Ego Strikes Out on Two Fronts

Let’s set the scene: thirty-something-year-old lawyer arguing a case in court. She doesn’t have a ton of litigation experience. Today is real-world on-the-job training. Recently, she’d been arguing a case in court but felt anxious, caught up in worrying whether she was making good arguments, and what impression she was making on others. This time, even though she had not prepared as much, she had replaced the anxiety with confidence.

What made the difference?

This is from a recent session in which one of my patients was detailing some progress she had made in working with her anxiety. When I asked her to add a bit of color to what had happened, she described it this way: “I was prepared, but much less prepared than last time, yet it went so much better because I didn’t feel stressed about the situation at all. I was not worried about messing something up, so I could just be normal.” She went on to point out that she’d been thrown many curve balls in the process, but found she could respond to them with remarkable ease, as though she were “in a normal conversation” with a colleague instead of batting practice.

How was she becoming a courtroom slugger despite only having played a little while in the major leagues? And how can we all learn some nuggets of wisdom from watching her at bat?

Let’s start with what was actually making her anxious that first time. It wasn’t the law (she knew her stuff). It was the audience. Am I making a good impression? Do I sound stupid? Am I about to be found out? And who’s the star of every one of those questions? Not the case. Her. That’s ego. We usually picture ego as someone strutting around sure they’re the smartest person in the room, but in a courtroom ego strikes out in two ways: thinking too highly of ourselves, and thinking too little of ourselves.

The anxious version of ego is something that she and I had been circling for months. Yet, for her, ego doesn’t only show up when she’s nervous. She’s navigating a high-powered job at a high-powered law firm that, let’s just say, didn’t have any ego vacancies. Her current case is set to go to trial in a few months, and lately the ego had been playing hardball on a different field: an associate senior to her who she worried was leading them the wrong way. How does she know this?

Based on her previous experience (she’s been down that road before), she can see where things are heading. As she put it, “I’m not right about everything, but fundamentally, I am [right] here.” She pointed out how she was getting frustrated in meetings, to the point where a partner checked in with her later to ask her what was going on. She knew that frustration wasn’t helping, yet didn’t know how to separate that from getting the task at hand done.

The easy thing here would be for me to tell her to check her swing; in this case check her ego. Take a breath, be more humble, let it go etc. This is pretty useless on several fronts: giving advice = lazy therapy, and telling someone to be humble doesn’t magically excise ego from the brain. Perhaps more importantly, she isn’t wrong. To mix metaphors here, the senior associate really may be steering the case toward a ditch, and she really has watched this movie before. If I’d said something like “sounds like a bit of ego talking there, huh?” she’d have been well within her rights to throw a legal pad at me (and I’d have deserved it).

So her accuracy isn’t the problem. As she walked me through the situation, “This approach is going to fail” showed up in the same breath as “and why am I the only one who can see it, and why do I always have to do everyone else’s job?” Get out your legal pad and make a note of this: One of those is a fact. The other is ego. And when the two ride together, when the ego is driving with the fact in the passenger seat, both get driven off the cliff (not exactly Thelma and Louise-style, but you can picture how this movie ends).

Why would that be? Here I’d point to some work from my lab. We’ve measured how different mental states actually feel to people, and a pattern shows up: states like anxiety, craving, and frustration feel closed and contracted, and worse, while states like curiosity and kindness feel open and expansive (and better). That closed, contracted feeling also tracks with a brain network tied to our self-focused, ego mode (all the “I, me, mine” activity). So when she’s in the grip of “I am right,” she isn’t only being hard to work with. She’s getting caught in the most closed, self-referential state her brain has on offer. Not a great place to argue a delicate point from, let alone have a collegial discussion (they are on the same team after all).

She and I walked through how these types of meetings play out. She tells the associate he’s wrong. He digs in. (Of course he does, who wouldn’t?). When we hear “that’s wrong,” most of us don’t hear a fact, we hear an attack, and the part of our brain that bristles isn’t the reasoning part, it’s the I am part. Her contracted ego wakes up his contracted ego, and now there are two closed systems defending themselves while the actual case sits on the table, untouched.

So we landed on an experiment (and I called it an experiment, because I honestly didn’t know if it would work). Play with the difference between “I am right” and “this is the right thing to do.” Say them a few times, and check your body as you do. Does one feel a little more open than the other? “I am right” plants you in the center of it. “This is the right thing to do” takes you out and lets the fact stand on its own. Same information, very different outcome. When we take ourselves out of the equation, the other person has nothing left to push against, because there’s no “me” for them to lose to. There’s just the problem, sitting where everyone can look at it together. Instead of us grabbing the steering wheel trying to force them to go with us, we let the facts drive, moving us toward the right destination (together) instead of off the cliff.

We then explored how to apply this practically. It turned into asking questions instead of making points. Instead of “that’s wrong,” something more like: “help me understand this, because I’m not following. I’ve seen this go sideways before, and I’m curious how this time is different. What am I missing here?” That shift does a few things at once. Maybe she’s missed something (it happens to everyone, even to her as she pointed out herself). She gets to understand more fully why he’s doing what he’s doing. This also helps them connect as people, on the same team, BUT this only works if she is truly curious, not fake curious. And it disarms him, because now he isn’t defending himself, he’s just explaining his thinking. Curiosity, it seems, can do what frustration keeps failing to do by force. It also happens to be that open, expansive state, which is a far better place to think from than a boiling one. A proverbial home run if not at least a triple.

Which points at the deeper thing, the one I warned her might be a year’s worth of work. Someone at a recent workshop I was co-leading asked me about ego and habits, and what came out of it was this: maybe anything that starts with “I am” is a habit. I am right. I am the only competent one here. I am the person who cleans up everyone else’s mess. Learned and reinforced a little more each time we feed them. The case doesn’t need her to be right. It needs the right thing to get done. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them makes it more likely that you strike out in the big game, leaves you frustrated and gets a “what’s up?” check from a worried partner.

At the end of the session, I didn’t hand her a summary. I asked her for hers. She said that over the next couple of weeks she’d try substituting out “this is right” for “I am right,” essentially taking herself out of the sentence. That simple single word substitution is more or less the way to keep her eye on the ball instead of herself. She could explore a way to let the fact do its job without dragging herself in behind it. And for all of us watching or playing the ego game, it may be an experiment worth doing ourselves: see if it is easier to keep your eye on the curve ball when the pitch was never aimed at or about you.

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and professor at Brown University. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. He co-founded MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction.

If you are struggling with anxiety, Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program brings together his research and clinical experience to help people build effective skills to reduce anxiety and cultivate calm (www.goingbeyondanxiety.com).

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