Chapter 25.
Feed Your Healthy Ego

Learning to be a leader is the same process as learning to be an integrated and healthy person.

—Warren Bennis

High self-esteem is our birthright. It is the core spirit inside of us. We do not need to pass a battery of humiliating tests to attain it. We need only to drop the thinking that prevents it. We need to get out of its way and let it shine, in ourselves and in others.

Masterful, artful, spirited leadership has ways of bringing out the best and the highest expression of self-esteem in others.

But it starts at home with me. If I’m a leader, it starts with my own self-confidence. We human beings find it easier to follow self-confident people. We are quicker to become enrolled in a project when the person enrolling us is self-confident.

Most managers today don’t take time to raise their own self-esteem and get centered in their personal pride of achievement. They spend too much time worrying about how they are being perceived, which results in insecurity and low self-esteem.

Nathaniel Branden, in his powerful book Self-Esteem at Work (Jossey-Bass, First Edition, 1998), says it this way:

A person who feels undeserving of achievement and success is unlikely to ignite high aspirations in others. Nor can leaders draw forth the best in others if their primary need, arising from their insecurities, is to prove themselves right and others wrong, in which case their relationship to others is not inspirational but adversarial. It is a fallacy to say that a great leader should be egoless. A leader needs an ego sufficiently healthy that it does not perceive itself as on trial in every encounter—is not operating out of anxiety and defensiveness—so that the leader is free to be task and results-oriented, not oriented toward self-aggrandizement or self-protection.

A healthy ego asks: What needs to be done? An insecure ego asks: How do I avoid looking bad?

Build your inner strength by doing what needs to be done and then moving to the next thing that needs to be done. The less you focus on how you’re coming across, the better you’ll come across.