Dr. Lori Todd Asks Who’s Driving Your Car?
Meet my ego. She is always thinking. She broods about past mistakes, plots new ways to stay safe so I don’t have to risk, and she worries about the future. Left unchecked, my ego could drive me around for hours and hours and I would get nowhere fast. Sound familiar?
How do you get yourself back in the driver’s seat?
First, stop fighting with your ego, reasoning with it, enrolling others in it, feeling bad about it or waiting for it to go away. What you resist persists! All the energy you put into it will only drive you faster to nowhere. Be up to a game that is bigger than you, one that isn’t even practical, convenient or realistic. Be committed to a vision that requires reinvention, and is too big for your ego to win at. Surrender to this vision without any evidence that it can be accomplished.
What can you do?
Ask yourself, “What is your purpose in life?” Decide what you could do today that would make you proud. Write a list of 15 things you are grateful for. Take immediate action. When in doubt, focus out. Appreciate someone in your life. Be a contribution in the world. Have someone’s life be better because of you. Organize a team of committed people to play along with you. Make bold promises and powerful agreements with these people. Hold each other’s feet to the fire, never sell out, and kick butt if necessary.
Laugh when you are winning and laugh when you are losing. Stand that you are the source for everything.Whoever or whatever is in your space, you brought it there. Nothing is being done to you. When you are responsible, you place your ego into time-out and climb into the driver’s seat of your life. Take the top down, let the wind hit your face, stick out your tongue like a dog, and be willing to look foolish and transform the world. As I write this, my own ego is pouting in the backseat and needs a nap.
I am blessed to be a coach and trainer of transformational work. My training at WorldLegacy in NC, getting my PhD at UNC, my Masters at Cornell University, and with personal trainers has allowed me to shift quickly and be able to follow my vision, even to have a vision. I have found that my ego is with me every step of the way. My limiting conversations are always present but they are usually in the back seat of the car. I learned at The WorldLegacy that everything is a conversation. Viktor Frankl has been important to my Journey as well as many other people. In “Man’s search for meaning” he writes, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Dr. Lori Todd