Ego Scooby Snacks

I need to go on a diet. I have been munching on too many snacks. But not anything like cakes or cookies. The snacks I’m talking about are snacks for my ego. Ego Scooby Snacks, as I like to call them.

Ego Scooby Snacks are identity reinforcers. They build up the image of how we want to be perceived by others and ourselves.

Ego Scooby Snacks come in many different flavors. They range from obvious acts of self-promotion to much more subtle behaviors. Examples include:

• Casually name-dropping an important person or a company who is interested in working with me

• Adjusting the placement of my art so that it can be more easily seen before a group of friends comes over

• Working an extra two hours at night even though I’m exhausted and it’s not really necessary just so I can feel productive

• Apologizing for something I’m not sorry for

• Reading books or watching movies so that I can teach others about them or tell others that I completed them

• Stumbling over my words after someone gives me a compliment because I am trying to be modest

• Checking my brokerage account more times than is necessary

• Wearing luxury items to reinforce my sense of taste or my ability to afford something

• Spending three hours organizing my closets

• Checking email constantly when I am expecting good news 

• Exaggerating stories in slight ways way that make me look better

• Using essential oils just because I want to be that kind of person, rather than because of a real conviction

• Asking more people than is necessary for advice to have my decisions and thought processes re-affirmed 

• Going to a cool event because I don’t want to be the person that didn’t go to the event

• Engaging in superficial chit-chat rather than having a hard conversation with the person I know I should have it with

• Traveling to exotic places so that I can be the type of person who travels to exotic places

If you were wondering, these are all autobiographical.

Ego Scooby Snacks are not just actions. They can also manifest as internal thoughts that reinforce our egos. Things like:

• Ruminating on how my lifestyle choices make me special

• Basking in the glory of my humility

• Rehearsing in my mind how I will share my impressive achievements

• Mentally rejecting criticism because I convince myself the other person is envious or not intelligent

Also, all autobiographical. 

The term Scooby Snacks is, of course, in reference to the TV series Scooby-Doo in which the characters Fred, Daphne, and Velma would try to entice Scooby-Doo and Shaggy with biscuits to get over their fears in order to solve mysteries.

Unlike the original Scooby Snacks, Ego Scooby Snacks are tempting us to play into our fears. They are the things we do or think in order to help us feel enough, but the problem is that they don’t satiate us in any real way. They are like artificial sweeteners or refined carbohydrates or fast food that might give us a temporary feeling of satisfaction, but can make us feel bad as soon as the satisfaction wears off and can cause more serious consequences in the long run.

Munching on Ego Scooby Snacks doesn’t mean that we are wrong or bad. Just like eating cookies won’t give us a heart attack. At least not in the short run.

The problem with Ego Scooby Snacks is that we are rarely aware that we are eating them, and they are not beneficial for us if our goal is becoming the best version of ourselves. They divert our attention from our true values and goals. Eating Ego Scooby Snacks entangles us in the game of the ego. We are trying to feel enough, but in fact, they only make the fear of not being enough worse because we are playing into the fear. We are giving oxygen to the fear and developing coping mechanisms that don’t address the fear.

It is a term I often use in my coaching practice to help my clients self-identify behaviors that may be ensnaring them in the ego. 

If you, too, need to wean yourself off Scooby Snacks, then what to do?

The first step, as always, is to develop awareness. Check in with yourself. What am I really up to here? What is my real motivation? Depending on what you discover, it may be helpful to say out loud, I’m having a craving for an Ego Scooby Snack, or I just pigged out on some Ego Scooby Snacks. 

In the example of me compulsively checking email that I shared above, I have become more aware that my real motivation for the compulsion is to feel valuable. When I get an email that a new client wants to work with me or when I immediately respond to an incoming request, I get a “hit” of worth.      

Next, you’ll want to see how the Scooby Snack is getting in the way of the type of person you actually want to be. Who do I want to become, and how is this in opposition to that?

With the email example, I don’t want to be so dependent on and desperate for external validation to feel valuable. I also don’t want to be someone who always prioritizes work and who is always on his laptop. My journey of growth is toward someone who can more easily and gracefully tolerate times when there is a lull in external validation and who strikes a better balance between being responsive to my professional responsibilities and spending time nourishing my inner self and family.

You’ll then want to decide how you want to act. Do I really need to eat the Scooby Snack? Or if you’ve already eaten it, what will I commit to doing next time a similar situation presents itself? 

I have a long way to go, but I have committed to resisting the temptation to check email in certain situations where the compulsion gets in the way of my presence with others, and I have become more disciplined in doing daily practices that are nourishing and don’t involve any interaction with email.

And finally, over time, you’ll develop a “higher taste.” 

I’ve seen myself develop a higher taste when it comes to my travel choices. Throughout my 20s and into my early 30s, I was obsessed with traveling to as many countries as I could possibly get to. In extreme cases, I would go to a country just for two days to say I’d been there. I even had a travel app that I would excitedly update when I stepped foot into a place that kept count of everywhere I had been. These travel experiences no doubt expanded my understanding of the world and myself, opened my mind to different ways of life, and were a lot of fun, but they were largely based in ego because a big part of my motivation was proving my value as an interesting and worldly person who would be admired for the number of stamps on his passport. As my tastes have shifted, I’ve become a lot hungrier for immersive experiences that are meant to help me explore what is underneath the ego and directly connect me with a more authentic version of myself. This has meant more retreats, a lot less moving around, and fewer Ego Scooby Snacks of traveling to new countries just so I can update the country count on my travel app. I don’t know that I’ll ever lose my attraction to globetrotting, but over the last few years, my higher taste has meant a meaningful shift in behavior without it feeling like a sacrifice.

With my email compulsion, I have more of a ways to go before the higher taste of discipline and nourishing practices are more tempting than the compulsion, but I eagerly look forward to getting to a place in my life when I can go an entire weekend without checking email, without it feeling like a sacrifice.  

This last stage, the higher taste, is a key teaching from the Bhagavad-Gita, a sacred text from ancient India. The main speaker of the story, Krishna, tells the protagonist Arjuna that when one experiences a higher spiritual taste, the person will naturally lose interest in lower, materialistic sense gratifications. In other words, when we get the taste for something greater than the ego, we no longer feel tempted to reach into the Ego Scooby Snack cookie jar. 

Developing a higher taste is indicative of a higher level of consciousness. It is the most rewarding way to live because we genuinely feel pulled towards where we are going. As my partner Vipin has articulated, we go from “I should do this” to “I get to do this.” “I should do this” is certainly a central part of the growth process because the death of the ego never comes without resistance, but when we reach the level of “I get to do this,” that’s when we really hit escape velocity with our personal and spiritual growth. 

There is a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that we share in our Upbuild “The Call to Awaken” course that has been on my mind a lot recently:

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

Becoming aware of and choosing not to indulge in Ego Scooby Snacks is about sowing the thoughts, actions, and habits that will lead us to having a character, and ultimately, a destiny more and more aligned with the best version of ourselves, our real selves.

From “It Happened TO Me” to “It Happened FOR Me”

There is somebody who is important to me in my life who is not talking to me. It’s painful. It’s painful because I love him, and I’d really like to have him in my life. It’s also painful because my inner critic strongly believes that I should be able to fix the relationship. Recently, I have put effort into offering space for this person to share his perspective in the hopes that we can find a path forward. These efforts were turned down, and as a result, my resentment began to build. The fact that I felt wronged created the initial resentment, and then the feeling of resentment further convinced me of just how wronged I had been. It was a self-perpetuating cycle that felt impossible to break, especially in the absence of communication.

More recently, I’ve lost hope for reconciliation, at least in the near future. It sucks. The silver lining is that the loss of hope has given me some space to reflect, rather than constantly being in the mode of strategizing how to fix the relationship. This space for reflection led me to ask some deeper questions about what I did and what his experience of me must have been that led him to cut me out of his life. 

It might seem like I should have asked these questions right off the bat. They certainly crossed my mind at points in the process, but it took the pain of being cut off and the helplessness I feel in being unable to mend the relationship, for me to look at these questions in a more honest way. With this introspection came discomfort from seeing some of my ugly tendencies: difficulty loving and being kind to the people closest to me, a self-serving need for control, and a competitive way of relating to people which creates disconnection and can sometimes make others feel small.

It is a wake-up call. These tendencies aren’t new discoveries. In fact, some versions of them were all mentioned on my kindergarten report card and came up consistently in my annual reviews during my time in the corporate world. But the consequences I am facing because of them (broken relationship + pain) are something I have never experienced – I’ve never been cut off.

Because the consequences are severe, they have been a catalyst to learn a bunch of lessons about how I want to be in this world and how I want to relate to others. I am learning that I need to put more energy into being kind to people close to me, such as actively trying to find out about and honor my family members’ preferences, rather than being so focused on my own. I am learning that when I try to control a situation by controlling others, it feels really bad on the other side and has the opposite effect of what I intended. This lesson has been important in my relationship with my partner as we navigate the challenges that come from being first-time parents together and having very different parenting styles. And I am learning that my “innocent” competitive way of relating to others, such as when I make fun of a friend’s sense of direction in a situation where he makes a mistake getting somewhere (which comes from a place of trying to feel superior), isn’t always so innocent because of how it can affect people. 

These lessons might seem straightforward, but just because something is straightforward doesn’t mean that we get it. My partner Hari often likes to quote Aeschylus: “Man must learn by suffering.”

When I got to a place of more tangibly experiencing these lessons, something shifted. The whole question of whether he is wrong or right began to feel less important. The resentment gradually subsided, and it was replaced by a feeling of gratitude not only for the lessons, but also to the person responsible for the lessons. I started to feel gratitude to him for doing something bold that must have felt really awful to do. And gratitude to him for, knowingly or unknowingly, being my teacher.

As humans, we are story-making machines. We are constantly telling ourselves stories about who we are, who other people are, and why our circumstances are as they are. In my example, there is one story that says I was wronged. There is another story that says this situation is a gift. The first story may or may not be true. It could very well be the right decision for him, and I am trying to trust that it is right for both of us in the long run. The second story, the one that says this situation is a gift, might feel overly optimistic, especially when there is pain, but with a little time and space, it has become obvious that it is true. And not only is it true, but it is also a lot more beneficial than the first story because it has the potential to become a catalyst for change.

As I have continued to digest the lessons, the gratitude has grown. These are lessons I need to grapple with in order to live more aligned with my best self. Without them, and without the person who taught me them, I’d have less information and less inspiration. For this reason, I have come to see the situation as something that happened FOR me, rather than something that happened TO me.

Beyond the lessons from this specific situation, there is the meta lesson that the presence of just about everyone we encounter in our life is a gift (with the exception being when we are victims of evil). This is not to say that we should keep challenging people in our life because they teach us stuff, but if we are open to seeing them, there are nuggets of gold for us to mine in every situation and with every person we encounter. The reason this is true is because when we have an experience with someone, we relate to what happened and that person in some way. That experience is never independent of who we are. How we relate to what happened tells us a lot about ourselves and what kind of work we need to do in order to become a better version of ourselves. They are a mirror that we can choose to look at or choose to ignore.

For example, if you get a challenging review from your boss that contains comments from colleagues that you feel are unfair, you might have one story that these colleagues don’t understand your intentions and that it’s in their best interest to disparage you. Instead, what if you tried the perspective that there is a 2% truth in their comments, and that the 2% truth is necessary for you to take the next step in your development? 

