Healthy Ego Work: Edit Your Experiences

What is one messy experience you keep repeating?

Perhaps it’s tolerating a job that is incongruent with the career you hoped to create for yourself… 

Perhaps it’s some unproductive habit that keeps pushing out your timeline to make a big change…

Some other examples…

Consistently working 2x harder than your closest colleagues.

Chronically avoiding difficult conversations with your people.

Staying in a job that no longer inspires you, or lacks upward potential.

The process of editing your experiences starts simply.

Step 1: Choose one experience to focus on.

Step 2: Start by asking yourself: 

• How does this experience make me feel?

• Can I name the emotion?

If you want some help naming the emotion, this EQ resource is really useful.

Step 3: If you can name the emotion, ask yourself: 

• If I keep repeating this experience, what am I even more inclined to believe about myself?

Step 4: If you find that the experience-emotion-belief cycle is undermining your ego, ask yourself:  

• What kind of experience(s) would support me in becoming the leader I aspire to be, for myself and my people?

• What do 2-3 of those experiences look like?

Step 5: Once you picture those different experiences, ask yourself:  

• Am I willing to give myself one of those experiences?  

  Yes, one is enough plenty to start with!

Step 6: Give yourself that experience. Do it in the moment or put it on your calendar in the next week* and notice what new relationships and beliefs become available to you as a result.

 By setting a date and time in the near future you make the new experience ‘stickier.’ And if you need extra motivation, ask a colleague or loved one for some and/or accountability!

COACH’S NOTE: If giving yourself that different experience feels like a BIG or ‘selfish’ step, I strongly recommend you break it in to smaller, simpler parts. Make it bite sized!