The Art Of Being Effective: 7 Life Points That Can Either Harness Or Hinder Your Greatest Success
Everyone has an ego, it's what you do with it that counts most.
laurence la madeleine | Unsplash It might be tempting to deny that you have an ego. After all, there's nothing flattering about being called "egotistical. But Laura Day, frequent Oprah guest and New York Times best-selling author, insists that everyone has an ego, and it's important to understand our own in order to clear the obstacles to our success and stop subconscious self-sabotage.
The author joined Andera Miller on Getting Open to talk about Day's seventh book, The Prism: Seven Steps To Heal Your Past and Transform Your Future, and how misunderstood the concept of ego has become. Day helps explain how to harness your ego as the primary driver of success.
Seven steps for embracing all your 7 life points so you can harness your greatest success
1. Understand the prism
One thing that blocks a lot of people is a failure to make their intuition practical. Intuition, to be successful, needs to be woven into normal life. Being guided by intuition is not some lofty spiritual ideal. Practical intuition involves daily habits to help train your ability to follow your ego as a responsible guide.
The Prism introduces the idea of “ego-centers” and how they relate to the capacity to manifest for success. So many of us are either in a cycle of crisis or experiencing a major life shift. Yet, we can move through these significant changes confidently rather than being thrown out of balance by them. And the ego is the force behind it.
2. Train your intuition
Your intuition can be trained, taught, and used to create real-world results when you put it into practice. Many of us confuse intuition with impulse or anxiety, but there is a significant difference when a feeling is true guidance versus a manifestation of fear in disguise.
Day stresses how training your intuition requires an understanding that the ego is not a bad thing. It is who you are. It is the machine you use to create your world.
Everything starts with the ego. Without it, we would never be motivated to get out of bed. Our egos guide us through intuition. We need to tune into it by paying attention to it.
3. Make small shifts
The most common blocks that keep people from accessing intuition usually only need small shifts to dissolve them, encourages Day. This is where the concept of The Prism is so effective. A prism breaks white light into its separate color components. The same is true for our ego-centers. If we take the whole ego as a single force, it can be too bright and will disguise any detail.
When we get stuck in old patterns, the prism example helps us understand how to separate the aspects of our unfulfilled needs that we get stuck repeating. As the prism shifts white light into seven colors, we can shift our perspective of the ego into seven centers of need.
4. Choose to harness, not hinder
As her book description reads, "The Prism reveals seven points in our development that can either hinder us or be harnessed to create healthy lives." This structure is unique in each individual.
Day explains how we use these ego-centers to create our reality. Our life is constantly adapting to the ego-centered structure over and over again. By separating these different aspects of the ego, we get to clearly identify the needs and harness the ego to fulfill them.
5. Stop degrading the ego
The human ego often gets maligned, but it's essential to understand how the ego is necessary and how it is structured. The ego is set by age 7, which gives further proof that the ego itself is not a bad thing.
The ego is a drive to survive and is formed by early childhood experiences. These experiences can help to reinforce and support the ego's development, or can cause ego blocks that throw the ego-centers out of balance.
We're taught that if we look deeply inside, we can make a change. But if the answers were truly contained inside, they would be easy to fix. This is where the ego centers become critical. The ego drives the need to create change by seeking it outside the self.
6. Refuse insufficient tools and techniques
"You are a closed system," cautions Day. "You can't fix a broken system with a broken tool. You don't have any perspective. You need a catalyst, something outside of you that makes you go, 'Oh! Look at that!'"
Think about the last time you went on vacation. When you are in a different setting, you are outside of your old habits and experiences, so there is an opportunity for something new to enter. Maybe you eat differently, maybe you exercise more. That change of routine can be the catalyst for a perspective shift that finally allows you to figure out if something is — or is not —working.
If it is working, you can prove it. But, if you have to believe harder to make it work, it's not the "thing" that's working. It's your belief. Harness that belief.
7. Get to know your ego-centers
Once you become familiar with the ego-centers, you can figure out which one (or ones!) tend to be the most challenging for you. Then you can use the knowledge to drive your motivation to face and succeed at the challenge.
Each ego-center correlates to a color on the spectrum and, in turn, to a chakra, as Day described. When we are open to the intuitive communication of each ego-center, we are setting the foundation for opening that chakra.
Everyone has an ego-center that presents an extra challenge. As Day told Miller, ego-center 6, being able to calm herself and seek the nourishment needed, is her most challenging. Your intuition will guide you toward the one that is most challenging for you, if you let it.
Here are the 7 ego centers you need to understand to start this work:
- Self-reliance: The right to belong
- Self-awareness: The right to clarity
- Self-expression: The right to be heard
- Self-esteem: The right to be valued
- Self-direction: The right to your drive
- Self-soothing: The right to be nourished
- Self-support: The right to exist
Reading through the list of ego-centers might cause a "gut reaction" of resistance to one of the items. That reaction is your instinct communicating a need. That reaction is your ego being split into its components by the prism of perspective. That reaction tells you which ego-center is going to be the most challenging.
The ego is not a bad thing. It is a necessary thing that fuels the drive to create needed changes in life. As well, challenges are not bad things. They can be fun. The fun of being challenged by one ego-center is the fun of self-discovery, which propels you along the path to manifesting success. Laura Day's new book is an excellent guide to get you started.
Will Curtis is YourTango's expert editor. Will has over 14 years of experience as an editor covering relationships, spirituality, and human interest topics.
