Welcome to the Mindset Coach Academy podcast. I'm Lindsey Wilson and I am a high-performance Mindset Coach, a mom, a former professional athlete and an entrepreneur. I help coaches and high performers optimize their mindset to improve their coaching, their performance and those of their athletes and their lives. Here you'll learn all about Mindset, how to live it, how to teach it and how to sell it.
Hi guys and welcome back to the Mindset Coach Academy podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson and it's Mental Monday. So, you know, Mental Mondays are where we really try to give you something actionable that you can use in your life. And so I want to talk about ego today and I want to talk about just framing it in a different way and sort of asking yourself how to use ego as a positive force in your life. I mean, ego gets a really bad rap, right? But I mean, I think those of us that are in athletics especially and high performers, like we've also seen the benefit of ego, you know? Ego pushes us to other levels. And, you know, you could also argue that ego is a part of our self-concept that is trying to strive for our goals and we might not be going for those goals without it. So, one way to think about ego and I've definitely used it this way, which is you're constantly trying to protect it, right? You're constantly, it's a little shaky and you're really using it in more of a protective way, right?
Like protecting what you have right now. And I think about myself, I remember in college, I've talked about this before, but like I really, I made myself do it, but I really hated watching film. Like that was, it felt like just like the biggest ego burn ever because I would like watch myself play and be like, what the hell are you doing? I didn't know about some of the tools that I teach now, which is critiquing versus criticizing and how to remove the emotion and all the things that we teach our coaches and our certified coaches to deal with with athletes. But at that time, I knew a lot about how the brain worked, but I didn't quite understand what I was doing. And really what the pain was, was I was trying to protect what I had then. I was trying to protect my ego. I was, and it was so painful to see myself play in a way that I felt was sort of not what I experienced or kind of tenuous. And that's like not a super healthy way to use ego.
What I also did, and again, I didn't have the language to really understand this at the time. But when I've been the best in my life, I've used ego to really push myself to another level. And with that comes the acceptance of feedback.
So the watching film is actually a great example, because on one hand, and I kind of did both to be honest, and sort of different parts of my career, or maybe within even the same coaching session or film watching session was, you can use your ego to protect what you have now, right? And just, it's a little bit fragile. It's a little tenuous. So like, feedback is probably not super welcome. And when it is, you feel that rise up of like, that's not me, or they're wrong, or whatever. It's very defensive.
Okay. or you can use ego to actually push yourself to another level. And I think it comes down to the question in your brain or the thought in your brain of I'm better than this, right? And so for me, it's like, if I can use my ego to be like, oh no, this is, I'm not meant to be mediocre.
Like this is some bullshit here. I'm pushing it to get to another level. That seems to be more of a healthy way. And with that, you are able to take that feedback because you know that you are capable of more. And so it like propels you forward versus like a defensive stance. Like I kind of even think of it that way. Like you're either in that defensive stance, like the ego I need to like hold in and not take feedback and not really improve because I'm just defending what I have now.
This is my little territory that can be ego or we can use it as like the energy to push ourselves to another level. But that takes strength, right? And that takes a little bit of like solid ego maybe to like feel strong enough to push ourselves to that next level. Because when you're pushing yourself, you are gonna get, you're gonna get feedback, you're gonna get haters, you're gonna get failure, you're all the things on the way to that next level. But that still is ego. That's ego like, oh no, I'm not supposed to be here, I'm supposed to be over there. And so this mental Monday, I just want you to like examine some places in your life, maybe at work or maybe in relationships or maybe you know, whatever in competition where you are doing both.
Cause I think we all do both, right? We're either staying solid with our ego and trying to protect it or we're using it to push us forward. Almost like that coach that believes in you more than you believe in yourself. You know what I mean? Like, no, you're better than that.
We're getting to another level, let's go. So those are my thoughts on ego. Cause again, I think ego gets a bad rap. I think we can use it in a great way.
I think those of us that have been in sports have seen the benefit of how ego can drive us forward. But again, you can use it either way, right? You can use it to hold yourself back and kind of protect what you have or you can use it to propel yourself forward. So let's just examine, just use some curiosity, coach yourself, but imagine and examine where you might be doing both of them. I think we all, again, I think we all do both of them. So imagining and analyzing where you're using ego for good and maybe not so good ways. So that's your homework for this week. I'll see you next week on Mental Monday.
Bye for now. Hey guys, come on over to Instagram and connect with me @LindseyPositivePerform. You can tag me in stories.
You can send me an audio message or a direct message. I post stuff like sometimes stuff related to mental training. Other times I post my granola recipe or my crazy salads because I'm all about the salads, the full fat salads, mind you. So come on over to Ingenuity.com and connect with me on Instagram and connect at Lindsay Positive Perform. I'd love to connect with you on Instagram.
