Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and this week, we’re talking about allowing your higher self to make decisions instead of your ego.
Now, I have a prediction and I don’t know if I’ll be right or wrong, but I tend to think this episode is not going to be one of the most listened to, but you are going to help me decide if this is something you want to hear more about.
If you’ve been kicking it with me for a long time—I’ve been coaching in the industry for over a decade, so some of you have known me for a really long time and I used to talk a lot about mindset and the power of thought. I would talk a little bit abstractly about signs or universal pushes and just some more abstract kind of mindset things, meditation, the idea of be, do, have, like just some real deep mindset work I really used to dig into.
In recent years, primarily based on what was going on with the world, you know, 2020, 2021, 2022, even into 2023, we’ve been in this really interesting place where we’ve all had to adapt really quickly, and so my podcast and all of my messaging has become more strategic, mostly because of what was going on in the world. I think we’re at this place now where we’ve been running on a treadmill for a really long time and it could be a nice time to get back to some of that mindset work.
However, a lot of people don’t realize that arguably mindset work is much more important than tactical, strategic work. Most of us are like, “Don’t talk about higher self. Talk about what’s working on reels today,” right? “Don’t talk about mindset. Talk about how to navigate the next price increase.
Here’s the rub on that. If your mindset sucks, your price increase is going to fail. It doesn’t matter if your higher self is not making the decisions, I can tell you 65 great reels ideas and you’re still not going to pull it off. And so I decided that this week I would go a little bit more mindset, kind of kick it old school for myself, and talk about the idea of allowing your higher self to be in the driver’s seat instead of the ego.
Now, like I said, I predict that this episode is not going to be the biggest hit, but I’ve predicted this wrong before. So if you happen to like this episode and you want to hear more of this, I’d love for you to share it on Instagram. Get the word out. I’m going to decide if we do more of this or not based on the ratings and reviews so let me know what you think.
Let’s start it right at the top talking about what does the word “ego” mean? When you hear the word “ego”, does it have a positive impact or a negative impact? Negative, right? We all know the answer to that. It’s because usually when we hear about the word “ego”, we think about the extreme parts of it, right? Being egotistical is being self-centered, right? It’s only seeing your own point of view. It’s generally not infusing empathy and so there’s this real negative connotation to the word “ego”.
We all have an ego and the ego is sitting in the driver’s seat for all of us every single day. You can be the most humble person on the planet and the ego is still the driver.
I want to first explain what the ego is, why it is the decision maker of truly every single thing you do in life and in business, and how to take advice from the higher self.
The higher self can really only ever sit in the passenger seat. The higher self can be a tremendous navigator. The higher self generally can’t get into the driver’s seat and I’m going to explain why in a second. But like every good driver knows, you need an incredible navigator to get you where you want to be.
I’ve been sharing a few stories about my husband lately and one of the things that really works in our dynamic is he drives us everywhere we need to go. Everybody knows you don’t want me behind the driver’s seat if you can help it. We’ve worked out a dynamic of what it means for me to be a good navigator for him and it has been massive for us. He trusts me to navigate. I decide where we’re stopping, where we’re going, where we’re going to get gas, what we’re going to do, how quickly we’re going to get there, and he just trusts me to do it. Essentially he’s the ego and I’m the higher self, which cheers to me. I kinda love that, but I want you to have that same dynamic when you’re building your life in business.
Let’s start by talking about ego and what it is and what it means. I had to do some research on this myself. When you look at—there’s lots of different ways to look at ego and I saw it described a ton of different ways and I wanted to explain it in the way that made the most sense to me.
The idea of having an ego was established in the early 1900s, the 1920s to be precise, and it was developed by a psychologist named Sigmund Freud. If you’ve studied psychology at all, you’re familiar with that name. If you haven’t, it’s okay. You’re going to learn a little something today. He wrote an essay, it was called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and this was where he really formalized this concept he had about the ego and the id, and there’s this additional layer of the superego that came to be as well.
The reason why he put this into place is because there was all of this talk about the unconscious mind or being subconscious and people couldn’t tangibly understand it, so he created these terms (ego, id, and superego) to help make it more tangible.
Well, a hundred years later, people have lost that foundation and I want to give you that foundation and then share with you how we can gain control of all these things.
What Sigmund Freud determined was at the core there’s this thing called the id. I love that word ’cause to me, it goes back to caveman times of grunts and not words. The id is primal instinct, like basic impulses. When you look at an infant, all they have is id. They don’t have anything else. When they’re hungry, they cry. When they wet their diaper, they cry. When they’re tired, they cry. All they are is impulsive because they don’t have any of these other layers I’m going to add on in a second. But we are born very simple minded and driven by the id. It’s like human instinct at its core is going to be id.
I want you to think of that as unconscious decision-making in your life. At the end of the day, for all of us, we are instinctual, we are irrational, we are impulsive. We want immediate gratification, like we are impossible to please at our core. That’s why when somebody has an infant, somebody has a baby, we’re like, “Oh my gosh, they’re in it deep,” right? Because all that baby knows is “I want it, I want it now. I’m impulsive, I know what I need. Give it to me fast.”
