How Ego Can Get in the Way of Your Career (and Life)
You’re Fired! Career change often happens to people in an abrupt way—there is an event such as a termination or layoff. The change event itself is momentary, usually lasting an hour to a day. But it is the internal process of adjusting to change, dealing with shocked emotions, and managing our way forward—transition—that determines how long it takes to move on to what is next.
Consider three situations of relatively major career change and transition:
Involuntary change brought about by market conditions: A former professor with a Ph.D. whose appointment as a “visiting professor” ended one year ago. He can’t find stable academic positions due to the oversupply of Ph.D.s and U.S. universities' increasing practice of reducing labor costs by hiring adjuncts (temporary, non-benefitted) versus tenure-track (permanent). Having left all he has ever known of the intellectual life in the academy, he is facing an uncertain, unmapped future in sectors he knows little about such as nonprofits, media companies or even the gig economy. "I'm certainly frustrated by my situation," he says. "I know I have skills that would be valuable to various organizations, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to even get a foot in the door or get someone to take me seriously." At the moment, he certainly feels diminished and unsure of his value.
Change in political administration: For eight years a former attorney played a role in nearly all of a city's critical decisions and accomplishments across the spectrum of municipal issues, ultimately directing a major bureau. As often happens with shifting political winds, he was one of the talented people ousted when a new leader was elected, and he believed his reputation was damaged as well. Years later, he still feels dazed, defeated and under-employed by the change; he wonders if he could possibly rebound into the public sector or will have to re-invent himself and look further afield to a new role and industry.
Voluntary change to retirement. In the situation of a retiring counselor, change was brought about by choice—she’s “of age” and has saved enough to quit working full time. However, she feels uncertain and troubled about the impact of leaving a structured life and how her sense of identity and fulfillment may change. A seemingly celebrated event, retirement, can be stressful because not just one but many transitions are happening at the same time.
In all three, the familiar scaffolding of one’s life seems not as secure and dependable, which can trigger feelings of insecurity, disconnection and low self-confidence. At the mental level, thinking errors can be partly to blame—for instance, why can’t things stay relatively the same? Appropriately, this thinking error is called status quo bias!
More than thinking errors, however, it is our wounded egos and fractured emotions that impede moving through this transition cycle in a timely way. To the extent one identifies to an excessive degree with a prior role and all that one has built him or herself up to be—college professor, city bureau director, counselor, etc.—it makes it all the harder to move through transition into something new. Over-identifying with a role points up the larger trap created by identifying with one’s ego--basically believing yourself to be something at the level of form — a thought form, emotional form or physical form.
In brief, the ego is that part of our consciousness that feels the need to be special. It’s that part of us that’s always comparing what we have to others, and either seeks approval (if there is a moment where you feel superior to others—that’s ego), or feels lacking somehow (is there a moment where you feel inferior to others—that too is ego). It can be humbling to realize our ego has been running the show and tying our self-worth to job titles, possessions and other false measures of status.
Sometimes a job loss can trigger what’s termed an “ego death.” It can be painful to recognize that we are not who we thought we were and let the false self fall away. “At the moment when there’s nothing more to lose, the Ego breaks open—and then we see who we are behind who we thought we were.” (Ram Dass)In the place of ego preoccupation, we might begin to search for more depth in life than just being a counselor or a bureaucrat, and explore how to go about career in a more conscious way. Clients may ask big questions such as “what is my purpose?” “what is the meaning of life?” and “how can I live a more fulfilled life?”
Such searching questions are prompted by the awareness that something profound is missing in life, and the challenge then becomes to live those questions. For help, you might share your feelings, and challenges in transition, with trusted others; also, it can be helpful to write in a journal about what you want to be. In this way we discover the axiom of a wise psychologist, that a healthy psychological self and growth through transition is about “staying in relationship with oneself, with others, and with the world.” (Carol Gilligan)The change of job loss requires a transition process of emotional self-care and a restructuring of activities to get re-employed. At the same time, it can be an opportunity to reflect on what really matters and see that perhaps we have gotten lost in ego (we are not our jobs or our accomplishments).To check back in with the PhD professor, how has he incorporated these insights about ego? The first step was to admit that a job as a professor at a university is not sustainable, and that he needed to start over. He found his ego was initially reluctant to let go of that vaunted identity—after all, academia is called the life of the mind! However, as he started to take control of the situation and actively explore new options through research and networking, he began to feel better about new possibilities.
For the soon-to-retire counselor, she saw that her work equated to a very structured life, and after leaving her practice it would take time to get a new life. She had natural worries about maintaining or even improving her health in retirement. A larger factor was that much of her identity had been tied up in helping people, so it was a gradual process to dis-identify from the role. At the same time, she realized she still enjoyed helping and giving back, so she vowed to volunteer with several nonprofits.
Losing a job does not actually change who we are, although it can feel that way at times. It can be helpful to realize that what drives those unreal feelings is one’s ego, and seeing the excesses of the ego for what they are is really the first step to change your career direction and find greater life fulfillment. In the process, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk, offers a deceptively simple approach for transcending ego during transition: “Smile, breathe, and go slowly.”