Are you really happy with what your occupation in life is, your profession, or are you just hanging in there in your business because of your ego. What needs to be determined is distinguishing the two, deciding what’s guiding you, your ego or your true calling.
This because your ego and true calling in life appears strikingly similar. What both will do is gravitate you towards the realization of what you want, your desires. Both will completely consume your life, when you’re awake or in your dreams, by flooding you with frenetic thoughts of brilliance.
They can also both manifest similar outcomes, such as, fame, money, prestige, and power. They both have the ability to leave you feeling completely exhausted.
The Big Ego Syndrome
Having an ego is important and necessary since it’ll do all the work in assembling your personality, on outline of who you are. It manages and proclaims your fragile identity while figuring out what your voids are.
It will also protect you from the onslaught of expectations while it motivates you to work yet harder, achieving greater things than what your peers are able to do. It places you in the realm of competition.
Know that ego can also isolate you into thinking that any and all achievement and hard work are the sole goals of your life and existence.
If your ego is responsible for your personality while managing your identity, your true “calling” is more invested in making sure that it’s authentic, real, displaying who you really are, and not just the persona or image of who you think you are in the world.
Is It Ego Or Is It Calling
There are ways to determine which is commanding your life, directing what you do. What the ego fears is not having or doing something, while what your calling fears is not being able to express or be something.
Know that the motivator of the ego is always fear and failure. That its primary function is preserving your identity, while fearing your unworthiness. As a result, what your ego does is it pushes you harder so that you can achieve even more.
Your ego will communicate with you through “you must” “you have to” or “you should,” persuading you to think and believe that you need to achieve more, that you need to be worthy in the eyes of others.
Your Life Calling
What your life calling does is it’ll express itself to you quietly, through subtle silent clues scattered throughout your life. It doesn’t concern itself with you needing to attain or accomplish anything. It creates.
Your calling’s primary function is to act as a conduit for expressing what your true self is for the world to see. What you decide to do with that expression is up to you, and not as important. What the ego needs is anxiety for it to survive, while what your calling needs is silence.
Ego And The Fear Factor
What your ego breeds on is stress, as it needs anxiety in order to decide which areas of your personality will become dominant, and which ones should remain dormant. Where you display the most insecurity is where your ego will go and repair.
The ego uses your anxiety to pinpoint where the problem is, and will then go and correct it by disavowing all of the annoying aspects of your personality. Unfortunately, what the ego finds disruptive can also be your greatest gift.
Showing Your True Colors
A calling is always discovered through observation as well as reflection, which are not found in noisy environments or external forces and pressure.
It listens to your life, your hopes, and then discovers and enhances what it’s asking, which requires more silence than what you may be comfortable with. What ego results in is burnout, while calling results in fulfillment.
The definition of burnout is that it’s not about offering too much of yourself, but more about trying to give more of what you don’t have. Ego will usually end in burnout since it’s constantly consuming resources which you don’t have, this in order to push you towards a better version of yourself.
The Ego And The Calling
A calling is an expression of what your true nature is, and it can only end in fulfillment. You know the feeling of satisfaction whenever you do something that you absolutely love, that’s your true calling showing itself. Ego will focus on the result, while your calling will always focus on the process.
Since ego needs to manage anxiety to achieve more, it becomes concerned with the results. By focusing on just the end outcome, what your ego gets is validation that all of its work is worth it. Without any satisfactory results, all of the striving becomes pointless.
A calling will reveal itself through self-discovery. It comes from within and only reveals itself when it pays attention to how your life unfolds. Instead of it needing to manage the outcome, your calling handles the stress of ambiguity.
It realizes that tension reveals something that you couldn’t learn otherwise. Your ego needs to preserve the self, while your calling has a need to impact others.
Ego Is All “Me” While Your Calling Is “You”
Your ego is only concerned with preserving whatever it is it wants. The ego may at times be interested in helping others, but it isn’t inherently motivated to serve them. It’s motivated by managing and maintaining your identity.
A calling always begins with the expression of the self, but will always move towards the needs of others. It’s thought that your calling is that place where your gladness meets the deep needs of the world.
While your ego has the job of helping you to function properly in the world, it’s your true calling which creates more of an authentic, genuine you to others.