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Welcome to Episode 109 of the Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and today's episode was sparked by a blog post from Seth Godin that I read this past week.

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It's entitled "Egomania vs. Ego strength." I will post a link to that article in the show notes. When I read the blog post, it made me think of the difference between self-differentiation and selfishness.

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I'm going to read the blog post in its entirety so you get a sense for how this sparked my thinking. Then I'm going to unpack it in terms of ego, egomania and ego-strength.

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Here's the blog post:

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"People talk about ego like it's a bad thing, but our desire to do a good job, our self-trust our willingness to dance with fear--these are fuel, if used properly.

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Egomania pushes us to ignore useful feedback, to bristle at input and to refuse to do the work to get better at our craft. It's actually a sign of fear and weakness.

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Ego strength, on the other hand, makes us eager to learn more, engage with the market and figure out what it will take to have the project actually succeed."

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That's it. That's the entire blog post. As I mentioned, it got me thinking that people confuse the difference between self-differentiation and selfishness.

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When you study family systems theory, you realize this is not the case. However, the question is, how do we know the difference? I want to start by using two terms that Godin used in this blog post, ego and ego-strength and defining each of them. The definitions for ego and ego-strength come from a blog post on the website PsychCentral. The post is entitled "Ego vs. Ego-strength: The Characteristics of a Healthy Ego and Why It's Essential to Your Happiness."

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And of course, I will post a link to this article in the show notes according to PsychCentral, "The word ego is a Greek word for 'I,' meaning the core sense of self, a distinct and unique expression of personhood, albeit one that paradoxically exists in connection or in relation to life and others."

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Ego by itself is not a bad thing. In family systems terms, it reflects self-differentiation in that a healthy ego will have a distinct sense of self while remaining in connection to others.

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A healthy ego balances the need to be an individual with the pull for togetherness in any relationship system. A self-differentiated person has a healthy ego in that she is able to define herself without disconnecting emotionally from others. On the other hand, an egomaniac is so preoccupied with herself that she may be self-defined but has little or no emotional connection with others. This is similar to a narcissist. Both can have delusions of grandeur and can feel unappreciated by others. The difference is that an egomaniac is unable to see someone else's point of view. A narcissist is able to see someone else's point of view. She just doesn't care. In either case, we would consider an egomaniac or a narcissist as selfish, while a self-differentiated person is not selfish. She just knows who she is in relation to others.

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According to PsychCentral, "Ego-strength refers to a cultivated resiliency or strength of our core sense of self, the extent to which we learn to face and grow from challenging events or persons in our lives in ways that strengthen our relationships with ourselves and others, and enrich our lives with meaning."

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When you develop ego-strength, you are able to face life's challenges without letting them become problems. Your connection to others becomes a source of strength, not a place to escape responsibility for yourself.

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Conversely, the lack of ego-strength will likely mean blaming others and/or becoming dependent on others in an unhealthy way.

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The PsychCentral article goes on, "A person with little or weak ego-strength lacks resiliency sticks mostly to what feels comfortable to them and avoids what does not. They tend to hold unrealistic expectations, which are held rigidly in place by emotionally charged core beliefs that activate the body's stress response as they are rooted in fear and anxiety."

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We can see here that as we translate the lack of ego-strength to family systems theory terms, that this makes one more prone to reactivity that comes from fear and anxiety. This, of course, is the opposite of self-differentiation. It is more likely that without a healthy ego, without ego-strength, one will become more selfish, more dependent and more reactive.

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The lack of ego-strength can end up with one of two extremes. One is having someone think that they lack the ability, they lack resources, that they're too weak or unable to handle challenging situations such as conflict. So they end up being adaptive and dependent. At the other extreme, they use anger and they use their rage and anxiety to show others that they need to recognize and appreciate them and what they are feeling, what they are going through. This would be the reactive response that displaces pain on others.

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Interestingly, what the article says is that this is based on the response of the sympathetic nervous system. Remember that fight or flight response that I covered in last week's episode on self-regulation? What that means is that the reactivity is automatic and it not only results in unhealthy responses, but as the article says, "Reactive responses not only block us from developing a healthier ego or ego-strength, they also make us prone to repeating problematic behavior patterns."

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Self-differentiation is different. Its focus is on taking responsibility for yourself, not being selfish. It's the opposite. It's the recognition that this is our primary responsibility. And in doing this, we're better able to navigate life's challenges and better able to remain connected to others in a healthy way. Far from being selfish, this actually helps us to be better family members, team members and leaders. The question is, what does self-differentiation look like in terms of well-developed ego-strength?

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I'm going to go through a set of characteristics that the PsychCentral article talks about in terms of well-developed ego-strength, and you are going to see how this very much is self-differentiation. The characteristics include resiliency, optimism and a sense of the ability to handle challenges. This is indeed what it means to be self-differentiated, where we allow challenges to be challenges and not become problems because of our own anxiety. Further, as we grow in self-differentiation, in ego-strength, we get more capable of handling triggering situations.

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This goes back to again last week's episode where I talk about the ability to self-regulate because we are learning to be self-aware and intentional. Because we have tools to manage our own anxiety in difficult situations, we gain confidence in the ability to regulate our reactive responses.

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Persons with well-developed ego-strength, "Have an ability to tolerate discomfort enough to regulate their emotions as opposed to feeling overwhelmed by them." Remember that when we are self-differentiated, we are able to work through our own pain by taking responsibility for self, as well as not taking responsibility for other people's pain. This enables us to better regulate our own emotions.

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Another characteristic of well-developed ego-strength is the ability to focus on strength in developing strength rather than dwelling on weakness. This is very much what Edwin Friedman would talk about, that we emphasize our ability to build on our strengths and not worry so much about our weaknesses. When we focus on our weaknesses we start to become dependent and reactive. Focusing on strenght is not a sense of false confidence. This is just knowing that by taking responsibility for self, we will work through whatever we are facing and somehow grow from it. We may not actually do very well through it, but we will learn and we will grow by facing a challenge, by facing pain, dealing with the situation at hand.

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Similar to this is that well-developed ego-strength will enable us to believe that we have the inner resources to deal with challenges and that others do as well. And so we allow other people to face their own challenges. We take responsibility for self without taking responsibility for others, without overfunctioning, without enabling others. We know that this is the aspect of self-differentiation where we are able to tolerate the pain of others because we know that the best thing we can do is to stay connected to them while letting them face their own challenges.

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Another aspect of ego-strength is not taking personally what other people say or do. This is the essence of being a non-anxious presence. We understand that we are all human beings. We're all fallible. We give other people a break for what they say and do, and we give ourselves a break for what we say and do.

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And so when people say things that might hurt us, we're able to regulate our own anxiety, our own reactivity in a way that enables us to be a non-anxious presence. And we do that by not taking things personally, but understanding everybody's coming from a certain point of view.

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Finally, and this goes back to the idea of taking responsibility for self and not others, the article says those with ego-strength, "...give others ownership for exacerbating or solving their own problems as necessary. They exude an overall confidence in self and others to use their resources to handle and resolve life's issues. The stronger the ego-strength, the more comfortable one feels in taking ownership of their problems and giving ownership to others for theirs."

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This is what a non-anxious leader does. This is the essence of being a non-anxious presence. So the next time that you hear somebody talk about being self-differentiated as being selfish, first of all, don't take it personally. But then secondly, remind yourself that what you are doing by taking responsibility for yourself, responding to life's challenges as a non-anxious presence and being a non-anxious presence for others is actually the best thing you can do for the people you care about and the people you lead. That's what it means to be a non-anxious leader.