Make the Ego Great Again
You’ve been lied to. Your Ego isn’t too Strong. It’s too weak.
Sport research treats task goals (aka mastery/process goals) and Ego goals as separate, but not as opposites. This means they can run at the same time. The athletes who appear the most intense, tenacious and gritty yet somehow focused and calm at the same time, are running both systems in parallel. They want to get better, be the absolute best and leave with the trophy, medal or paycheck in hand. That mix shows up most commonly at the elite level. The best athletes utilize multiple sources and channels to fuel performance. Mastery is not the sole high-performance default like it’s portrayed and sold on social media, and the ego is far from an “enemy.”
Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander and author of The Attributes, put it directly: most people’s egos are not too big. They are not strong enough. He is referring to a Self with the audacity to risks, to stand in uncomfortable and often public moments without folding and running away. That’s different from the shy, fragile, easily offended and reactive persona associated with the ego.
Diviney gets into a sharper version of the same point with narcissism. In his model it is a drive attribute: the appetite to be special, noticed, and recognized. The word is ugly. Black and white. All or nothing. The function is not and it does exist on a spectrum like everything else. He has argued that most people do not have too much of it. They have too little which prevents them from stepping into a demanding role, like winning, competing or leading at a high level in the public eye. In sport that looks like this. You want the challenge, the top ranking, the position that is visible—but then convention taps you on the shoulder and you diminish yourself and the desire because wanting to stand out is labeled as a defect, as wrong or selfish. Now that you’ve taken the world’s bait, you are at war with yourself trying to suppress one of life’s strongest drivers.
Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted as saying we have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don’t throw out the best part of ourselves. What gets treated as the devil here is the appetite to win: wanting the fight, wanting to stand out, wanting to be seen. Stay small. Don’t want it too much. Behave. Don’t upset others. Don’t take up the space. Don’t show off. Athletes try to look clean, but what gets tossed out with the appetite to win is a powerful internal drive that nature built. What remains is avoidance, regret and better manners. That’s not character, it's a cover. Ever hear the phrase “to a hammer everything looks like a nail?” Well, the opposite is also true. To a nail, everything looks like a hammer.
A weak ego hides the want to win or ends up avoiding the win altogether. A strong ego wants the battle, the challenge and can live with the result and other’s opinions, then go out and do it again without holding back. Diviney’s point is the same as a healthy performance-approach: I want to be the best and I’ll do what it takes, while the clinical narcissist uses other people to feed their display. There is a difference.
Why avoidance costs you the performance
This is not only a language or categorization problem. Ego approach and ego avoidance organize different systems. They are different states. Different biology.
Approach is an appetite. Attention and action go toward a target: the person, the standard, the job. Dopamine-rich striatal circuits support moving toward something worth having and doing what’s necessary to get it. This is where winning streaks begin and resilience lives.
Avoidance is a defensive loop. Attention goes toward a possible bad display, unwanted outcomes and obstacles and keeps the analytical mind engaged. Slumps are born here.
Approach–avoidance conflict research puts that arbitration in an amygdala–striatal–prefrontal circuit. When threat value is high, avoidance takes charge of more of the decisions. A “don’t look worse” or “don’t miss” command is a standing instruction that incompetence might become visible. The nervous system treats that as a social-evaluative threat which enhances internal narratives and resulting tension.
People are doing machines. They are not don’t-do machines. “Strike the ball” or “land the 9” gives the system a program to run and target to hit. “Don’t look worse” provides a vague idea to interpret and police. Policing is not performing. The nervous system needs objective actionable commands and targets—plant, strike, pass, jump,—not a list of forbidden outcomes.
Challenge and threat both raise physical and mental activation levels. For the strong ego the body’s response and resources register as adequate: cardiac output is more efficient, vessels are less rigid, the body is organized to move forward and execute. Relaxed but ready.
In threat, demand looks bigger than resources: output is less efficient, resistance rises, the posture tightens. Avoidance goals bias you brain toward threat. The heart can still pound, but movement is no longer directed toward execution.
Attention follows the body.
Worry (in all its forms) occupies working memory and devours resources that the task needs. Gaze and focus leave the target and go to the limbs, the steps, how it looks and what to avoid. An automatic skill gets picked apart and processed through extra control loops that delay and destroy a fluid efficient process. Again, avoidance and execution are different biological states.
Flow state requires down regulation of thinking for unhindered execution and access to our potential. In flow, self-commentary dials down and frees up trained sensory-motor networks carrying the skill and talent. Imaging of a brain flow shows less activity in midline default-mode regions (that’s the self-talk network) compared to periods of boredom or overload, plus a lower threat tone that shifts arousal and alertness into an effective range to attack. Alert enough to lock on, but not so wired that every cue is treated as danger. Avoidance keeps the self and social evaluation in high gear. Flow does not share the same lane as avoidance. A strong ego can let the self step away and open the gate to unleash a talented trained killer . A weak, concerned, caring, considerate ego stays in the game to manage everyone else’s expectations and opinions, which destroys flow state.
Awareness and Acceptance
Wanting, the desire to win, to be great, is a feeling not a choice. Fighting it creates inner tension and tension destroys fluid elite performance, and even life for many people. Do you enjoy being the best? Do you like winning? That’s actually ok. The next level of your performance is downstream of accepting this huge part of yourself. For many of you, it could be the final hurdle.
So stop treating your own appetite as a problem and creating a war with one of the most powerful life-affirming parts of being alive. The desire is likely already there. What is missing is an Ego stable and big enough to let it rip instead of playing it safe and small for approval. Lean into it and make the ego great again.