How to Defeat Your Ego and Find Yourself

Hey everybody, I have got a great video for you this week. It’s gonna blow your mind. Do you remember when you first saw ‘Sixth Sense’ or ‘The Matrix’ and you were just like “Whoa!”, it freaked you right out? Well, that’s what I’m gonna do this week because I’m gonna tell you who you are, and not in some kind of sci-fi wicked way. Because I am a guy grounded in science, you may think this is way too spiritual, but in fact, it’s the real deal, who you really are. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Okay, let’s get ready to be freaked out, blow your minds. All the time that you live and are conscious, like when you’re awake, you are busy thinking. That’s what the mind does, you think and think and think. I’m gonna refer to the thinking part of our brain as your mind. Your mind, as it’s doing all this amazing thinking, is telling these narratives of who you are. It’s almost like having a play-by-play commentator talking about your life as though somehow it’s observing you separately, and it tells this narrative, the story of your life, and it becomes our very identity. It’s who we think we are.

I say to myself, “Look, I’m Paul. That’s my name. I’m 52 years old and I’m Canadian born. I’m living in this beautiful city. I feel safe,” or whatever the narrative I’m telling right now, that’s who I think I am. But that’s not really true. That’s simply some facts about this body that’s been here around the trips around the planet a certain number of times. But they’re all contrived in my mind, and my mind is just a tool. It’s like any other part of my evolutionary background. I’ve evolved to have this amazing thinking brain and it’s very, very useful and I’m grateful for it. But I’ve also evolved to stand upright and walk on two legs and I’ve got hands that can carry things. If I’m carrying boxes from one place to another, do I see my identity as a body that carries things? No, we don’t do that. It’s more things in our mind about who we tell ourselves that we are that we identify as being me.

“I’m Paul and I have these certain characteristics and I do these certain activities and I am this way or that way. I have these aspects of my personality and that’s who I think I am.” That’s my personality, that’s my ego, and I can do great things to defend that ego because I start thinking it’s pretty important. It’s who I am. But if we see the ego, the mind, the thinking mind as a similarly constructed evolutionary reality of the homo sapien species, then we can start to see that the mind is simply a useful tool. One that’s done extraordinarily good things for human beings in terms of our survival. But I am no more my mind than I am my opposable thumb or my upright walking, that’s not who I am.

Your mind has this wonderful capacity to develop concepts, to analyze things, to consider my relationships, to problem-solve for something in the future. It’s wonderful, but it’s just a tool like walking and opposable thumbs and all that kind of thing. So, we are essentially chimpanzees with big brains. That’s what we are as a species. But the part that’s who you are, who you really are, is the consciousness behind those thoughts. It’s the observation or the observer behind the mind, and that’s who you really are. Most of the time, because the narrative of our internal voices, our mind, is so loud and so always present, we’re rarely aware that it’s the observer that’s actually watching the game. The game which includes the thoughts in my mind. When we start to see that observer as separate from the thinker, then we start to get outside of this identity that’s tied up with our egos. That’s when we have the capacity to see who we really are: the conscious awareness, the observer, that’s who you really are.

The trouble, of course, is that because our minds are so busy and we perceive our world through our mind, we often, in fact 99% of the time, don’t differentiate between the observer and the mind. We think the mind is the mind, is the mind, and the mind is the ego, and that’s who I am. “I’m whatever I’m thinking in my mind. I feel this way, I think this way, I think that that guy’s a jerk because he cut me off in traffic and I’m angry about it, that’s who I am.” But we’re not that thing, that person, that construct. We’re the observer. When we can differentiate between those two things, wow, that’s when things open up, that’s when opportunity arises, that’s when freedom comes about. That freedom is really about seeing myself as separate from my ego, seeing myself as separate from my thoughts, these constructions of this identity. When we can get really clear about this, then these relationship patterns or repeat hurts and wounds that we suffer, that come of our ego and come from our defense of this sense of identity that we have, we can start seeing it with some objectivity and start going “Oh yeah, I’m not the angry person because I got mad at that driver. In fact, as I see anger arise, I might be able to see and go, that’s not who I am. In a moment, I’m going to get a text from my lover or my friend saying what a great intention they have for something we’re going to do later in the day, and then am I those thoughts and feelings? Did I change identities? Not at all, I’m just the observer. You are just the observer, that’s who you really are.”

Enjoy the freedom that comes in being the person, the being, the presence, that can be consciously aware of the ego at work. Powerful stuff, super woo-woo, but totally grounded in science. Hey, if you like this kind of content, click the subscribe button somewhere on this page and you’ll get a new video every Sunday morning. Click the like button and have a great day. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching, bye for now.