Humility Is the New Smart

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Quieting Ego

Quieting Ego is how we can deliberately work to reduce our reflexive emotional defensiveness; have empathy and open-mindedness; engage in Reflective Listening; and proactively seek other people’s feedback and perspectives to stress-test our own thinking. Quieting Ego is a way of practicing and operationalizing Humility. To quiet our ego is to perceive others and the world without filtering everything through a self-focused lens and to tamp down on negative or self-protective “inner talk” that is driven consciously or subconsciously by our fears and insecurities. Inner talk is part of our story of how we perceive the world. In many cases those perceptions are untrue, and this tendency to self-focus and distort reality negatively ...