Organizations are really microcosms of the larger world we inhabit; with a dense matrix and complicated equations. We bring our individual personas cloaked in a professional garb into the work space. We enmesh our personal attributes, values and inclinations with the organizational culture and ethos. Those organizations that create an atmosphere of harmony between the values of the individual and the company always turn out to be successful enterprises. And those where dissonance rules the roost, not only stay nothing more than revolving doors for the employees but also perform miserably in the financial terms appearing poor in their business standing.

But organizations are, after all, a collective and sum total of its employees. Good organizations comprise of a great set of employees who bring in their refined value system. These employees put their positive energy in sync with the larger organizational principles and goals for overall success, both for themselves and the companies they represent.

There actually exist simple tenets that, if abided by, can turn us into outstanding professionals; regardless of internal push and external pulls.

In an earlier article we looked at Rule #1 for becoming exceptional professionals. Let us talk about another simple credo to adhere to for bringing out the best in us – it urges you to get the better of your ego and scale up towards actualizing your true worth.

Yes, a simple yet profound rule – Kill your Ego!

Okay, tell me quickly who is the master of your mind? YOU in all your wise consciousness that Jung would be proud of or a negatively-driven Ego being nurtured by an inferiority complex in a make-believe world that even Freud would be ashamed of!

If you want to visualize what is Ego then picture this - You are sitting atop a giant Redwood tree with a saw in your hand desperately trying hard to halve the branch you are perched on. Which side are you sitting on? Yeah, you got it right – the side that is going to fall hard with the biggest thud on solid ground. That is Ego and this is what it does to you.

So, what is the kind of cross you bear, if you nurture your Ego?

  1. To cradle an Ego is like nursing a sore that never heals. In a work environment, the strikes you make and the wounds you receive are in multitude given the number of people you need to work in unison with.
  2. If you have a big, misplaced Ego then you have a passion for bringing everybody around you down, including yourself.
  3. An Ego makes a Boss turn a workplace into hell and himself into the Satan's sentinel.
  4. The Ego acts as an impediment in your road to greater learning and path to success.
  5. Ego blinds you from reality, deafens you against voices of reason and caution, immunes you against the touch of humaneness in you and makes you utter things your sane mind would never think of saying. Outside the informality of your house and into the formal world of work, this is nothing but hara-kiri.
  6. When you act out under the influence of Ego, you create such a spectacle that the fence sitters and bystanders find the show disdainfully entertaining. The blood is on your shirt and you are not even cheered for it, let alone respected or sympathized with.
  7. Ego has been the Achilles' heel of many men of might and has engineered their shameful fall into the deep gorge of disgrace and anonymity.
  8. The Ego cuts you off from the team, destroys the spirit of common goals and vision and turns you into that bad patch that must be removed if beyond rectification.
  9. It is Ego that makes you stick with your wrong and not admit a mistake. It shackles you such that prospects of growth are more like a grind. A work day appears full of problems that pull you down rather than filled with passion for excellence and superlative performance.
  10. The Ego deviously designs to hold you back into a rut when an open, clear, fair, wise mind would take you to greater heights of reward, recognition and positive responses from all around you.

"The ego may have its uses but it should not be allowed to be the boss. To be alive is to fall into the ego trap. The trick is to trick the ego into serving something bigger than itself," shared Rohini Majumdar, a wise acquaintance and a follower of yoga and meditation.

Ego is such an anti-trait that it has the propensity to demonize us, squash all good sense, destroy and denigrate our true personality and turn us into a laughing stock to the repugnant pleasure of others.

Therefore, if you must get violent at some stage in your life, then you must pick up the sharpest knife of reason & rationality and kill your Ego!

With the onset of 2017, do pay heed to these two rules and make a resounding success out of the mainstay in your life.

L. Aruna Dhir

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