Or, if an overweight person were to sit down in the seat next to you a few minutes before takeoff for a five-hour flight, you might tell yourself a certain story about the situation and about who the person is. But what if you tried something different? What if you tried the perspective, however uncomfortable it might feel, that this is an opportunity for you to internally examine the judgments you felt when you first saw the person approaching? And what if you tried opening yourself up and connecting with the person, and then reexamining your preconceptions?

Understanding what story we are telling ourselves gives us the opportunity to see where our egos might be trapping us and holding us back. It gives us the opportunity to zoom out to choose a perspective that might be more aligned with the best version of ourselves and one that is closer to reality. It also gives us the openness to tap into the truth that every person has the potential to be our teacher. And it allows us to appreciate that the most challenging people for us can often teach us deep and impactful lessons because of the intensity of our experiences with them.

This can't be purely an intellectual exercise. It has to be an authentic experience of getting how our story is only one possible story, grappling with the lessons that are available, and then letting it sink in that only this person at this particular moment in time could teach us this particular lesson. 

When we take the time and put in the effort to have this authentic experience, the cliché, “Everyone is my teacher,” stops being such a cliché and becomes a lived experience that has the potential to help us make meaningful shifts in our lives.

Imposter Syndrome

Am I qualified for this role?

This is a question that frequently weighs on me. 

Am I qualified to lead this workshop? Am I qualified to be a managing director? Am I qualified to write this blog post? Am I qualified to make $X per hour? Am I qualified to receive praise from the person who just complimented me? Am I qualified to call myself a good older brother?

This question shows up in my life in big ways and small ways. It shows up when I have a role that is important to me and when I perceive my value in that role as being in doubt.

In receiving some coaching from my partner Rasanath on this topic, I have come to see that my relationship to my roles is a little paradoxical. On one hand, I like having a role. It gives me an identity. It gives me an outlet for my value to be seen.

On the other hand, I live in fear that I may not be able to live up to the role. I fear being exposed as a fraud. 

I want the role. But I don’t want the role. I want the recognition. But I fear not being able to get the recognition.

This contradiction leaves me feeling out of sorts. Underneath the contradiction is a feeling of shame for being so dependent on the validation that comes from having and maintaining the role.

It’s a double dose of shame. Shame for not being good enough at the role. And then shame for being unable to happily live with myself if I didn’t have the role. 

This is imposter syndrome.

Evidence for Being an Imposter

At any given time, I have lots of good evidence for my being an imposter. This evidence might include any number of the following: 

1. I am riding someone else’s coattails

Throughout my 11 years at Goldman Sachs, I had a few bosses who were considered “rainmakers.” In other words, they made tons of money for the firm. The thought that my success was largely due to my being a part of their team, rather than my own ability, made me feel like an imposter.   

And more recently, as a coach at Upbuild, I often feel like “I am where I am” because of the charisma and wisdom of my partners, and all of the relationships they cultivated prior to my joining the organization.

2. They don’t know me well enough to see the truth

I am adaptable. I know how to play to the crowd and play to my strengths. This makes me doubt whether others know the real me. I assume people can’t perceive all of my flaws, or at the very least, can’t perceive the extent of my flaws. If they could see my flaws more fully, I assume they wouldn’t be supportive of my maintaining the role. 

3. It’s not worth it for them to rock the boat by giving me negative feedback or getting rid of me

When people accept me in my role or give me positive feedback, I often chalk it up to that being the path of least resistance for that person; maybe they want to avoid having a difficult conversation or maybe it’s difficult to get someone else for my role (the sunk cost is high). I sometimes feel this way in my marriage. That my wife might be better off without me, but the hassle of separating from me is too high.

4. I have insufficient training or domain expertise

In my time at Goldman, when I looked around at other traders, I never felt “quantitative” or “technical” enough to lay claim to the role of derivatives trader. In my role at Upbuild, I coach a handful of founders and leaders of startups, some of whom are older than me. The idea of a coach who is older and wiser and has already succeeded at whatever the client is doing makes me feel like an imposter. 

The definition of imposter syndrome (from Oxford) is “the persistent inability to believe that one's success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one's own efforts or skills.” Therefore, the predominant method for overcoming imposter syndrome, as espoused by the self-help world, is to convince yourself that you are worthy of your roles. Just give yourself lots of pep talks about how you deserve to be where you are, and eventually you will believe it, and then the imposter syndrome will go away. 

The problem with this approach is the rather large detail that we don’t believe it, which is the reason we are feeling imposter syndrome in the first place. 

While most of us know emotionally what imposter syndrome feels like, have we ever dug a little deeper to ask ourselves the question: What am I an imposter to?

Consciously or unconsciously, we have an idea of who we think we should be. This identity is often informed by individuals who have been successful in the arena we are competing in AND who are similar enough to us that we consider them within reach. 

For example, if we are working in a product team at a tech company, this identity might be informed by successful product managers at other tech companies, co-workers at our company whom we deem to be a few steps ahead, people of the same age and from the same university who have become successful in tech, or tech bloggers we follow on LinkedIn.

We usually look for people who have similar demographics and ambitions. This is why most of us don’t feel threatened by Steve Jobs’ success but can be sent into a tailspin when we see on social media that a major news outlet wrote a story about our college friend's professional success.

This is not to say that we don’t also base our identity of who we think we should be on celebrities. It’s just that it can feel a little more acceptable (for some of us) not to be famous. Also, as Rasanath points out in this Upbuild podcast on imposter syndrome, most people will never admit to trying to be Steve Jobs because of the stigma that comes with having such a grand vision, but when we look underneath the surface, expectations like these exist. It’s a little cringeworthy to admit this, but I have some notion of myself as part Tim Ferris, part Brene Brown, and part Tony Robbins. 

No wonder we feel like imposters. Because we are. We are imposters to who we think we should be.  

Working with Imposter Syndrome

The effects of getting stuck in imposter syndrome are well known: anxiety, guilt, envy, disconnection from others, less intimacy, less risk taking, procrastination, overpreparation, and prioritizing the wrong things. It is also a rather unpleasant feeling, like walking around with rocks in your shoes. 

So, if pounding your chest and winking at yourself in the mirror doesn’t work, what can we do about it? 

The key is to remove the ego. This, of course, is not such a simple task and can feel abstract as a goal. So, to get more concrete, what we can do, as my partner Vipin highlights in that same podcast, is do the work of separating the truths from the distortions. Within the various pieces of evidence that we have for being an imposter, there are truths (facts or beliefs based in reality) and there are distortions (beliefs that are based on misrepresentations or exaggerations of the truth).

For example, underneath the thought that “I am riding someone else’s coattails,” there is the truth that in every aspect of life, in all circumstances, we are benefitting from and dependent on the success and contributions of others. We would not be where we are if it were not for our associations. Rather than using that as evidence of our unworthiness (a distortion), we need to take time to orient towards the gratitude we feel for those contributions (even if we can’t immediately feel that gratitude) and be generous in our acknowledgement of the contributors.

So, in my case, rather than feeling like a fraud because my partners at Upbuild are good at what they do and because their work opened doors for me, I can acknowledge that truth first to myself (by journaling about it, meditating on it, etc.) and then thank my partners for their contributions. When our dependency on others lives in the light rather than the dark, it enlivens rather than shames us. 

As another example, when imposter syndrome is brought on by the thought that “I have insufficient training or domain experience,” the truth is that there are certain qualifications that are necessary for us to properly do our roles. It is also true that we could always become even more qualified for our roles. The distortion occurs because the ego misrepresents or exaggerates the items on the so-called “checklist” of necessary qualifications, often because of comparisons with who we think we should be. 

When I was a trader, did I really need to be as quantitative as the guy with the PhD in math sitting next to me? My ego sure thought so. And this thought was the painful seed of my imposter syndrome for more than a decade. That was a distortion.

In my current role as a coach, do I need to be older and wiser and have already been successful at my client’s job? My ego often thinks so. That’s a distortion.

And this kind of distortion doesn’t only show up when we have roles. It also induces imposter syndrome for our other identities. 

For instance, I consider myself a very “responsible” person when it comes to personal spending. This identity was called into question when, for Father’s Day a few months ago, my wife bought me not one, but two pairs of $200 jeans. The jeans fit incredibly well and fabric was oh so soft, and I knew my wife had spent a lot of time picking them out. In spite of this, when I received the gift (which had the receipt in the bag), I could barely manage a “thank you” or a smile because the thought of not returning them gave me a mini identity crisis. If I kept them, my ego reasoned, I’d be an imposter to my identity of “responsible spender,”  and this distortion was the reason why I showed up with less presence and less gratitude in a moment where there could have been meaningful appreciation for a loved one. (And just In case you are wondering, in the end, I kept the jeans to preserve my other ego identities of “fashionable guy” and “grateful husband.”) 

Summing Up - The Ego as the Ultimate Imposter

When imposter syndrome arises, it can be a reminder of the truths that other people contributed to us in significant ways and that there are certain competencies that would be beneficial for us to work on. Our egos distort these truths in various ways and make them mean that we are not worthy of our roles and our identities. The way to work with imposter syndrome is therefore to separate the truths from the distortions. And while there are many distortions that we need to look out for, the biggest distortion of them all is the conscious or unconscious belief that we need to be someone that we are not. After all, the ego is the ultimate imposter.

I Dislike In You What I Dislike In Me

After being abroad for most of my adult life, I have been back in the US living with and spending time with my parents the last few months. This has meant that I frequent many of the same places I did as a kid. One of these places is the community center gym where I spent considerable time pumping iron in high school. 

On a recent visit to the gym on a Tuesday at 4pm, I was surprised to re-learn that weekday afternoons are prime time for the high school crowd. Much to my chagrin, the weights area was packed with 15 post pubescent boys wearing cut-off shirts checking themselves out in the mirror. While I waited for some bench space to clear up so I could do my presses, I watched as one boy after the next would walk up to the mirror, do a biceps and a triceps flex, lift up his shirt so he could admire his abs, rub his pec muscle back and forth a couple of times, lift up his chin and nod at himself, and then look around to make sure that no one was watching. 

As I observed these shenanigans unfold, I noticed myself experiencing intense judgment. These boys think they are such hot shit. All these boys care about is how they look on TikTok. Their muscles aren’t even big enough to justify admiration. 

The judgment turned into disdain for the boys. It also turned into a feeling of shame on their behalf. Don’t these boys have any self-respect?

As I reflect on this experience and look a little deeper at what’s in my heart, it is painfully obvious why my judgment showed up so intensely. The reflection of the boys in the mirror was also a reflection of myself.

While the stages of life are very different, the key ingredients are the same: a preoccupation with body image, a desperation to be desired, and at its core, a deep insecurity about self-worth masked by feelings of grandiosity.

I was those boys when I was in high school. And I am those boys now. The shame I felt was not as much shame on their behalf. It was more the shame I felt about myself. The disdain I felt was not as much the disdain for what the boys were doing to themselves. It was more the disdain for the boys having reminded me of my shame.

What we dislike most in others is often what we dislike most in ourselves.

The dislike is the coping mechanism. It is our way of distancing ourselves from the behavior and from the underlying insecurity that drives the behavior. 

As C.S. Lewis wrote, “...if you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me…or patronise me, or show off?’...It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.”

