When the ego is unhealthy and not restored to balance in awareness, this can show up in a season, a situation, or a way of life as wrestling with wants and happiness. For good mental health, you want to maintain your healthy ego. Problems happen if or when your ego gets off balance, negatively affecting you and the world around you.

The unhealthy ego is like a deviant, undisciplined kid that sneaks up behind you and at first, you don’t know what to expect, but then if you’re aware you catch onto how this kid cunningly operates, so they can’t deceive again you in the same ways. Like the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”

The energized, undisciplined kid (ego) wants to take over your life and fool you with trickery and spin truths.

Unfortunately, there exists a bad kid in all of us, and why bad exists in the world. But, we can daily train and gradually learn to deactivate this kid’s behavior. There’s also a good ego kid that can win out and teach the bad kid a good ninja lesson or two, in your choice and responsibility as the parent. The bad kid is stunned and disappears from the scene.

The real ego lives inside your subconscious brain, and none of us humans can remove our ego through surgery and still be functional, as ego, like air, can’t entirely be contained.

As individuals, we can constantly change our minds and affect our actions, decisions, and behaviors.

We can use our egos to help us grow. Ego can motivate any low self-confidence and provide the push needed to make something happen, do it imperfectly, and strive for achievement. Ego can convince us to take action.

The problem is when the bad ego kid gets off course without you, the parent, recognizing the harm, and makes you follow their lead and take misbehavior actions.

That’s the focus of this article, so you can be aware of your own ego’s influence (and recognize it in others). The ego can be the most dangerous tool and weapon inside you that you have the chance to transform in your knowledge and consciousness.

3 Steps On How to Train Your Healthy Ego:

Step 1: Get to your awareness.

Find a daily or regular time to be in quiet, stillness, and unplug from this world. This can be in gratitude, journaling, praying, and meditation.

Feeling peace (calm), and finding solitude away from the world is not the same as having inner spirit peace that transcends into your daily choices and actions.

And, meditation may or may not change the health status of your current ego.

If not careful, those who have practiced daily zen, higher consciousness, or transcendental meditation for years, may still come back into the modern world and express ego-centric or prideful actions.

Meditation to remove mind-body stress can temporarily silence your mind and ego, but may not help your in-world ego actions.

When you’re meditating you’re not interacting with the world. You’re not practicing how to silent the mind when you’re in the world, and when someone threatens or cuts you off on the road. Without practice, you don’t automatically get to your zen mind that you practiced hours ago in a closed room, sitting on a pillow.

Unless the intention and the dots are connected to becoming more loving and doing peaceful acts in the world, then a silent practice doesn’t permeate into a noisy world unless you decide to. The meaning of your practice can get lost in translation (unintentional).

When you’re back in the world, your conscious mind is thinking again, turned back on, and prompted to behave again around noisy triggers. For effective meditation to silence the unhealthy ego, you want to live out your humble self in the world even if your ego is making you think otherwise.

Done in full consciousness, yoga or fasting are other good practices to improve your intentions for immediate practice.

Whatever works best for you, the goal is to raise the awareness to yourself — that you are not your thoughts. And that the ego exists and effectively needs to be silenced in the external world just as in your silent practice. The easiest way to do this is to tap into your love.

Step 2: Find love and practice in the noisy world.

Building on step 1, if the person makes the conscious decision they want to be more loving, then they can get the full benefits of what meditation offers.

Because the root of ridding ego is in finding the love and God within you when you’re fully conscious and making decisions. Personal growth, learning conscious mind, and desire to do good, is can effectively silence ego behaviors.

To expand on this, let’s take an outright ego-maniac. You know right away something is off with this person as they need constant attention. They can show up loud, proud, vain, narcissistic, and have selfish wants. They act judgmental and critical. Another clear sign, they talk about themselves. These are all fear-based expressions rooted deep in insecurity. They’re out of control. Without awareness, running into their fear will push away love.

When that happens, they can change if they get conscious in their heart, mind, and spirit.

“Feed the spirit, not the ego.” – Eckart Tolle

Step 3: Become present in mindfulness.

“The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There’s only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment.” – Buddha

Live in the present, not your mind’s past for the future. The ego dies in this situation as expressed in Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now.

Ego can trick the person into believing that mindfulness is silly. Because ego wants to live in fantasy, lies, take the credit, and create negative stories and outcomes that your brain feeds ego from your past situations, and uncertainty (what has never happened).

Your getting present at this moment doesn’t allow that. It tells the truth.

Using the bad kid metaphor, the time right now strips ego of power and makes it humbly crawl back into its room, close the door and play games quietly on the computer.

When you’re the opposite, and a humble and kind person, in conscious and rational thinking mindfulness, you can be aware of your loving thoughts and take the higher road actions.

The bad kid ego despises your goodness because they lose.

Interesting and mind-blowing, huh?

If your ego is healthy you’re reading this with an open mind. Your ego is tamed and doesn’t care to scream, kick, attack, and argue (that’s just one trigger point away).

Grown-ups, leaders, and influencers exemplify good ego behaviors because people are watching. Similarly, we can be our witnesses, as though we had an audience. We can change and do better at any time if we want to in free-will choice.

With our good ego intentions, we can choose to never judge another book by its cover and first encounter. Practicing steps 1-3 above, we can choose to give second chances as others have given us.