How to protect your ego so you're always right

Never face consequences of your actions ever again

If you didn’t notice the sarcasm in the title, I should probably be up front by telling you, dear reader, that this article is mocking those who need to preserve their idealized self-perception by protecting their delicate egos.

I invite you to take a walk in the shoes of someone who is accountability averse. You are accountability averse because you are so used to only hearing, seeing and noticing the things you believe you are (ie. virtuous and humble) that you can’t hear about all the things that you do that piss others off. After all, it’s their problem, not yours.

Here are some (or all) of the things you will do to shirk responsibility, deny wrongdoing and justify unethical behaviour:

1. You are friendly, gracious and warm except if the other disagrees with you. Your tone sharpens a little and your conviction is bolstered. You’ll just have to work harder to convince them of your version of reality. Some might call this gaslighting but it’s persuasion when you do it.

2. You are always right(eous). You will insist others adopt your narrative or way of thinking because you believe you’re doing a good deed. When they decline because they disagree with you, you will tell them a story of how you learned the error of your ways and you’re paying it forward with them now. If they continue to resist your act of kindness, you will launch into a lecture until they feel forced to agree with you to de-escalate and end the conversation.

3. You’re a lifelong learner. You insist to others that you’re always learning and wanting to improve. You might aver that you’ve learned so much from them already. But when the other person challenges your ideas that you’re really invested in because these ideas serve you professionally or socially, then you already know better and they can learn something from you.

4. You initiate interactions with others because connection is important to you. When you reach out, you let that person know how important they are and how much they matter to you because you assume they need you to prop them up - because your opinion is worth so much more than other trusted connections in their life.

5. You’re a saviour. There’s always someone who can learn from you and be reminded of their value and importance because of you. You want to heal the world and you have the solution but none of the self-awareness about how your need to be right prevents connections from being totally honest with you.

6. You want feedback. When connections give you honest feedback, you accept it graciously and seethe quietly. You will eventually find an opportunity to point out their erroneous thinking in front of others to restore your place on the throne of righteousness.

7. You provide helpful reframes. You correct people’s thinking or at least, you suggest a better way of thinking because their way makes you uncomfortable and your way is just better. You also don’t hesitate to give others feedback, especially when they don’t ask for it, so that they can align better with your values and improve their life.

8. You create safe spaces for people to be themselves. But what you’re possibly doing is creating the conditions to be a knowledge vampire. If not, you’ll find a way to weaponize their disclosures when you believe they can benefit from your tough love.

9. You inspire others. You have a lot of wisdom to share with others so you can inspire them based on your assumptions about them, not based on what you can learn from them - by actively listening.

10. You’re an ally. You’re against all forms of oppression and want to use your privilege to elevate women and provide your guidance to support their success. That is until they get the attention of others with power and create alliances that threaten to leave you behind. Then you might find ways to fault the person you mentored, turn their alliances against them and gather enough evidence of their incompetence and threat to the organisation so that they’re forced to leave.

Does this description remind you of someone you know? If you’re in a professional relationship with this person and you’ve tried to find ways to improve your relationship with them to no avail, perhaps it’s time to put some emotional distance between you two so you can break free from the hold they have on you.

Need help making sense of a murky professional situation? Comment below!

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting and supporting my work,

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

If these pieces are striking a cord, consider gifting a subscription to a loved one who’s in a relational bind or to yourself. Paying subscribers get special access to detailed content about specific issues and can send their questions and concerns about your tricky or narcissistic relationships that I will respond to in private chat threads and comments.

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

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