Now as adults we’ve learned okay, you can’t operate like that, but that comes in time at our core, like you and me both right now in this moment, I still want exactly what I want, I want it right this second, I don’t want anyone to argue with me. I want to snap my fingers and I want to show up.
You want that too, right? You want that in business, you want that in life, you want that in marriage, you want that with your kids. You want that financially, you want all of it. We just want what we want and we want it right now, right? That’s the id in us. You can’t fight it.
It is also what brings our basic level of fear. I have said this for years. It’s fear was ingrained in us from the time we were born. That’s the id, right? Fear kept us safe in caveman times, basic natural instinct. That is the unconscious voice that is always going to be a part of the decisions that we make.
Then we have the superego. The superego is—I want you to think of this as like the subconscious. This can be tricky to understand because now you understand that the id is basic and instinctual. It’s what’s called the unconscious decision-making, so not subconscious. It’s unconscious. It is wired into us from the time of birth. There’s nothing we can do to fight it, okay? It’s unconscious, it just what it is, it’s there, it’s the id.
Then we have the subconscious. The subconscious is the superego.
The superego is in its simplest form, your values. We all bring superego to our table, to the conversations every time we show up every day.
Our values make up our conscience. When you try to teach your kids to have a good conscience, essentially you’re trying to teach them values, right? My conscience tells me to not steal candy from the grocery store. Well, at the end of the day, that’s my values. There are probably some—actually, not probably, there’s definitely some children who were raised at, listen, stealing is how we get by because they had no other choice. That in their subconscious is instinctually what they would do to get by.
Now is that something they were unconsciously born with as the id? No, it’s something that was taught to them, so it creates the morals, it creates the values.
Generally the superego is developed from the time of birth so when we say, “Oh, it’s your money story from childhood, it’s the baggage from childhood, it’s the emotional distress that you went to,” all of those things feed into the superego.
How many of you—like I always say I’m a perfectionist in recovery. It’s almost a laughing joke because I will never be able to fully turn off being a perfectionist. I would like everything to be perfect all the time. I’ve done a lot of therapy in my lifetime, so I deeply understand why I like things to be perfect. However, it’s so ingrained in me that as hard as I work at it, it will always be a part of me. There is a piece of me that thinks “but perfect would be better” and I can’t turn that off.
My husband doesn’t seek perfection. He was raised very differently than I was. That can be a bone of contention between us. I can want him to want things to be perfect all day long. His superego or his pre-conscious or his subconscious just isn’t wired that way and so this could be good marriage advice too. Sometimes we want those in our life to change, but it’s like you’re trying to change the way that they’re wired rather than understand the person that they are and the values that they have.
The superego or the subconscious or the conscience or the values are the next layer, okay? We all bring our values, our beliefs to the equation every time we show up every single day.
The ego, I want you to think of the ego as the middle woman or the middle man who stands between the id and the superego. Remember the id is subconscious. The id is I want it, I want it right now. I want it fast, I want the way that I want to have it done. I’m going to be angry if I don’t get it. That’s what the id says. Then the superego says things like, “Well, but we should really be patient because it should really be perfect and we don’t want to have to do illegal things to get it.” The id is like, “How could you even say that? We just need to have it. We need to have it now. It doesn’t have to be perfect, I want it.” But the superego or the subconscious is saying, “No, no, no, no, no. Perfection is everything and we really need to keep that first and foremost.”
Can you see how those two ideas are at odds all the time? So it’s the ego’s job to balance out those two beliefs and make good decisions.
How many of you are indecisive? Yes. That’s because the ego in us is having a difficult time deciding if the id, the basic instinct, or the superego, which is the subconscious values, should be in the driver’s seat. The ego is every single day trying to decide how to make the right choices in order to get the result we’re looking for. Is this starting to make sense? I hope so.
Let me give you some examples of things that your ego says. The ego will say things like, “I’m a victim of my circumstances,” okay. “I would do something about this, but I can’t because my partner doesn’t make enough money and I don’t make enough money and I would invest in education except for that I don’t have it. So now I can’t do it.”
Your ego says, “I want everything and I want it right now,” right? That’s what the id says. The superego says, “You have to make rational choices, and you don’t want to get in over your head and you want to make sure that you are being respectful to your partner and your superego is saying all of these considerations,” and so your ego starts to feel frustrated between that dynamic of I want what I want and I want it right now, but I’m a victim of my circumstances because X, Y, and Z in my values tell me things like I can’t put this on a credit card. I can’t give up time away from my family to work more because I’ll be misaligned with my values.
The ego is in this terrible position of saying, “I’m a victim of these circumstances. I’m trapped. I have no choice and there’s nothing I can do.” Has anybody ever felt like that? You’re convinced that that’s the truth while your ego is also confused every single day, and the only solution to that confusion is embracing the power of the higher self.
