When you are very concerned about the opinion of others, you fear ridicule and always try to be right, what is hidden behind so many insecurities may be, paradoxically, a excess of ego, that false judge that we carry inside, a self-boycotting Jiminy Cricket that ends up disconnecting people from themselves. The psychologist, coach and influencers Maria de Mondo public I, ego. A guide to stop suffering, connect with yourself and achieve peace of mind (HarperCollins), a perfect manual to learn to handle it and discover to what extent it colonizes us and dictates our attitudes. Controlling it can be liberating.
María de Mondo tells that she was not satisfied with what life was giving her and decided design your life in a personalized way, prioritizing your inner peace above all else. “At the age of 24 I had an existential crisis that made me rethink everything in life. I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t willing to settle for that,” she recounts. For this reason, she decided to undertake “a deep introspection path to find out who she really was and what she wanted to do. I have always been very curious and I love to learn, so I started studying like crazy.”
His training in coaching, mindfulness and the Psychology career was the seed of her book and, they have also made her a wellness influencer. But, above all, she has provided him with a happy and fulfilling life. “Currently I create content, I write, I give workshops and I do coaching sessions focused on each person being able to find their own peace. I am also the mother of two queens who drive me crazy. I like to read, write, eat and look at the sky, ”she says. We talked to her about how identifying her ego and learning to manage it became the key to her happiness.
Why did you decide to write ‘Me, ego. A guide to stop suffering, connect with yourself and achieve peace of mind’?
So that people can live in peace once and for all. So that they discover who is behind the anger, sadness, frustration… so that they can connect with their true identity, and not the one that has been created by all the external conditioning that we have. So that they recognize themselves and can live a full life, from their true freedom, and not from what is expected of them.
At the beginning of the book, it takes a bit of a downturn when you begin to understand that the ego practically colonizes us. What is good to realize?
That we can finally take the reins of our lives because now we do know what is happening inside us. We can begin to connect with ourselves and live in a more conscious way, stopping resigning ourselves and living on autopilot. Now we can take responsibility for our inner peace and our true freedom. Now, you have to work on it, there have been many years dominated by the ego. That is why the final part of the book is focused on practice, on how to connect with our true being, and on how to keep the ego at bay when it hurts us.
When reading you, I begin to think that we are not very clear about the ego. How would you define ego, the negative, but also the positive of it?
The ego is your false identity, who you think you are, but in reality you are not. The ego has been forming from the outside, due to the influence of the beliefs of our parents, environment, society, culture… the ego lives by and for the outside, and we stop looking inside. We stop listening, we stop seeing each other. It makes us care and affect the opinion of others, live in the past or in the future, be self-centered and take everything personally, make value judgments and judge others as if we were God of justice, makes us afraid and not leave our comfort zone… and makes us live unconsciously, on automatic pilot. But indeed it also has good things, since the purpose of the ego is to protect and guide us. It is impossible to live consciously 24/7 and analyze everything. We wouldn’t even have time to leave the house. So the ego can be a very useful tool to get by in life. For example, so that a client does not tease you or take advantage of you or to end a relationship when he hurts us.
You thought that your ego was useful to you, after studying it, what is your opinion?
I knew he had an ego, because I did fit the ‘socially known ego’. I could behave arrogantly or arrogantly many times. But I believed that this ego had helped me achieve many things and that it was not bad. I didn’t want to get rid of him. The reality is that it is not bad, because it can bring us many things, but it does us a lot of damage. The problem is that our suffering is caused (almost always) by our ego. The moment we identify it, we recognize it, and we stop it, because we manage to connect with our true BEING, that suffering disappears.
What evils can the ego bring us and what should we learn to avoid it playing tricks on us?
The ego, apart from the suffering it causes us with its interpretations and priorities, can make us lose great opportunities in life, making decisions out of fear. But for me, the worst is losing yourself. To avoid it, we have to connect with our true being. Our being is already at peace and lives from love (and not from fear), but it is deeply buried within us.
If you feel and go very humble through life, can you have a masked ego?
When you start to understand yourself, it is very easy to fall into the spiritual ego. We could say that it is as if your ego were transformed. You start to get your life back on track, you take care of your mind and your body, you connect with your spirituality… but you keep judging what others do, you demand that you improve and you don’t allow yourself to be wrong on your way. It is just as you say, a masked ego. When you are, you don’t need to prove anything to anyone, not even yourself. You don’t need to ‘go from’ anything for life.
What advice would you give us to learn to manage our ego?
More than advice, I share three steps: 1. If you feel an unpleasant emotion or feel uncomfortable about something, take a break. Almost certainly your ego is behind it. 2. Write on a piece of paper what you are telling yourself about that situation or that person. Everything that comes from within. 3. Afterwards, look again at what has happened as if you were the spectator of a movie in the cinema, the facts, without judgments or interpretations, and write again answering this question: How would you see this situation from the perspective of love?
The other day I read a headline in which a very famous actress said that she was lucky to have no ego. Is this possible?
No. We all have ego, and we all live through it. The Dalai Lama also has an ego. The problem is that the ego is socially associated with being a proud, arrogant person, who thinks he is better than others. But that’s just one kind of ego. The person who has low self-esteem and thinks he is inferior to others is also living from his ego. The ego is much more than an attitude, the ego is our character, the identity that we have been creating since we were born. We all have that false identity.
Something very difficult that you plan in your book is not to judge, when you reflect on it, you realize that we are doing it almost all day. How to avoid it?
It is impossible not to judge, just as it is impossible to eliminate the ego. The important thing is to realize when those judgments are hurting us or someone we love. Or when they are limiting or paralyzing us. Being aware of this, we can abandon the trial. Your reality is not reality, and we tend to talk as if it were. We have the responsibility to question everything we believe or think and even more so if it is something that does not belong to us because we have inherited or acquired it from our environment.
How can letting go of our ego, or at least control it, make life better for us?
Perhaps my opinion is not so important since I am the author, so I invite readers to read the testimonials of people who have already read the book. I keep the testimonials in the featured stories called Book in my instagram. I believe that the opinions of the readers are worth much more than mine.
And finally, in the book you suggest that you have to look for your own being, beyond the ego. How can we find it, connect with ourselves and what benefits does it bring?
With the last point of the three steps that I mentioned earlier. When we think and connect with love -not the romantic love, but the love that we all have inside-, and we are able to totally change the perspective with this connection, there it is. The benefit is feeling at peace.
María de Mondo: “The ego can make us lose great opportunities in life”