This is what makes spending time with family members so triggering. We spend, or used to spend, a lot of time around them, and so we are intimately familiar with their stuff. And because we are cut from the same cloth, their stuff reminds us of our stuff. Ram Dass captured it when he said, “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.” 

Anxiety runs pretty rampant in my family. I don’t consider myself a particularly anxious person, but that’s because I have worked hard to stamp it out. Projecting confidence, speaking in a loud voice, stating opinions as facts, overpreparation, spending time in areas of my life I know that I am good at, and avoiding the areas of life where I am not as successful, are all ways that I deal with (i.e., suppress) my anxiety. When I see anxiety in family members, I often get annoyed and judge them as weak. This judgment shows up in both nonverbal and verbal communication, usually through short outbursts of frustration. Stop worrying about everything! For the other person, it can feel like a rejection of not only their feelings, but also of who they are.

When I look a little deeper, I can see my reaction is driven by my own shame around my emotional vulnerabilities. My ego clings tightly to the identity of an emotionally resilient strongman. When someone else gets anxious, I feel anxious as well. That’s natural. The issue is that my ego worries that maybe I’m not such an emotionally resilient strongman. In other words, maybe I’m not who I thought I was. That’s painful. The judgment and irritation are defense mechanisms that prevent me from feeling the pain. But because of the emotional escalation, I am often not aware of or honest about what is really happening, and all the person on the receiving end experiences is the judgment.

Materialism is also something I tend to be judgmental of when I see it in those I love. This shows up in tuning out when my wife starts talking about some clothing she loves that she found while shopping or feeling irked when the Fedex delivery person rings the doorbell an hour after the Amazon delivery truck departed. Despite my ego identity as a zenned-out minimalist, I have more than a few times in the last month spent too much time browsing Amazon looking for nothing in particular. I feel so much shame about my own materialism that when my wife walks into the room during one of my browsing sessions, I will immediately shut my laptop and jump up from my seat as if I’ve just finished up a work email and am now excited to spend some time with her. In reality, I am trying not to get caught. 

And even if we genuinely think our tendencies are distinct from the behaviors that we disdain in others, we just need to look a little deeper to see what is underneath the surface.

I am working with a coaching client who has a prestigious job at an investment bank and is one of the most unpretentious, down-to-earth people I know. She truly defies the banker stereotype because of her humility. Even though arrogant behavior is all around her, it bothers her when she witnesses or is on the receiving end of it. Her aversion toward that kind of behavior had gotten so intense that she was not able to do her job effectively because she was avoiding connection with people whom she judged as arrogant, which is a sizable proportion of people. In a recent coaching session, we were exploring her “overactive arrogance radar,” and at some point in the conversation, in a very innocent way she said, “I take a lot of pride in not having a big ego.” There was a moment of silence, and then we both started laughing. Her next words, “Oh my gosh, I have such a big ego about not having an ego.”

The judgment and the disdain are signals. They alert us to where we need to explore and where we need to ask some deeper questions. They help us discover our shame, which can be ridiculously hard to find if you, like me, happen to be skilled at burying it. 

To get started, here are 3 questions that you can explore in a journal, with a coach, or in the presence of someone you trust:  

1. What is one thing I am judgmental of others about?

2. How is this also true about me?

3. In what way does knowing it is true about me bring up shame?

Notice the second question is “how is this also true about me?” not “is this true about me?” The question does not call for a “yes” or “no” answer. The presumption is that it is true, and we want to know how it is true.

So…if it pisses me off when others are not reliable, how am I not reliable? If it pisses me off when people get into political debates without having done their homework, how have I also formed my political views without the full picture? If it pisses me off when others are controlling, how am I also controlling? If it pisses me off when others are not self-aware, how do I also lack self-awareness?  

This is not to say that we condone other peoples’ behaviors that are affecting us and the world in negative ways. And it may not always be true that what we judge in others is what we judge in ourselves. The question, “how is this also true about me?” is meant to provoke us and may not be relevant in 100% of cases. But before we go about judging the behaviors of another, let us first understand why we are triggered and in what ways we might be able to relate to the behaviors that we believe ourselves to be so adamantly against. When we have this understanding, our actions come from a more honest place and are more likely to have the intended result, especially if we are hoping to help facilitate change in others. And when we are honest about our shame, the shame starts to soften.   

In the example of materialism, rather than being on a crusade against everyone in my family buying things, I need to be honest first with myself and then with others about my own shame that I feel when I spend too much on something, when I buy things that I don’t need, or when I see how much packaging Amazon used for the essential oils set I purchased during one of my browsing sessions. The honesty offers oxygen to the people who are suffocating from the judgment. 

And we ourselves rarely have the full picture about our own judgments. It can be helpful, in our relationships where there is a sufficient amount of psychological safety, to ask others about where they feel judged by us. We can then use the feedback as entry points to explore using steps 2 and 3 from above.

With sincere effort, this exploration is our ticket to growth and connection. It is our ticket to honest relationships and less hypocrisy. It is our ticket to less shame about our shame. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “In the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek.”

The Freedom Fantasy

“I’ll be happy when…”

One of the most delusional phrases in the English language. 

I try to keep my audible uttering of these words to a minimum, but if I’m being honest, I’m thinking these words practically all the time. 

I’ll be happy when I can move into a place with more space.

I’ll be happy when my son starts sleeping through the night.

I’ll be happy when my net worth hits a certain number. 

I’ll be happy when I can finally see my family. 

I’ll be happy when it’s the weekend.

I’ll be happy when I get through this project. 

I’ll be happy when I can spend more time in nature.

And on and on. Morning, afternoon, and night. 

Underneath these thoughts is almost always the belief that:

When I get these things, I will experience more freedom, and with more freedom, I will experience real happiness.

I am constantly fantasizing about quitting my present circumstances to start living my ideal future. A future with more freedom.

My freedom fantasies have lots of different flavors: freedom from time constraints, freedom from financial constraints, freedom from stress, freedom from deadlines, freedom from other people’s mistaken perceptions of me, freedom from rules that don’t suit me, freedom from any situation that has the potential to be better.

I hold these freedoms on a pedestal.

My hunger for freedom can often feel counterproductive. The more I hunger, the less I feel free. To deal with this well-known phenomenon, the “self-help” section of the bookstore will tell you to stop hungering. If you just reduce the desire for something, then not having it won’t be as bad. This might work for a beach house or a BMW, but for freedom? 

Impossible. I’m famished. I’m starving for freedom. 

Experiencing freedom is core to what we humans are all about. So my hunger for more freedom is not something that I should (or can) rid myself of. My hungering for freedom is not counterproductive. But what I am realizing is that my definition of freedom has been wrong all along.

My understanding of freedom is proven to be mistaken on an almost daily basis when my mini freedom fantasies come true. A difficult project comes to a close. The weekend rolls around. My son starts sleeping 12 hours a night. And yet, the freedom never seems to bring the kind of happiness that I had in mind when I concocted the fantasy in the first place. The freedom never seems to bring real freedom.

This is the freedom fantasy. 

A personal example of this myth was when I left my corporate job a few years back. I had fantasized about that day for more than a decade, the day when I would finally quit in a blaze of glory (and with a standing ovation) to pursue my passion. In my mind, I had checked the boxes of the freedoms that I wanted, mainly financial freedom and freedom from desiring another promotion, before I could make such a move. And I was ready to start living my fantasy full of new freedoms: freedom from 50-hour work weeks, freedom from a boss, freedom from having to wear a suit, freedom to live wherever I want, freedom to do work that I would find meaningful and enjoy in a deeper way. 

And yet, when the excitement (and validation) of the day eventually subsided, and I got down from my high horse of having quit Goldman Sachs to do something to “help the world,” I didn’t feel more free. In fact, it felt like I was standing at the bottom of a mountain with a whole new set of peaks to climb.

The French author, Alain de Botton, wittingly illustrates this point in his book The Art of Travel with his observation of what typically transpires when we plan our vacations: We look at pictures in a travel brochure, thinking how amazing it will be when we get there. We fantasize about it for weeks. And then when we finally book the trip and make our way to the exact same spot that looked so attractive in the brochure, we find that we aren’t as happy as we imagined. We wonder why, but eventually, it dawns on us that we made the crucial mistake of bringing ourselves along for the journey.

As a coaching client recently remarked to me in one of our sessions, “I just want freedom from myself.”
My client was onto something. We do want freedom from ourselves. But it is not freedom from our real selves. It is the freedom from our egoic selves.

We’ve all had tastes of this freedom. For me, these tastes have come while going camping in the wilderness, during experiences at music festivals jamming out to great music with good friends, during intense yoga class in a hot room, letting loose on the dance floor at a friend’s wedding, giggling with my son as we roll around on the floor, and taking a walk by myself on a warm summer evening with house music coming through my noise canceling headphones.

Make no mistake. These experiences are not experiences of the real self. They are worldly experiences that give us a sense of something closer to what the real self must be. They hint at what true freedom feels like and give us an idea of what starts to happen in our internal world when we move away from the egoic self.

More specifically for me, the ever-present and excruciatingly loud voice of my inner critic reduces in volume; the parts of me that carry anger, frustration, and judgment don’t feel so angry, frustrated, or judgemental; the need for attention and praise starts to soften; and the “I-me-mine” centered view of the world doesn’t feel as important or true. I feel less of a pull to prove myself to the world and to defend the ego identities that I have worked my whole life to propagate.

It’s certainly not the case that music festivals or intense yoga classes are the answers to our hunger for freedom. And it’s not that we should avoid pursuing goals like financial freedom or freedom from a job in which we feel trapped. But we are deluding ourselves if we think those kinds of freedom are going to allow us to feel truly free.

Many people have gone their entire lives thinking that if they were just a little more successful or had a bigger house for their family, then they could finally start to enjoy life. And then one of two things happens: either they go to their grave feeling like they never could be happy because they hadn’t achieved what they were chasing OR they work 20+ years toward that goal only to find continued existential angst and unease even after they achieve it.

To help us on the path toward true freedom, we first need to be deeply honest with ourselves about whether how we currently spend our days will eventually bring us freedom. For most of us, the truth is that it will not. And if you aren’t sure because you haven’t tasted the success or identity that you crave, then just ask someone who has it. And second, in order to satiate our desire for freedom, we must start to find ways to soften the attachments that we have to become bigger, better, and more of whatever our ego tells us we should be.

There is only one true freedom: freedom from the ego. And it is the freedom from the ego which gives us the freedom to be our real selves.

Goldman Sachs Bonus Day and the Entitled Ego

To the outside world, today is just a normal weekday in January. On Wall Street, today is anything but normal. Today is Comp Day, the day that annual bonuses are announced.

8:30am. Matt, the most senior trader on the team, receives the first call. The caller ID on the phone dashboard blinks, Conference Room 5. No one ever calls from Conference Room 5. Except on Comp Day.

On most days, the junior team members pick up the phone for the senior members. On Comp Day, everyone picks up their own phone. Especially if the caller ID says Conference Room 5.

There is a collective gasp from the team as Matt looks down at his phone. “Hello,” Matt says sheepishly into his headset. “Yes, on my way.” Matt, who flies business class with his family of five to Hawaii four times a year, gets up from his seat like his 3rd-grade teacher just whispered in his ear that the principal would like to speak to him in her office.

As Matt disappears into Conference Room 5, we get a peek at Nick, the Partner who runs the team, sitting behind a stack of papers. Everyone pretends to go back to work, but no one is doing anything. Except thinking about Conference Room 5.

