how best you treat other people. It really comes down to changing focus from how each act will make you 'seem' a better person towards how each act will make you a better person.