How to Silence Your Ego, Embrace Feedback and Develop Mastery

In the past year of doing this blog, I’d grown confident in my writing abilities. It wasn’t until I recently started as a content copywriter in an EduTech startup, that this perception was challenged big time.

The nature of startups means that everyone who works there wears multiple hats. Officially a content copywriter, I create event descriptions, write value-add blog posts, contribute to course content, and curate other engaging material. Sprinkle in some video production, interviews, event support, and social media growth and this is my job. Sometimes it’s crazy, but a good crazy, and I love it.

On one of my first pieces of written content, I received 88 edits for a 600-word blog post. As Tim Urban from Wait But Why would call my mammoth, my ego as a writer shattered into a million, tiny pieces. As my jaw hit the metaphorical ground, I carefully examined each comment and suggestion made to my writing. The hardest thing to swallow was that it all made sense — every bit of feedback was valid and made my writing better and a whole lot structurally clearer.

It felt like someone had taken a proverbial pin and bust my happy bubble of self-perception.

As the flurry of emotions ran through me, I knew I had a few options:

1. Get defensive and ignore the feedback
2. Give up and not bother improving myself, or
3. Take the feedback on board as an opportunity to evolve into as a kick-ass writer

It’s not in my nature to give up so easily, thus the first two options felt like an easy cop-out. As 1990s R&B band Jagged Edge sang, “Sometimes, what may be the best thing for you to do (is) the hardest thing for you to do.”

So I picked Option 3. The question now became: How could I positively respond to feedback and use it to develop mastery in any skill or task?

The first step is shifting my mindset.

Silencing the Ego

The ego has been a topic of philosophical pondering and intellectual discussion for eons of time.

Business consultant and author Cy Wakeman defines the ego as “a corrupt filter on reality that forms a narrative in our head.”

Think of our ego as a film producer, editing the scenes in our life and distorting the story we tell ourselves. Coupled with the fact that the human mind is evolutionarily wired towards negativity, the ego can be extremely self-limiting. The egos potential damage is reinforced by today’s startup ecosystem and entrepreneurial circles who believe the ego is the enemy we must kill.

Our egos prevent us from immersing ourselves in challenging situations that provide opportunities to grow. Anything that challenges our ego, challenges the very fabric of our reality, through how we perceive things. It’s why many of us live life avoiding anything uncomfortable because it’s safer and easier to feel self-assured and certain.

If we zoom back to the visual of my jaw-dropping disbelief, I decided to take a step back.

The feedback I received wasn’t about me directly, nor was it the end of the world.

What had landed on my lap was an opportunity for me sharpen my saw. An opportunity for me to learn, do, and get better. Whenever I feel negatively arise, I think about Discipline Equals Freedom author and former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink’s “Good”.

There is always something good that comes from what appears to be a negative situation. By opening myself up to feedback I improved my grammar, learned about Oxford Commas and obtained better flow with storytelling.

Though my ego had been shaken, acknowledging that I had been a bad writer allowed me to seek improvement and enable me to get better, which in turn helped me boost my confidence.

Unless you’re a Himalayan monk riding a wave of utter self-transcendence, it’s pretty difficult for you to always protect or completely rid of your ego. Rather than killing or cushioning it, working towards diverting our self-image to one of continual improvement is a much better use of energy.

The comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.

Silencing the Ego takeouts

• Acknowledge that most feedback isn’t about you personally
• Understanding that the ego is a distorted perception of reality, not truth itself
• Failure or perceived failure gives rise to an opportunity to improve yourself
• Choosing to improve yourself will, in turn, help build your core confidence
• It’s impossible to forever protect your ego or get rid of it — you need to work with it

The ego may seem harmless because it can’t be seen or touched, but managing it in order to develop mastery is often the most difficult step.

The second step is using feedback as a guide to action.

Use Feedback as Your Teacher

You’re always learning.

The adage that when the student is ready, the teacher appears is particularly true regarding feedback. Listening, absorbing, and responding to feedback is hard. You have to be ready and open to embrace feedback in order to act towards impactful change.