After three minutes that feel like 13, Matt walks out with a look on his face that communicates he was expecting an additional zero.

Another minute of silence. The phone rings. Conference Room 5 on the caller ID. This time it’s Taylor’s turn.

The process will continue most of the morning. Eventually, it’s my turn.

My heart jumps into my throat when I see the blinking light next to my name. “On my way,” I say in the same robotic tone as those who came before me. I feel the eyes of my co-workers pierce my physical body. My heart has returned to my chest, but it is now beating at the same speed it did in the moments before my first kiss.

Nick greets me with a nod and a quarter smile. “Take a seat.” I know not to expect any pleasantries.

He starts in with the canned qualitative commentary about the firm’s performance. I don’t catch what he says. My mind has blocked all qualitative parts of the conversation.

And then the moment of truth. The quantitative part. “Your P-A-T-C is …”

P-A-T-C stands for “per annum total compensation.” It is the total of base salary plus bonus, and is colloquially referred to as your number.

After my number is revealed, Nick communicates how much of the bonus will be paid in cash and how much in company stock. None of this information registers. My mind is playing the part about my number on repeat.

My access to my emotional temperature at this moment is non-existent. All I know is that I need to appear both gracious and disappointed. I need him to know I am mature enough to act like a decent human being, but that I am unimpressed by my number. To admit satisfaction or to offer sincere gratitude would be equivalent to acknowledging I had been paid too much. Dissatisfaction is a strategy to be paid more next year.

I give one final nod and walk back out onto the trading floor. The eyes of the legions of traders, sales people, and strategists again pierce my body. By the time I get back to my seat, the caller ID is already flashing, Conference Room 5.

It’s hard to know how to act the rest of the afternoon. Some people are ready to quit. And some are thinking about what color Ferrari to buy. I don't know which person is which. Better to keep to myself. Everything feels like a blur anyway. Everything except my number.

Today is the start of a year-long relationship with my number. It is a very intimate relationship because my number sticks in my head. It marinates. It stews. It consumes me. And it becomes me. I start believing everything that it represents.

As the chorus from Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” goes: They've given you a number and taken away your name.

But this is not about them. This is about me. This is about how I have surrendered my self-worth to a number. A single number on a single day communicated to me by a single individual.

During each of my 11 years at Goldman Sachs, two months before Comp Day, I would send a list of my accomplishments to my boss to give him ammunition to pay me a higher bonus. When my number was eventually revealed, my ego’s internal algorithm would compare it to my list. The number always fell short.

Externally, I would act like I had been betrayed. “It’s so unfair that they paid the sales people more this year!”

The ego feels entitled. It loves to use the concept of fairness in service of its agenda. Especially on Comp Day.

Internally, my inner critic would beat the crap out of me: “You’re not quantitative enough. You never deserved to get promoted to MD.”

The inner critic is the mouthpiece of the ego. It had known all along that I was an imposter and here was proof thrown back in my face. The shame from feeling “not enough” would become extremely unpleasant.

To provide temporary relief from the shame, I responded with disengagement (“I never wanted to be a part of this greedy profession in the first place”) and angry resentment (“Those greedy assholes kept it all for themselves!”). While these responses offered me an illusion of power and control, they also left collateral damage in my life. Professionally, I wouldn’t put in as much effort, wasn’t as enthusiastic about helping others, and would overcompensate by finding subtle ways to show just how valuable I was. In my personal life, I would get grumpy, wouldn’t be as present, and would indulge in validation-seeking behaviors such as name-dropping and humblebrags.

This whole cycle is problematic, and it is entirely because I surrendered my self-worth to a number.

Comp Day is not about the money. It is about the meaning that our fragile egos create about the money.

And even if you don’t get a bonus in the same dramatic fashion as an investment banker, what number do you let define you? Is it your company’s valuation, the price of Bitcoin, your brokerage account balance, your hourly wage?

When we surrender our worth to something extrinsic, it will never be enough. It will never be real worth.

Fast forward to the present…

So now that I no longer work for an investment bank, has this tendency to define myself by a number gone away? Unfortunately not.

As a team of four at Upbuild, we have tried to disassociate our worth from our compensation by basing our compensation on collective earnings, rather than on individual contributions. It does change the mood, but it doesn’t mean the link between compensation and self-worth has gone away.

Even with this more equitable system, and even as I do the work of excavating egos for myself personally and professionally with my clients, it’s hard. My conditioning is intense. I experience insecurity about my value that comes from wondering if I am doing enough to earn my share. And I feel the insecurity of questioning if I have less value because my number these days is a lot smaller than it used to be.

But just because something has been one way doesn’t mean that it is destined to be that way forever. By bringing awareness into my life about my fragile ego, I am starting to detangle the link between my number and my worth.

Contrary to what my ego wants me to believe, worth does not need to be earned. It does not need to be proven.

These numbers are not us. They are not indicative of our real value. We know this because even when the number is good enough, the insecurity that, “I’m not enough,” persists. This whole system of relying on numbers to tell us our worth is flimsy. It doesn’t stand the test of time. We need to find something with a longer shelf life and something that is closer to the core of who we are.

We can ask ourselves the question, “Who would I be if I lost my money, my job title, and my status?”

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Love In The Workplace

Eight years ago, one of the best bosses I ever had brought me into a conference room after a heated exchange during which I had gone overboard in asserting my authority over a more junior salesperson. We sat down, he looked me in the eye, and he said, “Sloyer, you are good at your job, but you don’t have to prove it to everyone all the time.”

At first I was mortified. I felt so exposed, like I was standing there naked in front of him. He was calling me out for something that I had spent my whole life trying to hide. I, of course, wanted to be admired, but I didn’t want him nor anyone else to know how much I desperately needed it.

When I reflected on this later, however, I realized this was as close to love as I would get on the trading floor at an investment bank. In one simple sentence, he conveyed the duality that I am okay as I am, and yet it is not okay to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Rather than giving feedback about me as a person, he gave feedback about my behavior. He was clear that how I was acting needed to change for the benefit of the team, but he avoided casting doubt on my character or my competency. The way in which he sternly, yet calmly, delivered his message left me feeling like he empathized with the insecurity that was underneath my need to prove myself.

The experience in the conference room that day, which didn’t last more than a minute, had such a profound impact on me that, even eight years later, it has become one of my most referenced stories from my time at the bank. The loving action was truly a black swan event on the trading floor, and it has inspired me to imagine what it might look like if love were to become the standard, rather than the exception, at companies.

What is love?

When we think of love, we usually think of it as a noun: a warm feeling of affection for someone. The problem with thinking about it as a feeling, as the author of Nonviolent Communication Marshall Rosenberg reminds us, is that our feelings can change quite dramatically from moment to moment. So if someone were to ask you if you love someone, you’d have to follow up with a clarifying question: when?

Rather than thinking about love as a noun, it can be beneficial to think of it as a verb. In the Bhakti-yoga tradition, love is defined as devotional service that is free from selfish desires. In order for an action to be truly loving, it must be unconditional. There is no such thing as conditional love. And there is no such thing as love where we are trying to prove something about ourselves. As a result, love is rare. Many of us might think that we offer love to certain people in our lives, but if we were to be deeply honest, is what we are offering really unconditional?

I recently came across an article about unconditional love. The author asked the reader to come up with an individual in their life for whom they have love and posed the following three questions: Have you accepted this person’s failures? Do you see this person’s weaknesses as projects to be fixed? Are you afraid to be honest because this person might not accept you?

If you are like me, your answers don’t paint a resounding portrait of unconditional love. And if most of us don’t offer it to the people we say that we love, it’s very unlikely we offer it to those with whom we work.

Unconditional love at work

Unconditional love is not exactly a frequently spoken phrase in the workplace. This is not surprising given that neither of the individual words that make up the phrase have particular resonance at corporations.

Unconditional

Corporations are built on conditions. Specifically, they are built on the conditions that:

• Customers will buy goods/services if the corporation produces desirable products

• Shareholders will buy more shares if the corporation generates more profits

• Employees will work hard if the corporation pays them salaries and promotes them

Pretty straight forward. The transactional spirit behind these conditions naturally filters through to the relationships among team members. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

Love

There is a famous verse from Corinthians that starts: Love is patient, love is kind.

Patience and kindness take time. They take dealing with the messy insides of real human beings feeling real human feelings and making real human mistakes. Corporations don’t have time for this. Because if the above conditions are going to be satisfied, then efficiency and productivity cannot be sacrificed!

Insecurity disguised as inspiration

When I worked at the investment bank, I would often write emails to my boss letting him know about the contributions of one of the junior members of my team and would share my perspective that this person was doing a great job. My boss would inevitably respond, “Awesome. Thanks for letting me know,” and then I would forward the email to the junior person.

On one hand, it was an expression of validation and genuinely helpful for this person’s career. But there were unspoken conditions. The conditions were loyalty, compliance with future requests, and having my back if I ever ducked out early for the day. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. There was also an implicit understanding that I would continue to advocate for him in this way as long as my conditions were continuously met.

Another initiative I often took when I worked at the bank was to serve as a mentor for the analysts and associates. I would offer my time for coffee catch ups, guidance on how to navigate company politics, and advice on initiatives they could take to further their careers. On the surface, these were acts of kindness and generosity. Under the surface, these were forums where I could justify my own career choices to a very eager audience and present all the wonderful things that I had done as a model for what could be possible in their careers. I was disguising insecurity as inspiration. I also knew I was earning a reputation as a “culture carrier” that would likely get rewarded in the next promotion cycle.

Our insecure egos

Unconditional love is really hard. The reason why it’s so hard is because of our insecure egos. A key part of the nature of our ego is that it keeps us from feeling complete. This lack of completeness is existential for the ego. It does everything in its power to keep us wanting more.

The Inner Critic, as we share during our Upbuild workshops, is the mouthpiece of the ego. It likes to tell us things like: you are not enough, you’re falling behind, you need more of this, you need more of that. This can be especially true in the work setting because many of us derive the majority of our self-worth from our work. Our Inner Critics lead us to believe that we have a giant hole inside of us that must be filled with stuff from the outside.

We recognize that we can’t meet the relentless demands of our Inner Critics by ourselves, and so we need other people to help us. Really, we are hoping they will do it for us. We also recognize that others are dealing with their own Inner Critics, and so we consciously or unconsciously enroll them as co-conspirators in our quests to prove ourselves to ourselves and to one another. We treat people transactionally and allow others to treat us transactionally as a strategy to get stuff (validation, loyalty, promotions, compensation, etc.) to fill holes that can never be filled with transactions.

But this all needs to change. Love needs to become the standard. Whether it be on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or in the two-person lemonade stand startup currently being manifested in your parents’ basement, we need to take steps to make our work environments more reflective of this ideal.

Practical ways to show the love at work

Using the definitions from earlier, love in the workplace means that we unselfishly serve our colleagues and take actions that stem from a deep awareness of and connection to their intrinsic value as people. Love must always have a person as the object, but since it can get confusing when we are also trying to serve other team members and the organization as a whole, we can think about trying to do the most loving thing to serve the situation. In other words, we do what we believe will most beneficially serve the greater good. If we serve the situation, then we also serve the individuals, even if the individuals involved don’t like it in the short run.

