Ego vs. True Self: Who’s Actually Running Your Life? - 27

Ego isn’t arrogance — it’s a survival strategy. In this episode, we explore how identity is shaped by nervous system wiring, conditioning, and the brain’s preference for what’s familiar over what’s aligned. You’ll learn why growth often feels uncomfortable even when it’s right, and how to recognize when an identity has outlived its purpose. This conversation is a grounded entry point into conscious identity change — without burning your life down to find yourself.

Related to this episode: Trust Your Inner Yes: Women’s Intuition, Prayer, Meditation & the Wisdom of the Body - 4

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2520990/episodes/17757073

Transcript

 Welcome back to the podcast, my friends. Today we are talking about the ego versus your true self and start to question who's really running my life. January tends to invite identity questions, whether we want to ask them or not.

There's something about the clean slate energy, the new year language, or the pressure to optimize ourselves that makes a lot of people quietly wonder,

Who am I actually living as right now?

And if you've noticed a growing discomfort with your life, not enough to call it a crisis, but enough that you can't seem to ignore it, I want you to know that you are not broken. You might just be outgrowing an identity that once kept you safe.

Neuroscience tells us that humans use mental models of identity to predict safety, belonging, and success. And when those models stop working, the nervous system starts to get uncomfortable, even if nothing looks wrong on the outside.

So if you've been feeling unsettled lately, it is not a personal failure. It is not an invitation to burn down your whole life. It's simply your brain signaling that an internal update is perhaps a little overdue.

So let's start by talking a little bit about what I mean when I say the ego. When we talk about ego, it's really easy to imagine something loud or arrogant, but the ego is actually really practical. It's the part of you that learn how to belong, how to succeed, and how to ultimately avoid pain.

In fact, what we call the ego is very closely tied to the brain's threat detection and reward systems. Early in life, we learn how to leverage this system and it teaches us what traits are rewarded, what behaviors keep us safe, and what versions of ourself gained approval.

Over time, these lessons get stored and start to formulate our identities.

So from a neuroscience perspective, identity is simply a set of reinforced neural pathways. Once our brain learns something and learns that something will benefit us, it just relegates that pattern to the background and it runs on autopilot. So that's what I mean. Over time, growing up, we learn these things are rewarded. This is positive, this is negative, and it reinforces these patterns in our brain that now just run on autopilot throughout our entire life.

But what this also tells us is that the brain just simply prefers what is familiar and routine, not necessarily what is aligned for us. I want you to really hear me when I say that because we're gonna come back to that concept as we move forward.

want to share a story with you about how this realization really came to a head in my own personal life early on in my career. Growing up,

I think a lot of us realize that following the rules and people pleasing got us rewards. People like it when you go out of your way to please them. People like it when you're a team player or you bend over backwards to make their life easier. And there's a part of us, part of our brain lights up when we get that positive feedback. So growing up, I was definitely kind of a straight and narrow rule follower, people pleaser, 110%. Fast forward to my career and

practicing law. While those traits really helped me get there and be successful and do the things that I needed to do to get through law school, pass the bar and get a job at a really good firm, once I started working, all of those traits really started to cut me off at the knees because I was bending over backwards and people pleasing for everybody and working more than I wanted

And as time went on, I started to feel this really deep-seated frustration because I was sort of running on autopilot, saying yes when I met no and bulldozing my boundaries and continuing the patterns that I had always continued

without really stopping to ask, do those patterns, do those practices, does that identity as a team player, people pleaser?

does that still serve me in this space? And what I came to realize was that it absolutely does not. And if anything, it really led me to just a cycle of repetitive burnout again and again when I just ran out of juice. And it wasn't something I was doing intentionally or even consciously. It's just that I had learned that this is way to show up and this is a way to get reward and accolades from people is to people please and say yes and be a team player. But it was to my own detriment. And so that's when I recognized that that neuropath

that identity, those patterns, no longer served me and a greater shift was needed.

So the lesson here is that our egos and our identity, they're not necessarily the problem on their own. The problem is that our ego assumes that the rules never change and never should change. And that's where we really get lost because over time, your identity, your ego, your patterns need to evolve to reflect who you are as you evolve.

So let's talk about how this identity, this ego quietly runs the show in the background. Because it doesn't just show up as thoughts. It shows up as patterns, patterns of over-functioning, patterns of people-pleasing, patterns of hustling past your own limits, staying in roles you've outgrown just because you're good at them.

