Dear Students (and the rest of us), we highly recommend this article:
5 Ways to Distinguish Your Calling From Your Ego BY SHELLEY PREVOST
Your ego and your “calling” in life can look surprisingly similar. Both pull you toward the realization of your desires. Both can completely consume your waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours with frenetic thoughts and sparks of brilliance. They can also manifest very similar outcomes–money, fame, and power. And they can both leave you feeling exhausted.
Ego is necessary and important because it does the work to assemble your personality. It manages your fragile identity while you figure out who you are. It protects you from the onslaught of societal expectations and motivates you to work hard and achieve great things.
But ego alone can also skew you toward thinking that hard work and achievement are the goals in life.
If your ego is what assembles your personality and manages your identity, then your calling is invested in making sure it’s authentic–who you really are–not just a persona you show the world.
Here are some ways to decipher which one is really driving your work.
Ego fears not having or doing something. Calling fears not expressing or being something.
The lifeblood of the ego is fear. Its primary function is to preserve your identity, but it fears your unworthiness. As a result, ego pushes you harder in order to achieve more. Ego communicates to you through “oughts,” “musts,” and “shoulds,” persuading you to believe that by achieving more and more, you must be worthy, right?
A calling expresses itself quietly, through the expression of subtle clues throughout your life. It is unconcerned with you attaining or accomplishing anything. Its primary function is to be a conduit for expressing your true self to the world. What you DO with that expression is less important.
Ego needs anxiety to survive. Calling needs silence to survive.
Ego not only breeds on anxiety, it requires anxiety in order to decide which aspects of your personality will be dominant, and which ones will be dormant.
Wherever you feel the most insecurity is where your ego will work overtime to “fix.” The ego needs anxiety to pinpoint the problem, then course corrects by disavowing this pesky aspect of your personality. Unfortunately, what the ego finds annoying or disruptive can also be your greatest gift to the world.
A calling, on the other hand, is discovered through observation and reflection, which is rarely found in a noisy environment. Listening to your life and discovering what it’s Continue reading →