This might all feel a bit theoretical, so on a more practical level, here are some ways you can immediately offer love to your colleagues:

As a disclaimer, all of these actions could be motivated by a desire to optimize performance, create a more comfortable work environment, or demonstrate leadership skills. While these motivations can be constructive, they would not constitute love. Love can only come from a pure place in our hearts where we are not trying to get or prove anything.

1. Prioritizing rapport and nuance over efficiency. In our constant quest for performance, we like to give others candid feedback as efficiently as possible. In practice, this usually means squeezing what should be a 30 minute nuanced discussion into a 5 minute blunt-force soliloquy on why the other person sucks. Before taking action, we can ask ourselves the question: What would be most beneficial for this person and our team one year from now?

2. Giving feedback about the behavior, not the person. There is a feedback model that I like to share with my clients called SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact). As an example, one might say: during our Zoom call with the team yesterday (situation), when you asked David for his point of view without also asking me (behavior), I felt disappointed and like my work on the project wasn’t appreciated (impact). With the SBI model, we keep hearsay and defensiveness to a minimum.

3. Lots of meta-conversations. Meta-conversations are conversations about conversations and relationships. They are not about the work itself, but about how the work is being done. They usually begin with something like: Hey I’m feeling a little tension between us, would you be open to talking about it? or I noticed that you were very patient with me during yesterday’s meeting. Thank you for that.

4. Taking responsibility for our insecure egos. In the mentoring example I shared earlier where I got an ego boost from the validation of my mentees, if I had been more aware of my own insecurities, I could have shifted how I acted and what I shared with them by one degree to better serve them. I could have spent less time telling them the details of my own war stories about great trades that I had made (which were always slightly exaggerated), and more time asking questions to help them discover for themselves about how they might take the next step in their careers given their specific circumstances.

5. Giving validation from the heart, only. Many of us use validation to get others to like us, to win the corporate political game, and as a carrot to keep others performing. Validation should not be used as a currency to get something. It is an expression from our hearts. Before giving validation, we can ask our hearts: what would you like to express to this person? And if the answer is, nothing, then maybe save it for another time.

6. Being clear with boundaries and our needs. Unconditional love does not mean that we are doormats for others. It does mean we clearly outline our boundaries. As Brene Brown suggests, clear is kind. Clarity is a great service to our colleagues, and thus can be an act of love, especially if it makes us uncomfortable in the short run.

7. Taking people at their word and giving the benefit of the doubt. Our egos, under an existential fear of not being seen the way that they want to be seen, are on guard for getting “screwed over” and being let down. This fear leaks into how we treat others. By giving people the benefit of the doubt, we build the trust that is required for two-way unconditional love. And if we don’t trust someone, we need to be able to have nuanced and mature meta-conversations before we move forward with the task at hand (see #1 and #3 above).

As you can see from this list, unconditional love does not always feel good. It doesn’t imply passiveness or inefficiency, and doesn’t preclude actions such as negative feedback or firing someone. Unconditional love takes courage and a sincere effort to determine what would be the most beneficial action to serve one another and the situation as a whole.

“Love is the answer”

Even in our hyper-competitive and ego-driven work environments, underneath the chaos, we are all wanting to give and receive love. There are lots of well-researched benefits to creating a loving workplace environment (higher employee satisfaction, more teamwork, fewer sick days, better client outcomes, etc.), and although all of these are critically important, they don’t quite get at the core of it. The reason why we need to bring love into the workplace is because we are made of love. As espoused by just about every wisdom tradition, unconditional love is the reason for our existence. And we spend a lot of our existence at work.

John Lennon put it precisely when he wrote, “Love is the answer, and you know that for sure.” When we are not operating from unconditional love, we are operating from a place of delusion. Conditional and transactional relationships are based on the false belief that we need to have more and be different than who we are at our core. Unconditional love is based on the truth we have nothing to prove, and so we can love without conditions or fear.

When I was a kid, my siblings used to say to me: Michael, I don’t like you, but I love you. We don’t always have to like the people with whom we work, but let’s take one step toward loving them.

Looking at the ways of expressing unconditional love in the workplace above, which one will you make an effort to do in the next few days? And by doing so, what impact might this have on you, the other person, and the relationship?

The Salt in the Dish

“I am just the salt in the dish.”

Given salt’s low position on the totem pole of food preparation, this is a statement of humility. It is a statement of humility downplaying our own importance in any process out of deference to the larger mission or some greater good. It can be loosely translated as, “It’s not about me” or less succinctly as, “It’s not about me. I am involved in the process, and I help the process to run more smoothly, more efficiently, or make it better in some other way. But, ultimately, the mission is more important than any of my individual desires.”

This statement is easy to preach, but hard to live by. No matter how much we know “it’s not about us,” it still somehow feels about us. We are the protagonists in the narratives of our lives. We are the center of our own world constructs, and no matter how hard we try, we end up relating everything we observe and do back to us.

As an example, I recently facilitated a workshop with the goal of helping participants understand their personality types in order to build trust, self-awareness, and compassion among the group. In preparing for the workshop, I tried to repeat the mantra, “I am just the salt in the dish.” (hat tip Rasanath and Hari Prasada for introducing me to the power of this phrase in 2016 and to the spiritual teachers who passed it down to them). I had conviction that the workshop would make a real difference in the lives of the people who would be attending, so it should have been all about them. But as I prepared, it didn’t feel about them. I felt such intense pressure to deliver the perfect workshop that the purity and value of the work became secondary. My preparation, therefore, was less about how I could best serve the needs of the participants, and more about how I could deliver a shiny performance. And it was stressful. Because whenever a thought crept into my mind about how I could possibly slip up or how I might forget to mention a certain concept in a pre-scripted way, I got hit with a wave of anxiety. Instead of keeping the big picture in mind and feeling excited and grateful for the opportunity to positively affect the lives of people that I care about, I worried about what everyone would think of me. I shamefully concede that it became “all about me.”

One of the tricky things about this is that there is some truth that our desire for validation can motivate us to work harder, which can translate into a better experience for others. By making the work about us first, and the mission second, we can effectively serve others and the mission. But effective is not optimal. To optimally serve others, the needs of others need to be the first priority. Returning to the workshop example, I tended to emphasize content that I felt most comfortable and confident delivering. I was able to effectively serve the participants, but in my heart, I know I did not optimally serve them because I shied away from some of the content that would have been more meaningful and impactful for them.

To put our need for validation above the mission is unlikely to be sustainable, nor does it produce consistent results. Whether we deliver effectively or not, we may not always get external validation and others may outshine us. When this happens, even if the mission is being served, our motivation may wane or it could hinder collaboration. In the long run, this leaves everyone worse off. 

We may also lose sight of the original mission we were intending to serve in the first place. We may deliver a lesson (in the case of education), enact a policy (in the case of govt/public service), or make a contribution (in the case of business or philanthropy) that serves our own purpose and the mission’s purpose. However, if we put our own desires first, the mission’s purpose will be sacrificed in one way or another. This can be difficult to spot because the mission’s purpose is almost always one of our priorities, and we are highly incentivized to inflate its importance within our stack of priorities. We all want to believe the best about ourselves.

So what can we do about it?

As with all of our work at Upbuild, the first step is awareness. We need to catch ourselves in the act of putting our own desires first. A key distinction is that when we say “our” desires, what we really mean are “our ego’s” desires. This allows us to differentiate the desires of our egos (for validation, success, power, comfort, etc) from the needs of our true selves (which don’t include validation, success, power, comfort, etc). It’s not necessarily the case that these desires are bad, but they are just not our desires, which means that we don’t want to let them be the driving force for our actions. With a little humor and a little detachment, we can catch our egos trying to get their desires met, and then make different choices that are more aligned with the goals of the mission.

Another helpful step is to get crystal clear about what the mission is. Said another way, what is the deepest “why” for our involvement? On a team of people, there may be lots of different personal “whys”, and that’s okay, but as an organization, what is the “why” that surpasses all “whys?” 

There are also two questions that we can ask ourselves: 1. “In what ways am I trying to be the main course here?” This question will give us clues as to where we need to re-evaluate our involvement. And 2. “If I was not involved in this mission at all, what would need to get done, and in what way would it need to get done?” That will give us clues as to how we should be involved. 

This clarity is important because targets are a lot easier to hit when we know and explicitly declare what they are. There are always competing (conscious and unconscious) motivations, and if we can be clear about the most important motivation, day to day decisions about what to do and how to do it are easier to make. My experience is that having this clarity inspires me to act more like salt, and less like the main dish, which gives me access to who I am, and not who I am projecting. When we are trying to be main, we will never feel main enough. And when we are the salt, being of pure service nourishes us to complete satiation. 

Finally, if you are like me and need a constant reminder, a yellow sticky note on your desk with the phrase, “I am just the salt in the dish,” can be a beautiful service to yourself and to everyone who experiences the ripple effects of the deep and genuine humility we are aiming for.

The Oldest Profession in the World

I have this unattractive tendency that when you ask me how I am doing, I try to sell you something. The words that come out of my mouth, when prompted with that question, vary based on a gazillion factors, but the thing I am trying to sell is always the same: myself.

Hey Michael. How are you?
“Good, a really cool startup just hired us to do some consulting work, so I’ve been super busy with that.” 

Hey Michael. How are you?
“Good, I just did a meditation retreat so I am feeling particularly zen.” 

Hey Michael. How are you?
“Good, Covid cases have been super low in Japan, and the weather is amazing here during the winter.” 

Hey Michael. How are you?
“Well, it’s been a rough few weeks for our country, so I am just trying to get through it like everyone else.” 

Sometimes it is subtle, sometimes it is not so subtle, but the “sales pitch” behind the message is very different from the message at face value. When I am telling you that a startup has just hired us and that I am busy, I am selling you on my professional abilities and my importance. When I tell you about the meditation retreat, I am selling you on my balanced lifestyle choices and spiritual propensities. When I tell you about the Covid cases and weather in Japan, I am selling you on my decision to live abroad. When I tell you that it’s been a rough few weeks for our country and that I’m just trying to get through it like everyone else, I am selling you simultaneously on my political awareness and self-awareness. 

And just like in the marketing world, it is very rare that the seller actually has the buyer’s interest as a priority. When I tell you about the meditation retreat, for example, I am not doing it for your benefit. Although I might say something like “next time you have some time off, you should definitely check it out,” I am subtly telling you that you can be as great as me if you just follow in my footsteps. So when I answer the question in this way, I am really doing it in order to prove something about myself. 

And when I say that I am trying “to prove something about myself,” this begs the question, which self are we talking about? This came up in a recent Upbuild podcast on Detangling Self-Worth From Achievement during which Rasanath suggested that when we are talking about self-worth, we are almost always talking about the egoic self. The egoic self is different than the true self in that in order for it to exist, it needs to be constantly proving itself. The true self, on the other hand, has nothing to prove. 

So when I am selling you on myself, what I mean is that my ego is trying to prove its value. It does this because I am rarely in touch with my inherent value, which is based on core character qualities, and it is trying to fill the void from the feeling of not being enough by citing my achievements or something else for which you might validate me. It feels like how I choose to answer the question in that moment will determine who I am at my core. My identity is so tied to the choices that I have made, how I spend my time, and the degree to which I am achieving relative to others, that this question is often way more intense than it needs to be. 

The other thing I often do when you ask me how I’m doing is say something extremely generic. Something like “Fine” or “Hanging in there” or “Surviving” (“Surviving” is definitely the most cringeworthy of the three). This is also the work of the ego, and the underlying motivation for responding this way falls into one of two categories. 