Similarly to the ‘learn’ component of the build, measure and learn process when creating a product, the same applies to receiving feedback. Feedback kickstarts our own learning process by taking information, acting, and iterating on it. In my situation, I began to take what I learned regarding style, tone, and structural feedback which looped back into future content pieces I was writing. Each time I wrote and improved, it was another cycle of my build (write), measure (feedback or metrics) and learn (adapt and improve) process.

A quick guide to writing better: Scott Adams’ ‘The Day I Became a Better Writer’. The Hemingway app and Grammarly are life-savers as well.

The third step is to rinse and repeat.

Using Feedback as Your Teacher takeouts:

• You have to be ready, open, and embrace feedback for it to be useful
• Feedback kickstarts our learning process in which we can build off

Mastery Comes with Persistence

Just as you don’t expect to go to the gym once and be a weightlifting champion, responding to feedback once off isn’t going to get you to develop mastery in anything. As Marshall Goldsmith wrote in his book, “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There”, repeating old patterns keeps you in a plateau. As Jim Rohn says, “Success is something you attract, by the person you become.”

You only become a person of mastery through consistent application.

What about that big scary monster called failure?

Firstly, it’s important to note that while you’re persevering through something you’re going to fail. For me, it was writing countless pieces of copy and having them butchered over and over again. And yeah, it does suck.

What happens though is each time I got incrementally better and over time, those increments lead to a significant improvement. The knack for sticking with something through this teething period requires a level of internal validation.

Internal validation isn’t the shiny reward or pot of beer you give yourself for a job well done. Nor is it the ego gratification and validation some receive from the opposite sex. These are false highs.

Internal validation is the ability to feel good — to have core confidence in yourself while you’re practising something. It’s easy for dismal results to sway you into giving up, however, it’s the core confidence, and the why behind your dedication to a cause that will keep you at something.

According to Bel Air’s Fresh Prince Will Smith, “The reason for practice is because its controlled failure. You’re getting to your limits with each failure until your body or mind makes the necessary adjustments where you are able to do something.”

What this means is that persistence is controlled failure, repeatedly, before you can develop mastery and kick-ass at any skill or task. For me, it’s continuing to write until I can build up confidence as a writer in my work and potentially leading to other possibilities.

The key with mastery is not seeing it as an end destination. Instead, seeing mastery as a developmental process; an evolution, means you’re constantly improving and getting better at your skill. It’s like how in martial arts, many aspire to obtain a black belt, but there levels beyond the black belt which you can attain.

Mastery Comes with Persistence takeouts:

• Mastery comes with consistency
• Internal validation is what helps you push through failure and keep going
• Consistency gives rise to controlled failure — your continual perseverance leads to failure, but will ultimately lead to success

The last step of using feedback to develop mastery isn’t about you at all, but instead focusing on something greater than yourself.

Make Being Amazing a Side Effect of Doing Something Greater

To break the ceiling of a once-off improvement, you need to adopt a craftsman mindset. Paraphrasing Cal Newport’s quote, “How is becoming a master at this skill offering some benefit to the world?”

Framing your persistence of mastering a skill, talent, or approach to a greater cause avoids falling into the trough of despair. It also prevents you falling into the trap of “I can’t be bothered” or ultimately giving up because something is “too hard.”

Viktor Frankl articulates this best in his classic, A Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

For me, becoming a better writer wasn’t just about mastering the skill or being good at my job, it was about a greater goal. The EduTech startup that I work for has an overlapping vision of myself: to empower people with education through emerging technology and design. In a world with exponential change and disruptive technology, this is my why. To help people do meaningful work that evolves with the direction of where the world is heading.

Sometimes we get so caught up in dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s that feedback becomes this scary beast we try to avoid. We take things so personally that everything becomes, as former monk Jay Shetty calls it the “Inception Effect.”

“I am, what I think, you think I am.”

Instead, mastery isn’t about living in a perception of what we think other people think of us, but rather doing something for the greater good. To achieve mastery, as Mark Twain put it, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”

Make Being Amazing a Side Effect of Doing Something Greater takeouts:

• Build a craftsman mindset and develop mastery for a cause that is greater than yourself
• Success, like happiness, is not pursued, it must ensue
• Developing mastery aligns with your why, and what you stand for
• Mastery avoids you falling into the trap of deriving self-worth based on what you think others think of you

Originally published at www.reintention.com on March 12, 2018.