THE POWER OF EGO-STRENGTH

A power that you are not born with, but that you develop in the process of growing up is what we call ego-strength. This is the power of your self to be strong in the face of life and especially of life’s challenges. It is the power of having a strong sense of self—to use your powers of mind, emotion, speech, and behavior to figure things out, to face and deal with the people and events of everyday life, and to neither fall apart, throw a tantrum, or get aggressive when things don’t go your way.

Little children do not have this power and so do not feel themselves strong in this way. With a little child all you have to do is look at him or her with a cross look, then out comes the lip and they fall apart. In this they are very fragile, their ego or sense-of-self is fragile and easily overwhelmed.

Yet as a person grows, learns, and develops his or her powers (mental, emotional, linguistic, behavioral, relational, etc.), one’s sense-of-self grows stronger. And as it grows stronger, a person develops another power— the power to be able to face reality as it is and for whatever it is. This is ego-strength. Now you have the strength or power to face new things, things unknown, confusing, upsetting, undesirable, challenging, etc. and feel that “I’ll figured it out.”

“Sure, I don’t like it, but no big deal. I can figure it out, think it through, ask others, read about it, google it, and use my powers of language and action to figure out some effective responses.”

I had an insight yesterday while presenting the Unleashing Potentials workshop in the Self- Actualization series to a group of the ABNLP (Australian Board of NLP) here in Sydney. Someone asked, “What do you do if someone gets ‘all emotional’ while experiencing the Crucible pattern?” And someone else asked about ego-strength, what it is and how it relates to the Crucible?

That was great timing! I had just completed the introduction and demonstration of the Crucible. So an insight was generated that would probably not have arisen otherwise: The factors that we use as the resource mechanisms for the deep change in the Crucible to facilitate the unleashing of potentials are the very same factors that build up the power of “ego-strength” in a person.

What are these factors? We construct the Crucible from six primary resources, three giving us safety-change factors and three giving us confrontation-change factors.

1) Unconditional positive regard for self or self-esteem.

2) Witnessing what is, observing sensory-based information.

3) Accepting or acknowledging what is for what is.

4) Ruthless honesty for speaking the truth about what’s real and authentic.

5) Responsibility or ownership of one’s responses.

6) Appreciation as the ability to see deeply to the value and preciousness of something.

Each of these factors are also factors that generate the powerful experience of ego-strength they do so by enabling you to feel safe in your own skin knowing yourself as having innate worth and value so that you can see cleanly and clearly without needing to distort things and able to just accept what is without fighting it, rejecting it, or defending against it. They also enable you to operate effectively in the world by knowing and speaking what’s real and authentic, the truth, instead of needing to cover up, lie, deceive, or pretend reality is something other than it is. And doing that leads to two other powers— the power of responsibility and the power of appreciation.

Want to facilitate someone’s ego-strength? Want to coach someone so that they build up a stronger resilience within, more proactivity, and self-responsibility? Use the Crucible pattern. I kind of knew this when I wrote the book, The Crucible Model and the Fires of Change and I also kind of did not know it. At least I didn’t know it explicitly as I do now.

If you coach, train, consult, or do therapy with individuals or groups, your power to be a crucible and to create a crucible space is a power that enables people to face the truth, come to terms with the challenges of life, and at the very same time to develop the ego-strength that they need for such.

Where can you learn more about all of this? Well, of course, from the book, The Crucible and the Fires of Change and also from the workshop that Neuro-Semantic Trainers train all around the world, Unleashing Potentials.