The first is that I might be thinking that you can’t handle how I’m feeling, and rather than make you uncomfortable by telling you the truth, I just say something generic so you don’t have to grapple with how to respond. My ego tricks me into thinking that I am doing this for the benefit of you (our egos love to assure us that we are good people), but really what is happening is that my ego doesn’t want to lose control (our egos love control). If I am going to share my real feelings, my ego would want them to be received in a very specific way, and if they are not received in this way, it would be too painful (our egos love to feel comfortable and hate experiencing emotional pain). Generic reply begets generic reply, my ego reasons, so better to stick with that and then we can move on to the business at hand. 

The other thing that happens even more frequently is that I actually have no clue HOW I am doing. As we share in our Enneagram workshops, the heart is where emotions come from, so in order for me to know how I am feeling, I would need to slow down and check in with my heart. But since my emotions get in the way of my powering through life, and thus get in the way of my ego feeling valuable, I rarely take time to check in with my heart. I am very good at knowing WHAT I am doing, but I am pretty terrible at knowing HOW I am doing. 

If all this emotional drama sounds crazy, it is crazy. But unfortunately, this is such a common experience in life for me. When someone asks me to explain financial market derivatives or composition rules for photography, I don’t think twice about answering them. But when someone asks me how I’m doing (or “what’s up” or “what have you been up to”), it provokes me into a full-blown identity crisis.

So what can we do? As with all of our work, it comes down to awareness. We need to be aware of what is happening internally. We need to be aware of the needs of our ego. Although the specific needs of our ego will vary in intensity based on our personality types, our egos are all looking for some combination of feeling valuable, feeling in control, and feeling comfortable. 

• To bring awareness to our egos’ need to feel valuable, we can ask ourselves “what am I trying to prove to this person?” 

• To bring awareness to our egos’ need for control, we can ask ourselves “in this moment, what can I let go of?”

• To bring awareness to our egos’ need to be comfortable, we can ask ourselves “what am I unwilling to feel?” (credit Tara Brach for this question)

While feeling valuable, having control, and being comfortable are not inherently problematic, what is problematic is that we, and others, miss out on the experience of our true selves when the ego is the driving force behind our actions. We miss out on the version of us that has nothing to prove, is humble enough to know that almost nothing is in our control, and is okay with the discomfort that results when we sincerely check in with those sensitive hearts of ours.

So the next time someone asks “how are you” or “what’s up” or really during any interaction with a fellow human being, let us take a second to bring awareness to the needs of the ego. Let us acknowledge it to ourselves, and when we have the courage, share it with others. And then, in spite of those needs, let us respond not from the ego, but from the true self, which has nothing to prove and nothing to sell. 

Our Unilateral Contracts

Have you ever unilaterally created a contract between yourself and someone else, forged their signature without their consent, and then held them accountable to the terms of the agreement?

I have. Countless times.

Despite what it might sound like, this is not some white collar crime confession. I am, of course, speaking in strictly metaphorical terms. 

I recently came across a social media post from a friend who is in the same industry as I used to be in when I was a trader at an investment bank. The post was a link to an article from a well known internet news site interviewing this person about his accomplishments and perspectives on the industry. Although it was too much to bear to actually read the whole thing, a quick browse of the article made it clear that this person was “crushing it.” As soon as I got the gist of the article, I closed my laptop and got up from my chair. A range of emotions washed over me. 

The first and easiest to identify was envy.

After envy came anxiety. Had I made the right choice in switching my career? Had I lost my chance to truly crush it?

Then disappointment. I’m better than this, aren’t I? I should be happy for this person. This is not about me. 

And then shame. Oh man, I’m not better than this. I’ve been exposed. It is about me.

But really, more than anything, I realized I was pissed. Yes, that was the emotion I would settle on. I was pissed because I had been betrayed by my friend who had so arrogantly posted the link to the article. 

Didn’t he know that posting this article would ruin my day? Didn’t we have an agreement to never treat each other like this?

As absurd as it sounds, in my mind, I had concocted a unilateral contract with this person. The contract stated that he was free to achieve success, but he was to spare me from displays of his success. He could reach out to me for advice or to commiserate about failures, but his triumphs were off-limits. 

This social media post was a clear breach of contract. 

With this example fresh in my mind, it got me thinking about some of my other unilateral contracts. And once the ball got rolling, it wasn’t hard to come up with more examples.

• I have a contract with customer service representatives to agree to all “reasonable” requests that I make.

• I have a contract with my friends not to be overly critical of behaviors like excessive Amazon deliveries—lest they expose my own ethically questionable habits.

• I have a contract with the TSA not to search me at the airport (in Dr. Attia’s podcast, he talks about the narcissist anthem of “don’t you know who I am!”)

• When I used to work at an investment bank as a trader, any time I came up with a trade idea that I sent around to my team, I had a contract with my team members to publicly support the idea.

• I have a contract with the other members of the Upbuild team to validate me for my contributions—but only briefly, so they don’t risk exposing the extent to which I crave the validation.

• When I’m not in the mood to interact in meaningful ways, I have a contract with my family members to pick up on the nonverbal cues and act accordingly.

• When I am giving my full effort to something, I have a contract with other stakeholders to give at least 80% of their full effort to the same endeavor.

• I have a contract with anyone who brings a baby on an airplane to sit at least 10 rows away from me. 

Just to put this in writing brings up so much shame. My ego and my neediness in black ink for my fellow humans to see. 

And yet, I am not alone. The experience of holding people to agreements that they never agreed to is one we are doing all the time. For most of us, it might even be our default way of operating. 

When others breach our unilateral contracts, we experience all sorts of unhelpful emotions. Envy, shame, fear, and judgment are some of the most common. We also have lots of mechanisms for punishing those who break our contracts. As examples:

• We may act out in frustration (e.g., as I sometimes do with customer service representatives).

• We may express passive-aggressive disappointment in others (e.g. as I sometimes do when others don’t give their full effort).

• We may behave with resentment as a result of arrogance (e.g., as I sometimes do with the TSA).

• We may get grumpy (e.g., as I sometimes do with family members who are supposed to detect my mood swings).

Depending on the particular situation, we may also engage in gossip, withhold our love and attention, discredit others, or use sarcasm, among many other behaviors, knowingly or unknowingly, in order to punish the unsuspecting people in our lives for breach of contract. 

Given these unhelpful emotions and mechanisms for punishment, it’s not hard to see why these contracts are wreaking havoc on our lives and in our relationships. 

These contracts are also delusional. They are not based in reality. Can you imagine actually asking someone to formally agree to one of these contracts?

An abridged version of a unilateral contract might be written as follows: Johnny, by signing this contract, you hereby agree to never again post a Forbes article naming you to their list of ‘40 under 40’ on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform that Michael might be scrolling. You also agree to make sure that something good has happened to Michael in the last 24 hours before telling him any good news about yourself.

We likely don’t even realize how ridiculous these contracts are until we think about actually writing them or saying them out loud. And even if we’ve had a conversation with another person or group of people about a particular agreement, are the terms of the agreement actually clear to our counterpart? Are they even clear to us? Is there fine print?

So why? Why do we create these contracts if they are based in delusion and they are wreaking havoc on our lives?

Well it’s not actually us who is creating these contracts. It is our egos - our false identities of who we think we should be. And they are creating them for the perpetuation of their existence. For without delusion and havoc, our egos would cease to exist. As my partner Hari Prasada will often share during Upbuild programs, we want to identify our egos so that we can take responsibility for them, but once we have done that with sincerity, then we don’t need to identify WITH them. In other words, we are separate from our egos. 

With regard to our unilateral contracts, we need to be honest about which ones our egos have created and the associated methods of enforcement. We also need to be honest about the desires and fears of our egos that have driven the creation of these contracts, and we need to be able to tap into truths that go deeper than the ego. 

In the case of the social media post, it was my ego’s fear of not being valuable that drove the creation of the contract. When I am not in touch with my inherent self-worth, my ego has a tendency to measure my own worth against the worth of others. And because my ego links worth very tightly to achievement, it is constantly monitoring other peoples’ achievements to see how I stack up. So when it sensed that someone else was achieving more than I was, as it did when I saw the post, the fear of not being valuable got triggered, which triggered the cascade of emotions from envy to disappointment to shame, and finally, to anger at my successful friend for breaking our contract.

Said another way, the contract was my ego’s way of protecting me from feeling worthless, but because it was based in delusion and triggered deflating emotions, it did more harm than good. 

If I had, instead, been able to tap into the truth that I have worth independent of what my mind or body is able to accomplish and bring my attention back to what is truly important to me (my values), I wouldn’t have felt as threatened and likely would have experienced a more empowering and generous reaction.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, a film about a bunch of struggling real estate salesmen that we often screen during Upbuild workshops, Alec Baldwin’s very macho and highly ambitious character proclaims, “Only one thing counts in this life. GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE THAT IS DOTTED.” That might be sound advice in the real estate business, but in the business of being who we truly are, before asking anyone to sign anything, we need to be able to differentiate the needs of our ego from the true self. This takes honesty and courage, but once we more clearly see the needs of the ego, and even better if we can share authentically about these needs with others, we can start ripping up the old contracts that are based on false identities. And we can start living sans contracts and with the freedom that comes from alignment with our core values and a deeper sense of who we actually are.

Trading Derivatives and the Shame-Based Fear of Being Ordinary

It is November 2010 on the Goldman Sachs trading floor in New York City. It is just two years removed from the depths of the Global Financial Crisis, but you would never know it. The stock market has nearly doubled in the last 18 months, the Federal Reserve has just announced its second round of Quantitative Easing, and it feels like one big party on Wall Street.

It’s 9:31am on this November morning, and the stock market has been open for exactly 60 seconds. There are lots of green numbers flashing across my five computer screens, indicating that today is yet another positive day for the market. 

“Sloy-Dog pick up line 1,” John shouts over the trading floor’s loudspeaker system (John has added the word “Dog” to the first syllable of my last name as a term of endearment; the extent of the endearment is debatable).

I reach for the blinking button flashing for line 1 on my giant phone dashboard system. “Yea,” I say into my phone in as terse a way as I could possibly manage. A two syllable word, such as “hello,” would be unthinkable on the trading floor. 

“I need an offer on 2000 S&P March 1300 calls,” John shouts into the phone. “And I need it A-S-A-P.” John is an equity derivatives salesperson at Goldman, and he is asking me (the trader) to show him a price at which his hedge fund client can buy 2000 units of a derivative linked to the price of the S&P 500 index. The tone of his voice makes me think he hasn’t had his morning coffee yet. Or maybe he’s had three, and he is just about ready for his fourth. Either way, his sense of urgency gives me a feeling of energy and power. Adrenaline shoots through my system. It’s my first hit of validation for the day.  

I do a quick scan of my five screens in an attempt to make sense of what happened during the overnight session in Asia. The market has been very volatile in the last 24 hours, which makes this trade even riskier than it normally would be. I start to contemplate the risk/reward of the different prices I might show. If I show him too good (i.e., too low) of an offer, I might lose a lot of money before I have had a chance to neutralize my risk. If I show him too high of an offer, John’s client would likely trade with a competitor instead and possibly put John in the penalty box for a week. The “penalty box” is Wall Street lingo meaning that a client has decided not to do business with you for a certain period of time. John and his team won’t be happy with me if we get put in the penalty box. 