And that one really hit home for me when I recognized just because I'm really good at being a lawyer, it doesn't mean that that's who I am anymore. And that doesn't mean that it feels a line for me anymore. I had just done it for so long, I just assumed that that's who I needed to continue to be. Because that's what the ego does. It tells us, this is who you are. This is what works for you. Don't rock the boat. This is how it's supposed to be.

And we listen and we just keep going, running those same patterns again and again while we quietly sort of boil below the surface.

that in a nutshell sort of epitomizes the vast majority of my legal career. I was running the same patterns, finding success, but there was this really great dissonance between the success that I was having, the money that I was making, and how I actually felt at home, but also internally throughout the day. It didn't feel aligned. It didn't feel right.

or exciting for me, but there was a part of me that just kept saying, like, well, this is who you are. Like, this is aligned with the person that I once told you you were. You like to argue. You like to read and write all day long and get into the little nitty gritty of details. And so I kind of had run with that identity for so long, I couldn't quite figure out, well, if that's who I am, why doesn't this feel right? And what it came down to was that that identity was something that I had really outgrowing. And in some ways, identities that had been put on me by other people

in them telling me this is who you are, this is who you're good at, and me just sort of buying in hook, line, and sinker.

Ultimately what we find is that the true self is subtle and that's why it's just so easy to ignore. Your true self doesn't arrive with a five-year plan. It just arrives early as a feeling, a very quiet no, a deep sigh of relief when you start to imagine something different. Your true self isn't interested in maintaining appearances, it's interested in feeling aligned.

What I have found is that your true self and that call to alignment

communicates typically through the body. And your body often knows the answer before it your mind does. And this is something that I talked about in an earlier podcast episode. Go back and check it out and I'll link it in the show notes. And that is that oftentimes sort of we know intuitively in our bodies before our brain, our rational side of ourselves catches up. Neuroscience calls this interoception. This is your brain's ability to sense internal signals like tension or

ease, fatigue, or expansion. It's that quiet, this doesn't really feel right anymore sensation. It's not your imagination, it's data, it's neuroscience, it's your body trying to tell you to wake up and pay attention to what's happening in your body because there's really important information happening there.

one of the most poignant experiences that I had with this concept.

came to me towards the end of my private practice experience. And I had sort of woken up and realized, I don't want to do this anymore. And something has to change. And this is no longer aligned with myself. Once I opened my cognitive brain up to that realization, it's like my body started screaming at me. And I remember going into the office and being kind of ready to start the day and do my work and feeling like my skin was crawling. Like my fight or flight sensation

I've really kicked in and I just had to leave. And anyone who practiced with me in the last few years of private practice, I was out of the office a lot because I found myself just needing to get out of that space, move my body, find a different environment. But I just I could sense in my body this desire to get away and remove myself from that environment and that space. And it was a really powerful moment for me just recognizing that, holy cow, you know, there's something in my body.

that's

having a visceral reaction to continuing on this path. And ultimately, it was that awareness mentally that something had to change in my body. I started noticing it even more because my body and my brain were suddenly speaking the same language and giving me the same messages.

So why does it feel so unsettling when we're moving into alignment and away from an old ego or identity? Our brains are prediction machines. It's constantly asking, what do I need to do to feel safe and accepted, to prevent pain and seek pleasure?

So when you consider changing your identity, your nervous system, doesn't hear growth, hears uncertainty, it hears danger, it hears potential pain.

And that is why our ego and our survival brain shows up as overthinking, trying to talk ourselves out of something, telling us all the reasons why this could go wrong. It's survival brain telling you not to leave the cave. There's dangerous things out there. Stay where you are. Stay in the place that you know. It shows up as anxiety, perfectionism, a sudden urge to double down on what you already know.

This is not weakness, it's simply biology. It is your brain trying to keep you safe. It's so interesting if I could explain this concept to you and then have you watch me go through a coaching session with a lawyer that's sort of opening up to this realization that maybe law's not for them anymore.

