The ego as loyal warrior
Why change can be so hard
We talk about the ego as if it were the villain of our inner story; a thing to get past, dissolve, transcend, see through. Much self-improvement is sold as a war against it.
It might be worth pausing to ask: what is the ego actually for?
One way of thinking of the ego is that it gives us the sense, perhaps the illusion, of a continuous unitary self. And so the ego’s job is to keep us the same person we were yesterday. The ego’s task is continuity. It’s a loyal warrior that stands guard over the self we have built and works, faithfully and tirelessly, to make sure that tomorrow’s version of us is recognisably the same as today’s.
Once you see the ego that way, a great deal stops looking like pathology. If the ego’s job is to preserve who we are, then any significant change is, from the ego’s point of view, a failure at its task.
Every piece of growth we attempt collides head-on with the part of us whose entire purpose is to prevent it. The ego is doing exactly the thing it was built to do.
This is why change is so much harder than we often expect. We tend to assume that if we simply understand the better way, we will move toward it. We almost never do, not at first, and we blame ourselves for the gap. We call it laziness, weakness, or a lack of discipline.
But there is a loyal warrior standing between the new self and us, and it cannot be argued down. Brother Jude Hill, the Franciscan Friar and Jungian psychotherapist, has a line for how rare a genuine appetite for change is.
“The only thing that likes change is a baby in a dirty diaper.”
Everything else in us, however much it says it wants to grow, has to get past a warrior whose loyalty is to who we already are. And the longer we have been living from, and defending, a constructed ego identity, the more entrenched it’s going to be in its position.
The mistake we make is to declare war on the warrior. We try to force the change through, override the resistance, and shame ourselves for having it. And the resistance digs in, because force is exactly what a warrior is built to meet. Push hard enough, and you can sometimes win the surface, but the part you overrode goes underground and waits, and it tends to reassert itself the moment your attention moves on.
If the resistance is a loyal part doing an honest job rather than an enemy, then the work is to reassure it rather than defeat it.
To let it know what is being kept and not only what is being given up. To bring it along rather than leave it on the wall, defending a self you are quietly trying to dismantle behind its back. Change that lasts tends to come from making peace with the warrior, not from beating it.
At work, people are being asked to change faster than ever, and AI is already dramatically accelerating that.
When a capable colleague will not adopt the new tool, the organisation reads it as a skills gap or an attitude problem. Usually, that misses what is happening. The old way of working was more than a method. It was the ground their competence stood on, the thing that made them the person who was good at this. To take up the new way is to put that self at risk, and the loyal warrior knows it. The resistance has little to do with the software. It is the ego defending the continuity of someone who has been valued for years for doing it the previous way.
Treat that as laziness or fear of effort, and you guarantee the fight. Treat it as a loyal part protecting an identity that is genuinely under threat, and a different conversation becomes possible. What of who you are carries forward into this? What does not actually have to change? Where is the new way, an extension of the thing you were always good at, rather than a repudiation of it? You are not arguing the warrior off the wall. You are showing that the person it guards will still be here on the other side.
The same is true of our own resistance to everything we keep meaning to become. The part of us that will not move is the part that is doing its job.
Growth begins when we stop trying to kill it and start trying to win it over.