Any of you who’ve read my stuff these past few years knows that I’m always on the lookout for ways to simplify our lives.
I look at it this way: I’d rather focus on one thing, not twenty, as I navigate this ocean called life.
Well, today I have one of those simplifiers for you. You literally don’t need to do anything else but this to live a fantastic, fulfilling life.
It’s five simple words:
Get out of the way.
That’s it. Throw everything else aside and devote your life to getting out of the way and you’ll be golden.
What it means
How? First, I need to define what I mean by ‘getting out of the way.’
Let’s start with what we need to get out of the way.
The ego.
What the ego is
I’ve written a lot about what the ego is and isn’t. Suffice to say that it’s all the experiences we’ve had over the course of our lives that we’ve held onto and that determine most of what we do.
These experiences congeal into insecurities, fears, sensitivities, low self-esteem and, in some cases, a bloated sense of self-importance.
As we go about our lives, this ego baggage we’ve accumulated gets poked. Every day. Multiple times per day.
And how do most of us handle it when we get poked? We react.
3 examples of the ego getting poked
See if any of these examples strike a chord with you.
1) You’ve battled with your weight and body image your whole life. At Thanksgiving, your passive aggressive mother-in-law looks at the plate you’ve just served yourself and says,
“Well, somebody’s hungry!”
At which point you tell her to go F herself and go eat alone in the kitchen. You’ve just dropped a 100 megaton nuclear warhead on everybody’s Thanksgiving.
2) You had parents who constantly thought the sky was falling down and that poverty lurked around every corner. Now you’re forty. Your overworked boss puts your sales strategy memo in your inbox with a note on top reading,
“Please go a bit deeper on the numbers. Too general.”
That’s all she wrote. Your reaction? You fall apart inside, thinking if you don’t nail the next draft she’ll fire you. You’re depressed the rest of the day.
3) You’ve always been a rule follower who was afraid to take risks. Now you’re in-between jobs and have a decent amount of money in the bank. You really want to move to Paris for three months but can’t get yourself to do it, thinking it’s too “irresponsible.”
What do all of these examples have in common? The ego got in the way.
The damage caused by ego explosions
And what was the result of the ego getting in the way? Bad stuff happened.
A Thanksgiving dinner was ruined for all.
An afternoon was destroyed.
A once in a lifetime experience in Paris was derailed.
A better way
What might have been? In other words, how could these situations have been handled in a healthier way?
That’s easy. And simple.
It starts with someone recognizing that their ego is ruining their life. And they’re sick and damn tired of it. Enough. Time to try a different strategy.
A 3 step strategy
That strategy is simple: Don’t react when your ego gets poked. What to do instead?
Get YOU out of the way.
How can this be done in a practical, workable manner?
Step one is what I already wrote above: Become aware that your ego is sabotaging your life.
Step two is to then decide that you’ve had it. No more. So you commit to making this the most important project you’ve ever undertaken. (BTW, it is.)
Step three is to get to work on that project. And it isn’t complicated.
The project consists of:
1. Being vigilant about becoming aware when your ego has been stirred;
2. When you feel your ego/lower self begging you to react with fury or pouting or some other self-defeating behavior, you stop yourself from doing that. Instead, you say in your head, or even out loud, to your ego,
“Get out of the way. You are not wanted here. You cause me nothing but problems.”
You do this while taking deep breaths…
Then you respond. From a place of presence. And measured calm.
What does that measured response look like?
Mother-in-law: “Well, somebody’s hungry!”
You notice that hot, searing feeling in your gut imploring you to go to war…
Then you catch yourself. Take a deep breath and say to yourself,
“Get out of the way. You are not wanted here. You cause me nothing but problems.”
Then you say to your mother-in-law, “I love me my Thanksgiving.” Then you sit down. Preferably as far away from her as possible!
Catastrophe averted.
Practice, practice, practice!
You might think that’s it. Just those two steps. But there’s a third.
3. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
In other words, PRACTICE. Over and over and over again.
Every day. Any time you feel poked or prodded, your go-to thought is: “Get out of the way.”
That’s what your life becomes. Continually becoming aware when your ego wants to get in the way and take over and then telling it to get out of the way.
What it all comes down to
In all these years I’ve studied, pondered and written about spiritual topics, I’ve learned that getting out of our way is what it all boils down to.
There are myriad ways of expressing this, but getting out of our way hits the nail on the head.
Each time we get out of the way by not picking up our AK-47 and going into battle with our eager egos, a little piece of ego gets chipped off the statue and hits the floor.
And as that egoic detritus piles up, the beautiful, perfect sculpture within every single one of us starts to take shape, manifesting as a calmer, more compassionate person.
The takeaway
So get out of the way.
You owe it to yourself.
P.S. I’ve just started writing on X/Twitter. So if you want to read more pieces like this, go to x.com/davidgerken60.