Twenty-two seconds have now passed since John originally called for me. I do one last calculation in my head. As I reach for line 1 to give John his price, Julie’s voice bellows over the loudspeaker. “Sloyer, pick up line 2.” Julie is also a salesperson. She is John’s boss and covers some of the most important clients for the firm. She is not into the use of the word “Dog” as a term of endearment.  

I reach for line 2 and get connected to Julie through my second phone. I now have phones to both my ears. During my two years on the job, I have become quite dextrous with the phone’s mute buttons. I can seamlessly carry on two different conversations with two different phones at the same time without confusion. 

“Give me 15 seconds, Jules, I’m just finishing up with John.” 

“No,” she barks back. “This is super important.”

“Too bad,” I say, feeling a rush of validation from knowing that everyone around me just heard me tell one of the most important people on our floor that she needs to wait.  

“Sloy-Dog I need that price,” I hear John shout over the loudspeaker. We are still connected 1:1 through the internal phone system on line 1, but John wants to make sure that all 600 people on the trading floor, which covers the size of a football field, don’t forget how important his client (and thus he) is for the firm. I secretly appreciate that John has done this. Now 600 people know how important I am. This is my third rush of validation. 

I push the button for line 1, “I am $36 offer, John.” This means that I would be willing to sell this derivative to John’s client for $36. 

Without waiting for a response, I hit line 2. “Jules, what do ya need?”

“I need an offer on 4000 S&P March 1300 calls. It’s for Joe.” Joe is Julie’s biggest client. 

I scan the screens again. Julie’s trade is the same as John’s, except it is even bigger. And thus riskier. 

“You’re done!” I hear John scream (“you’re done” is Wall Street lingo meaning that the client has agreed to the price and the trade is now completed). Another rush comes over me. Doing a trade means more risk, but more impactfully for me in that moment, it means more validation and a greater sense of transient importance.  

“Sloyer, don’t forget about me,” Julie’s voice echoes again over the loudspeaker. More adrenaline for the system. 

How could I forget about Julie? She practically owns this place. 

I do a quick scan of my five screens followed by more calculations as I contemplate what price to show Julie. 

It’s now 9:36am. 

The day will continue on like this for 6.5 more hours... 

I am exhausted, but I would never know it. I feel alive. I feel energized. I feel validated. I feel like I could do this for another 10 years.

The Seduction of Validation

Despite the risk, all the stress, and all the overstimulation, according to my 24-year old self, this was the perfect job for me. For those of you familiar with the Enneagram personality framework, I am a Type 3 (“The Achiever”) with a 2 Wing (“The Helper”). My dominant need is to be seen as successful. My secondary need is to be needed. Being a trader at an investment bank, where salespeople relied on me to make prices for their clients and my bosses relied on me to generate revenue by trading (during a time when you didn’t need a PhD in rocket science to be a successful trader), allowed me to get both. Validation is a seductive drug. And my addiction was not only socially acceptable, it was actually societally encouraged. 

To say that I suffered from a lack of humility during this time would be an understatement. Brené Brown defines narcissism as “the shame-based fear of being ordinary.” With that definition, I was a textbook case.

Part I: The Shame-Based Fear...

Despite being very confident on the outside, I was carrying around bucket loads of shame. Well, it was more like truckloads. Some of the shame I was aware of. Most of it I wasn’t really aware of. The thing about shame is regardless of how aware you are of it, it’s a really unpleasant emotion to feel. In my own experience, the consequences of shame have been anger (so I don’t have to feel the shame), a withdrawal from self-expression and vulnerability (so I don’t get “found out” for not being who I say I am), and hypocritical judgment of others (so my ego can see itself as different from people who have the same undesirable characteristics that it possesses).   

Here are a few specific examples of where I felt shame during my time working at the bank...

• I walked onto the trading floor almost everyday fearing that I would get “found out” for not being worthy of the job. My role required quantitative knowledge, and despite doing it for 11 years, there was one particular mathematical formula that is essential to understanding equity derivatives (the Black Scholes formula) that I never understood. Regardless of any positive feedback or promotions I received over the years, I felt like an imposter. I felt like I had tricked my bosses and co-workers into thinking that I was a lot more competent than I was. The effect was that I was constantly and inauthentically trying to prove myself, which was exhausting for me and everyone else around me. 

• In addition to the part of me that told me that I did not deserve to be there, there was another part of me that felt shame when others didn’t recognize me for my value. It was like my internal voice was saying: “you don’t deserve this” and my external voice was like “hey, why can’t you see how much I deserve this?” It was a very painful paradox.

• Just like in many work environments, there was a certain amount of greed, materialism, and self-promotion that existed in the culture. I judged others for being this way, and yet deep down, I knew that many of my actions and ways of thinking were right up there with the worst of them. 

• I carried around shame because of anxiety with respect to money. Again, there was a paradox. I feared that not having enough would lead to less peace of mind, and even when I had enough, I still worried about it and thus never really had that peace of mind that the money was supposed to solve in the first place. 

• I felt shame for my hypocrisy. There was one particular example when I remember getting upset with interns because they didn’t understand the same important formula that I didn’t understand. 

• I was carrying around shame for my anger, which was ironically often a by-product of the shame from not feeling like I was enough. At the time, I had been studying Buddhism and some of the other Eastern religious philosophies which clearly warn against the dangers of anger. I saw myself as a pretty self-aware guy, and despite this knowledge, I would sometimes lose my sh*t when things didn’t go my way. The Buddha said anger has a “honeyed tip” and a “poisoned root.” And I was a sucker for the honey one too many times.

Part II: ...Fear of Being Ordinary

I wanted to be anything but ordinary. Ordinary was perhaps the biggest insult you could have thrown at me. Although I never would have admitted it, I think I probably would have preferred to have failed because at least I would have a good comeback story to write about in my memoir one day. But deep down, more than just wanting the negation of ordinary, I feared I would never be enough. I feared I would never be extraordinary enough. 

When we think of humility at Upbuild, we think of it as both the intellectual and deeply emotional understanding that: 

1. Nothing that I have is really mine

2. Anything that I am is mostly due to my teachers

3. I can’t figure it out on my own, and 

4. It’s not about me. 

It’s crazy how little humility there was in my desire to be extraordinary. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back on it, I can see how my very loosely held definition of extraordinary was ungrounded. It was not based on a true desire to serve or be in meaningful connection with others. It was based on flimsy notions like getting recognition and being liked by others. And so the desire to be extraordinary ran in direct opposition to having humility because: 

1. I believed most everything that I had was mine

2. I believed I was where I was mostly because of my hard work 

3. I believed I could figure out pretty much anything on my own, and

4. I was at the center of my universe.  

10 Years Later

So now that I work for Upbuild, has all of this “shame-based fear of being ordinary” gone away? Unfortunately, that has not been my journey of personal development.

Many of these behaviors and tendencies have been with me since childhood, and even though I am now more clear on why they don’t serve me, they are also what I have been relying on to keep me safe, get me praise (and thus feel accepted), and push me towards my potential. They have been my armor and taking them off feels ridiculously scary and vulnerable.

In my current life, the external circumstances surrounding the shame are different: there is no longer a PA system, I have three co-workers instead of 30,000, we use Zoom instead of the Bloomberg Application, I have one screen instead of five, and no one calls me Sloy-Dog. But many of the same flavors of shame are still there. I still fear being “found out” for not being empathetic and competent enough as a coach. I still wake up most days hoping someone will see value in me that they didn’t see yesterday. And I feel hypocritical when I get angry with my own loved ones even as I am working with my coaching clients to help them work through their anger. 

Real Humility

I was having a conversation with Rasanath a few months back. We were discussing how humility was a key point of focus for me this year in terms of my own psychological and spiritual growth. I told him how I was committed to reducing my need for validation in order to more beneficially serve the needs of others. While my heart was very much in the right place, I was still a little off in my approach. With one of his classic “wisdom bombs,” he reminded me of something he had picked up from his reading of the American Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton: real humility comes when we actually realize how much validation we need. It comes when we can truly experience our own shame and suffering that results from looking externally for our sense of self-worth. And real humility is a paradox because as soon as we start thinking “hey I’m getting good at this humility thing,” by definition, we are no longer humble.

For me, the last few years and in particular the last few months, including the writing of the reflection that you are reading right now, have been very much about seeing how much validation I need. They have also been about the sitting with the discomfort that has come from the shame of being so dependent on the validation. And while it might be nostalgic to relive my trading floor experiences from a decade ago, it was not an enjoyable experience to relive the tucked away shame that was present in those experiences.

As our team members at Upbuild often remind one another, the work of personal growth is not supposed to be fun. And it’s certainly not supposed to be easy. And if it ever does feel pleasant for an extended period of time, it is likely a clue that it has become an intellectual exercise meant to provide us with temporary relief from our pain, rather than a sincere effort to make progress. So, for now, I am sitting with my discomfort. I am sitting with the suffering. I am doing my best to resist the typical numbing mechanisms. And I am constantly reminding myself of the pillars of humility: nothing that I have is really mine, anything that I am is mostly due to my teachers, I can’t figure it out on my own, and it’s not about me. I am just a vessel for love, wisdom, and hope to flow through. 

**the names from the scene on the trading floor are not the names of real people

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Loneliness and the Meanings We Make of It

Am I alone? A question loaded with implications and one that has plagued me for as long as I remember. It has plagued me through the best of times and the worst of times. It has plagued me through my most intimate relationships and through prolonged periods of singleness. It has plagued me while traveling alone and while surrounded by large groups of people. It has plagued me in the seconds before I fall asleep and in the moments just after I wake. And it is plaguing me now as the arbitrary existence of nation-states and red-tape bureaucracy is forcing me to live 7000 miles from my wife. 

But before I attempt to answer the question, why is it important? Why does the mere thought, “Am I alone,” incite such anxiety within us? We humans are pretty rational creatures, so there must be some rational explanation for why we have this great fear that the answer might, in fact, be “yes.”  

First of all, we know from experience that many of our most fulfilling moments in life have been in the presence of another person. We have experienced feelings of true emotional and physical connection with another, we have been supported and provided support in times of need, and we have shared experiences with others that simply would not have been the same if we had been alone.

Secondly, we understand that life often works better when we have others around us. It sometimes feels as if the world is made for couples with the ubiquitous 2 for 1 specials and Costco-esque shopping opportunities. After all, no sane individual can eat three pounds of blueberries before they go rotten no matter how many cancer-fighting antioxidants they might have. Our jokes are funnier when others are around to laugh at them. Activities like eating out at a restaurant or going to the cinema can be more comfortable in the presence of another. Taxis are cheaper when we share them with others. We can comfortably fall asleep in the lap of another while waiting at the departure gate for our plane to take off, and if we need to use the bathroom, we don’t have to lug all of our luggage with us across the airport.

From a pure Darwinian survival of the fittest perspective, our chances of continued existence on this earth are greatly increased if we have another. If we get sick or have an accident, having a companion can be the difference between life and death. A friend or partner can give us CPR, call an ambulance, and literally or figuratively talk us back from the edge.