Embracing the power of the higher self is hard because it goes against everything that the id and the superego believe in. It forces the ego to consider a new perspective. It forces the ego to not look at the instinct and not look at what its experienced in the past and instead think about possibility and potential.
We as humans generally have a really difficult time with that because the superego says, “But you’ve never done that before. That would be impossible. History tells us blah, blah, blah.” Well, the higher self doesn’t care about history. All the higher self knows is that anything is possible. Miracles happen every day and plenty of people achieve everything they ever dreamed of and more, so why not you? It’s ’cause the higher self knows better. And those who achieve massively are those who listen to the higher self.
When the ego said, “I’m a victim of circumstance and there’s nothing I can do about it, and because these are the cards I’ve been dealt, I’m stuck where I’m at,” the higher self comes in and says, “You create your own reality.” If we can embrace that idea of, okay, so maybe it has not been possible for me to be able to open my salon up until this point, maybe it has not been possible for me to work enough hours to build a clientele, the higher self comes in and says, “Hold on a second. You’re the creator of this reality in this lifetime. All of the decisions you’ve made up until this point and all of the decisions you’ve yet to make are yours. You can make a new decision at any point if you choose to not listen to the superego or the id and instead say, but what could be possible if I choose differently?”
Higher self wants you to embrace curiosity and try new things and not allow the id to keep you small because of fear. Higher self says, “Friend, I’ll be your navigator. Let’s get curious together. Let’s look at what’s possible.”
Maybe you have tough circumstances right now, but you don’t have to be a victim of them. Let me show you a different path.
Imagine—go back to that visual again of my husband in the driver’s seat and he is driving and he’s lost. He is the ego is saying, “I’m a victim of my circumstance. I’m lost. I don’t know how I got here. I’m going to keep driving around in circles and I’ll never get out.” Well, me as the higher self sitting in the passenger seat says, “No, no, no, no, no, you’re lost right now, babe. But we can turn ourselves around at any moment and get back on the right path. Or we have another option. What if we choose a detour and we say, listen, we’re not going to get to our initial destination, but we can find something better.” That’s what a good navigator or a good higher self does.
Let’s do another example. The ego says there’s never enough. There’s not enough to go around. I’ll never make enough money. There’s not enough clients here. Competition is too stiff. That’s the id and the superego talking. The higher self says we’re living in a time of abundance. There is always enough to go around. It’s my job to claim what is rightfully mine, right?
The id says I’m only here in this lifetime temporarily and that’s scary. The clock is winding down. There’s not enough time. I’m going to stay in fear. The higher self says this lifetime is temporary and that’s amazing because it forces me to make beautiful choices every single day and not settle for anything less than extraordinary, right?
Both of those things are true. We are only here in this lifetime temporarily. Anything could change in a heartbeat. Those who choose to operate from the higher self say I am not willing to be a victim of my circumstances. I’m not willing to fall victim of scarcity mentality because life is too damn short and opportunities are endless for those to choose to live life to the fullest, right?
The ego says this world is highly competitive, cutthroat, and I’m fighting my way to the middle. The higher self says I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. I am aligned, I’m in harmony, and if I stop trying to fight the reality and instead choose to be curious and choose to align myself with others who are positive and going the places I want to be without judgment and without competition, we will all succeed together.
Things that your ego says would be, life is really freaking complicated, or here’s waiting for the next shoe to fall, or what’s going to happen next? Those are the things the ego says because the id and the superego teach us that bad things happen, right? When you look back on our past, often we focus on the negative more than the positive.
But our higher self says, I am so blessed to be here in this lifetime. I find the joy in every day that I have, and when the days aren’t joyous, I look at them and say what can I do today to ensure that my tomorrow is better and brighter so that I don’t continue making those mistakes?
You can see why the ego gets a bad rap and it’s not necessarily about being selfish, although the ego is very selfish. The ego is incredibly negative and most of us naturally have a very negative view of the world and our reality. It’s heartbreaking and it’s sad. If you’re not careful, you’ll surround yourself with lots of people who are not egotistical, but only see the world through their ego and only think negatively and are living in fear and are living in scarcity mindset and are complete victims of their circumstances and allow themselves to fall victim to this lifetime rather than being in the driver’s seat of it.
This is my invitation to you to choose to allow the higher self into your passenger seat, to allow yourself to create your own reality, to realize you can turn the car around at any time you can take a detour. There are plenty of other incredible higher self passengers who would love to connect with you and stay inspired and stay light and stay uplifted. There is so much abundance in this world and in this lifetime. It’s simply yours for the taking. The world in the universe are waiting for you to check your ego and show up and take it and stop making excuses and instead say I’m going to connect with who I need to connect with, where I need to connect with them so that I can have everything that is rightfully mine.
Friends, seek answers, get curious, think positively, see the world through possibility, and don’t let your past define your future.
Y’all so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
