What is your rocket fuel?

Transitioning from ego to soul power

When rockets take off, they are mostly comprised of fuel. This heavy load is designed to get the rocket out of the earth’s atmosphere and once out, the spent part is jettisoned. What takes over are the universal forces of nature such as gravity. Something similar happens inside of us.

I’ve always been driven and disciplined but in the past ten years or so, the source of my energy has shifted. In my early adult life, ego was my rocket fuel. Ego powers most of us. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a developmental phase. The ego is there to help us survive the environment in which we’re born into. It’s also our personality structure. It drives us to make something of our life and ourselves. It’s the force that gets us out into the world.

Ego was a huge engine for me - propelling me out of a home where I felt unseen and unloved, into university and then into various journalistic jobs that took me across America and then across the world. Ego powered me through obstacles, setbacks and disappointments. It gave me a driving hunger for success - to be known. It pushed me to pitch and write articles, powered me through writing and promoting several books, it helped me run campaigns for greater transparency and bring legal action against secretive government agencies. It pushed me to finish a PhD and become the first female professor in my university department.

Photo by Martin Jaroš on Unsplash

But then in my forties, my egoistic drive began to wane. At first I thought it was because I’d achieved much of what I’d been striving for. I’d reached the top of my profession with some blockbuster investigations that gave me recognition.

Of course I could have become more famous, just as one can always have more money or more power. I’m immensely grateful for what fame I achieved, however, because I realised fame wasn’t going to give me what I thought it would give me. It wasn’t going to make me feel truly seen, worthy or precious. I was being seen, yes, but fame is outsourcing your own worth onto strangers. It doesn’t solve the root problem of feeling unworthy or unloved. Nor does it do anything to heal the pain from such a feeling.

Fame, money, power - they promise, or give the illusion of, being the solution to life’s pains, but in reality they are hollow. At best, they offer short-term, superficial relief from pain, but at worst they isolate a person so thoroughly they became incapable of happiness or living a meaningful life.

It’s so easy to get pulled onto this wrong path, tempted by fame, money or power. When the hollowness shows itself, it’s easy to make the mistake that the reason for the dissatisfaction isn’t because you’re on the wrong path, but rather that you simply don’t have enough of whatever it is you’re chasing. Look at anyone who uses money, fame or power to fill their inner voids, and you’ll see someone in a clear addiction cycle. They can’t live without their next fix. The next headline, the next million, the next power grab.

Entering my late forties it became clear that life’s meaning and my satisfaction with it would come from the quality of my connections - with others, with nature, with life and with my own true self.

By true self I mean our essence rather than the persona we put forward to the world. It’s not the personality structure, either. These are aspects of ego that help us navigate the environment, but there’s something more essential inside of us. And that’s what I’ve been spending the last few years exploring.

Finding my true self meant taking the time and space to listen to the quieter voices within. We all have such voices. Where I was once fuelled by ego, now I feel it dropping away. It’s mostly served its purpose. It’s pushed me out into the world to be successful and I’ve made a name for myself and a life for myself. But now I’ve reached escape velocity and I am out in space. It’s time to transition to a new power source. What happens when the ego drops away? It seems an inevitable stage of maturity and one Carl Jung described as the path to individuation. It doesn’t mean sinking into oblivion. It means doing life differently.

I haven’t yet figured out how this new power source works. Whereas ego is bombastic and loud and drives us with fear and threats or promises of grandiosity, this new power source eschews brute force. Instead, it operates using the language of love. I’m discovering this language, or more truthfully, I’m re-remembering it. I’m sure I knew this language as a child.

Ideas appear almost as a whisper or a subtle inclination toward something. There’s an ease and an energy that comes when I do something in alignment with my heart and my soul. I’m learning more what my soul yearns for.

It takes time and in this transitional stage I’m not as ‘productive’ as I was before. But how I worked before wasn’t sustainable. And anyway, fear no longer motivates me the way it used to. I’ve experienced enough failure to no longer be terrified of it. So I’m trying to pick out the quieter voices. They show up in my enthusiasm for something and in connections. This soul power is a different engine but one that is far more creative and sustainable long-term. I’m keen to see what unfurls.