Emotional well being, lower stress levels, and lower heart rates may all be associated with having a companion. Similar to having a dog, being in the presence of another can remove us from the stresses of being in our own head. From life experience, I know that caring more about others is much more rewarding and stress mitigating than caring about myself, even if I don’t always act like I know it. Being in love has taught me this. And of course, there is the ability of the other to comfort us during difficult situations. Even if the other person is unable to change the circumstances of a situation, simply being told “everything is okay” or being on the receiving end of a gigantic hug can be all the difference.

And finally, there is that good old procreation thing. It has been in our nature since our early ancestors appeared on earth 1-2 million years ago to be adamant about passing on our genes to the next generation before we die. Whether it be for reasons of the ego or because we have some unselfish inclination to help the species extend its existence, I will never be sure. But having a partner makes that process a bit more seamless and socially acceptable.

So yea, it seems pretty reasonable that the question, “Am I alone in this world?” might bring on the kind of anxiety that it does.

But loneliness is not all bad. In fact, some pretty smart people have advised me that it is the gateway to personal growth. Being alone can give us the space we need to experience peace of mind. It can give us the freedom to be creative. It can liberate us from feelings of envy, greed, and lust that we often experience when we closely observe the situations of our fellow human beings. It can liberate us from distractions so we can think, process, and reflect. It can give us an incentive to go out of our comfort zone and truly experience the world through our own eyes. 

So now on to the matter at hand...“Am I alone in the world?” 

The way I see it, this question can be answered in six different ways.

1. Literally: Am I in the presence of at least one other human being right now? Yes = not alone. No = alone.

2. Status: What is my relationship status? Serious relationship or married = not alone. Everyone else = alone.

3. Theoretical:I may be physically alone right now, but if I so desired, could I have company, either physically or virtually? Would someone pick up my call to talk to me? Would someone answer my text if I sent one? Yes = not alone. No = alone.

4. Connection: Do I feel emotionally connected to another? Can I show affection for another and have it be returned. Do others respond to my “emotional bids” (i.e. either explicit or implicit calls for love and support) and do I respond to others? Yes = not alone. Not = alone.

5. Understanding: Do the people around me and in my life see me as I truly am? Do they see me for the real me? Have they experienced my vulnerability? Do they see past my song-and-dance and the barriers that my ego puts up? Do they see through to the loving, generous, fun-loving individual that is underneath? Yes = not alone. No = alone.

This one is particularly tricky because sometimes we don’t even know who we truly are. And for me personally, this one is intensely complicated because even in my most vulnerable moments, I find that my ego still holds something back. It is almost like a controlled vulnerability, as I read the other person to determine how I should be vulnerable, instead of just actually being vulnerable in the true sense of the world. I don’t believe it is manipulative as it sounds, but I do believe other people can sometimes sense this, and it can prevent them from feeling truly close to me and from fully seeing me for who I am.

6. Acceptance: Do I truly accept others for the way they are and do they accept me for the way I am? Do I love others in my life unconditionally and do others love me unconditionally? No = alone. Yes = not alone.

Another very tricky one because other than a parents love for a child (which I have not yet experienced myself from a parent’s perspective), I can’t think of any love that is truly unconditional. In my own experience, there always seems to be conditions on love with Condition #1 being I won’t love you unless you love me 

So, for most of us, the question “Am I alone?” is difficult to answer with any sort of conviction because the answers to the questions above are not binary and are constantly changing. One minute, we may feel incredibly connected to and understood by those around us, and the next minute, we may feel that there is not a single other soul out there who can even begin to grasp what we are going through. Even if external circumstances don’t necessarily change, our brain chemistry is such that consistent answers to these questions are very hard to come by.

And for me personally, I find the loneliest times to be when the answers above point to contradicting conclusions. Specifically, I feel the most lonely when I feel lonely IN SPITE OF being surrounded by a ton of friends or having a romantic partner. When I am physically alone, it is easy to understand why I feel lonely. But when I am not physically alone, and I still feel alone, it throws me off my rocker. It is extremely disconcerting, and only serves to strengthen the discomfort of this emotion we call loneliness.

So, as I have gotten older and experienced a few more things in life, it has become clear to me that the quality of “aloneness” has nothing to do with the number of people around. It might have something to do with the quality of the people around. Or maybe more accurately, it reflects the quality of our relationships. I feel way less alone knowing there is a friend across the world who “gets it” and “gets me” than a guy standing next to me who cannot even begin to understand what I am going through. Carl Jung said, “Loneliness doesn’t come from having no one around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that are important to you.”

So...now REALLY on to the matter at hand...“Am I alone in this world?”

Yes and no. Yes, because factually, I am an individual. I am alone in the physical space that I occupy. And when I go to bed at night and close my eyes, even if there is someone lying next to me, the fact remains that I am alone in my mind and in the darkness that my eyes can see. And no. No, because I am not going it alone in this world. I share the planet with 7 billion other humans, and if I can humbly attempt to shed the layers of my ego, I can serve as pillars of support for many of them, and in turn be served myself. I have access to the infinite love of others and by being truly vulnerable (not just pretend vulnerable like I have a tendency to do), I can be truly “gotten.”

Paul Tillich put it nicely when he said, “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.” Although we don’t want to re-frame the emotion just for the sake of avoiding the emotion, this quote is meaningful in that it reminds us that there are two sides of every coin. And with loneliness, the other side represents tremendous opportunities for growth to become truer and more fully expressed versions of ourselves. 

The Truth about Non-Truth Shall Set You Free

They say the truth shall set you free. From what, you might ask. Maybe it is from others, maybe it is from delusion, maybe it is from ourselves. I am not exactly sure. But what I have become more present to as I have gotten older is the feeling I get when there is real truth happening.

Truth can happen in an endless variety of forms: an insight, a conversation, a criticism, a thought, a discovery about the nature of myself, a discovery about the nature of reality, or just the simple truth of the present moment.

There are lots of ways to feel good, but I find it hard to beat the feeling I get when I discover truth for myself or have truth bestowed upon me by others. For the latter, however, even if the insight comes from someone else, I have to get fully present to the truth for myself for that feeling to exist.

So why? Why do we feel good when we experience truth? Truth is light. Pretense and delusion are heavy. Truth is easy. Pretense and delusion are complicated. They are full of gray areas. With truth, there is nothing to hide and nothing to cover up. No effort needs to be made to disguise truth from the world. Secrets can take on an entire life of their own. Once we are hiding something from ourselves or from others (even if we are not aware of the fact that we are hiding it), we become slaves to the secret. It may feel as if our survival depends on the maintenance of this secret. We lose our freedom to operate with love, creativity, and empathy in the world.

The high from truth is akin is to the high from an “A-Ha” moment. Chemicals are literally released in our brain. We rid ourselves of the proverbial “monkey on our back.” The world becomes our oyster.

And isn’t it interesting how real truth is the exception rather than the rule? We have to work hard to discover real truth. We don’t have to work very hard to discover delusion. The hard work and lack of freedom comes from the maintenance of the delusion, rather than the discovery itself.

In my almost daily existential quest to discover why I am here and what I should be doing while I am here, I think a lot about the delusions that are running, and potentially ruining, my life. One of these pretenses is the notion that “I got this” and “I can do it on my own.” Very much related is the impossibly high standard I sometimes hold others to, even when I am not close to upholding this standard myself. These notions are made even more exhausting and heavy by the fact that I am not aware that I am carrying them around with me most of the time. I do things like pretend I have heard of that famous actor when I have no idea who he is, pretend that it doesn’t bother me when some friends made plans without me, or that I don’t always need the love and support of the people who care about me. I do things like pretend that answers are obvious even when they are not and give others a hard time for making mistakes. Ideas like perfection and “I can do it all on my own” are not truths. They are my delusions. They are my pretenses. And they make life a whole lot more sub-optimal than it has the potential to be.

The complicated part about all of this is that pretense and facades are often pretenses and facades for a reason. It is not that we are malicious or ill-intentioned people when we have them. We can’t necessarily see them ourselves. And almost by definition, they have a gray area, so there is often truth embedded within them. They often serve a purpose. They fuel our voracious egos. They make us feel protected from the difficulties of the world. They are our defense mechanisms. They are how we have always dealt with our insecurities. They run deep. They are engrained within us. And if we let go of them, we would be letting go of parts of us that we might feel we could not live without.

And in discovering these for myself, I come face to face with the truth of just how much of my life is lived in pretense, delusion, and a pho-reality. But herein lies the silver lining, which is that one of the "truest truths" comes in the form of telling the truth about not telling the truth, from being authentic about being inauthentic. Once we peel the layers of the ego and admit to ourselves and others what is really happening, then we are immediately living in a world of truth. The heaviness, the complications, and the exhaustion all begin to fade away. We become unfettered from the shackles of delusion. Light and liberty prevail. The truth about non-truth has indeed set us free.

Intellectualizing vs. Feeling Deeply

As I begin my journey into the world of coaching, I can’t help but think this is an opportunity to reconnect with my emotions. But, to be honest, I am scared. I am scared not that I won’t be a decent coach. That may be true, but what I am scared of is that I don’t have enough capacity to truly feel deeply the pain and suffering of what others experience in their lives. I have a fear of failure in my emotional range...in being able to experience true empathy and compassion. In a life where I have been successful in different arenas, I can’t really say the same thing about the emotional arena.

Whether it be with good friends who might be going through a tough moment in their lives or with complete strangers who are less fortunate in terms of being able to afford life's necessities, it is often not my first or my natural instinct to feel their pain. And naturally, if I can’t feel their pain, it is almost impossible to be with their pain and be there for them emotionally in the way that they may need it. And I feel ashamed about this.

To be clear, true empathy is different than doing good for others and trying to make the world a better place. Taking action, being involved in philanthropy, and being a champion for the underserved, have always been important to me. Once a need is articulated, and I find myself with the motivation and resources to take it on, I am quick to serve others. But this is precisely not what I am talking about.  

In fact, my fear of failure when it comes to my own empathy is only exacerbated by the fact that I do indeed "do good" in this world. How could I be a champion for those whom I have never met, but I often can’t meet the emotional needs of my close family and friends? Am I an emotional fraud?  Do I have a heart of stone to be able to look someone in the eye and ask them to donate to a cause when I don’t feel the feelings at that exact moment that most people probably do when they are doing acts of kindness? Could I only be doing it to satisfy the needs of my own ego or to quench my thirst for external validation? Or am I just hoping to fake it until I make it? Maybe if I do enough good, I will start to feel the same feelings that most “good” people usually do? Yes, lots of cognitive dissonance and issues regarding identity going on here. My actions paint one picture of me. My internal feelings another. And it eats me up inside.

I would be too hard on myself if I said that I never experienced empathy. I do have my moments. When my proverbial cup is full (when I feel supported and loved and my ego has been validated), I can more easily feel what others are going through. During these moments, I really get it. I deeply feel it. And it is often from these fleeting moments that my longer lasting desire to serve comes from. After feeling the feeling once, even only if for a split second, I can “intellectualize” the feeling, “storing” and “preserving” it so I can talk about it and take action based on it. The feeling may be gone, but somehow, the inspiration remains. 

It would represent a big step on my journey of emotional growth (and in my journey to become a coach) if I can somehow find a way to reconnect more frequently and more deeply with the original feelings that got me here in the first place.

So maybe that is what this coaching journey is all about. A chance to un-intellectualize and re-emotionalize my emotions. A chance to drop the ego, a chance to drop the talk about how much good we have done or might be able to do...a chance to finally be there with the people who need a smile and to be listened to more than anything else.