We go down this path, we have this discussion about how it doesn't fit for them anymore and all the reasons it doesn't feel right for them. And then not one split second later, they come back to, but you know what, I really want to make partner before I go. And they double down on that identity and what they already know. And it's just an interesting exploration of how your brain will swoop in and tell you, but you need to check this one more thing off your list, or this is really who you are. That's actually feeling kind of scary.

let's stay here and just do more here in the space that we already know. And I see it again and again and again. When your ego senses change, it doesn't ask, is this change more aligned than where I currently am? Instead it asks, is this safe? Because identity change threatens belonging, predictability, external validation, and in fact it opens you up.

to external challenge and judgment and uncertainty. That is why outgrowing an identity often feels like anxiety or grief or restlessness, even when nothing is wrong and even when you know the change is right.

It's in that moment when you start to open up and pursue an identity change, your brain experiences a temporary loss of that predictability and that activates a stress response, even if the change is

your nervous system is simply recalibrating and rebooting.

This is why shadow work is so powerful and also so misunderstood. Shadow work helps us bring unconscious identity patterns into conscious awareness, which allows the brain to form new neural pathways instead of running old ones on autopilot. But if you don't know and understand your patterning, it's difficult to understand which identities are authentic and which ones are just patterned.

And so shadow work helps you get clear on which is which, which is really me and which is just identities that were taught to me years ago, adopted and now run on autopilot. For all of these reasons, I created the 30 day shadow work identity reset on my premium podcast this Because identity isn't just a mindset issue, it's a nervous system issue.

In the premium content, over the course of 30 days in the month of January, we will explore the ego roles that you've been living inside, the shadow beliefs that kept those roles in place, and how to reconnect with your true self without burning your life down. This is not about becoming somebody new. It's about releasing what's outdated.

So I'll give you an example because I have gone through the 30 day identity reset work and that's why I'm releasing it because it was so powerful for me. When I was going through that work, one of the things we explore is sort of what identity role did you adopt within your childhood, within your family, within your social group? And what I realized, I came from a large family, I have three siblings, and my role sort of became the one who doesn't make way.

right? Like my brothers were doing all of their things and getting into trouble and causing issues and forgetting things and this that and the other. And it was sort of expected that I would be the one that would fix those things, take care of those things, but also not cause any waves of my own. So fast forward to me as a grown woman in her 40s, I have a really hard time getting into trouble.

I am very conflict averse and have been historically and that has really come to light.

As I have changed my identity over these last 10 years, moving away from a formal practice of law and getting into all this stuff and putting all this out there into the ether, I started to really recognize that there was a real discomfort in airing out my life and my change and identity because I felt like it was getting me in trouble. People were going to be mad at me. People were going to judge me. My parents were going to be disappointed. My old law partners were going to judge me.

and say I made a mistake, it all felt like I was getting in trouble. And so early on as I was starting this work, I recognized that I had adopted this identity around someone who, you know, plays it safe, is kind of a rule follower, does what she's told and not really a risk taker. And it felt like home to me.

But as an entrepreneur, that is antithetical to everything that we do. Right? You're always putting yourself out there. You're always risking getting in trouble, doing something wrong, having someone judge you. And so that identity of mine, being a rule follower, being kind of traditional, kind of like check the boxes and just move along in your legal career, I had to let that go and really sort of embrace this messy, you know, more risk tolerant part of myself in order to evolve. Because if I didn't shift that identity, I was always

going to play small in my business. And so this identity reset work really helped me see that at a very young age, I adopted this idea, this identity of myself as someone who doesn't cause problems, who doesn't get in trouble and just does what she's told. And I had to let that identity go and develop comfort around that and understand why I needed it then and why I don't need it now. So that's a very long way of saying.

that this identity work can be tremendously powerful in understanding why certain things are hard, why certain things don't feel right, why certain things cause you so much emotional strife and where that comes from. So if this resonates with you, I would really encourage you to check out the premium podcast content. It's $5 a month for Ladyish Unfiltered Plus, and you'll get access to that 30-day identity reset.

So in sum today, if you've been feeling disoriented as we start this new year, just explore a simple reframe. Discomfort doesn't mean that you're off track. Sometimes it means that you're finally ready to live as yourself, not the version of you that learned how to survive.

Thank you again for joining me today. If this information resonated with you, please share it with someone else that could benefit from this guidance as well.

I hope to see you again in two weeks when we're gonna be exploring, okay, I've outgrown identity, I get it, I hear you. Now what the hell do I do with it and how do I move forward? In addition, for those of on the premium podcast content, you get the companion daily shadow work exercises to take this month of identity exploration a little bit farther.

I will see you all in a few weeks as we continue this discussion.