Squash Your Ego: 3 Ways a Mindset of Service Is Crucial to Your Goals

Your ego is important to your goals, but the caveat is that it’s a balancing act. While ego will increase your self-esteem and help you to block out other people’s opinions, it can also significantly deter you from your path -- if you let it.

Balance comes in the form of your marriage between your selfish desires and a selfless approach to achieving your goals. This is called a service mindset, and can be a very powerful tool to help you along your path. You don’t have to lose your “edge” to have a service mindset. Be open to tweaking your perspective a bit and getting outside of yourself, and you’ll see that the benefits of this approach are plentiful.

Squash Your Ego: 3 Ways a Mindset of Service Is Crucial to Your Goals

Ego is important if you want to succeed. If you’ve ever heard someone describe their fear of losing their “edge,” they are usually referring to their ego. While some people will will tell you that you can achieve great things without any ego, being selfless the entire time, there’s a good chance they are wrong. As nice as that sounds on paper, there are times when having an ego will benefit you.

How? There will be many times where you need to be the only person in the room, silently putting in the work to realize your dreams. You need to be able to block out the noise around you, including the opinions of others. The strong sense of self-esteem and self-importance that your ego provides will help you do that.

Your goal, no matter how lofty it is, is an extension of who you are as a person. That is true if you are losing weight, advancing your career, or chasing bigger paychecks. As your journey won’t be the same as another person’s, your results will be unique to you. There comes a point on your journey where you realize no one truly understands just how much work you’ve put in anymore. Those who accept that stand a greater chance of getting the result they are after.

In that way, your ego is important to your goals, but the caveat is that it’s all a balancing act. While ego will increase your self-esteem and help you to block out other people’s opinions, it can also significantly deter you from your path if you let it.

There are significant disadvantages to viewing the world solely as an extension of oneself. By doing so, you limit your perspective and ability to solve problems as you make progress. If you take it too far, there’s a chance you will turn people off to you as a person along the way.

Balance comes in the form of your marriage between your selfish desires and a selfless approach to achieving your goals. This is called a service mindset, and can be a very powerful tool to help you along your path. You don’t have to lose your “edge” to have a service mindset. Be open to tweaking your perspective a bit and getting outside of yourself, and you’ll see that the benefits of this approach are plentiful.

With that, I offer you three examples of how adopting a mindset of serving others can make the path to your goals easier and more enjoyable.

1. Accountability to others becomes your driver of motivation

Not many things in this world naturally motivate us more than accountability. We are far more likely to show up and deliver when other people are watching what we do.

It’s pretty simple: when you shift the focus from yourself to others, your motivation to get work done no longer solely relies on whether you feel like working hard that day or not. A mindset of service will naturally incentivize you to get work done, even when your goal is selfish in nature.

As an example of a selfish goal, pretend that you’ve spent years trying to lose weight because you believe it will contribute to you looking more attractive. What would happen if you shifted your motivation for losing weight to a more selfless point of view, like being healthy enough to spend time with your family?

This is a powerful shift in perspective that immediately takes the primary focus away from whether or not lifting weights sounds fun that day. Apply it to your career, business, family, or otherwise. When you stop doing it for yourself, you free yourself up to do good things for others.

2. You will internalize less negativity along the way

In conjunction with the last point, a service mindset will help you get away from judging every move you make. You will see results more objectively when you begin doing the work for other people. You’ll become better at analyzing data and using it as feedback for further growth. You’ll stop describing your actions as "good," "bad," "pathetic," or whatever terminologies you’ve used to described yourself with in the past.

You are far more likely to associate your achievements with your sense of self-worth, capability, and skill set when you have an egocentric focus. When you fail to differentiate the world from what goes on in your head, you set yourself up to bear a lot of the burden.

3. The work you put in will feel more purposeful

Finally, you will discover a great sense of purpose in the work that you do by getting outside of yourself. It’s how we’re wired. Have you ever worked a job where your skill level was high but your sense of purpose in the work was not? You likely got your work done, but it never felt like something you’d go out of your way to do. In fact, you might have avoided it at all costs. That’s the last thing you want to have happen to the goals you set for your life.

Increase your sense of purpose and you will be more grounded and stimulated by the daily process of striving towards your goal.

Make the shift to a mindset of service

The first step for you is likely to look at your goals and ask yourself this question:

“What am I doing it all for?”

Be honest. If you’ve created a list destined for self-glorification, you might be setting yourself up for failure. Do what you can to adjust the focal point of your goals while still making them meaningful to what you want most in life.

Remember, it is a balancing act. Combine your selfish set of desires with a selfless set of plans to realize them. Watch as you increase your motivation, purpose and ability to use failure as feedback as a result.