How Ego Turns Discipline Into Control (And How to Take It Back)
On role models and the practice of realignment that restores self-governance.
I’m the oldest of three.
The age gap is big: seven years with my middle brother, ten with the youngest. My dad worked outside the city most of the time, so while I love them both the same, I grew up close to my mom. And maybe she didn’t mean it this way, but in my little brain, I saw myself as her helper, the extra pair of hands around the house.
At first, it was small things: helping with chores, keeping an eye on my brothers when she stepped out, protecting them when needed. Nothing remarkable, but enough to show me what many older siblings learn early: you grow up a little faster than the rest.
That experience shaped who I am today, it explains some of my strengths and some of my struggles. But overall, it gave me an early glimpse of what being a model looks like. My dad modeled how to be a man: to stay cool, to be proud but not arrogant, to have a growth mindset, and most importantly, that it’s okay to show your emotions.
When he wasn’t around, I unknowingly tried to pass a bit of that on to my brothers in my own way.
The funny thing is, I didn’t feel responsible for being a role model. I was acting as one, yes, but not intentionally. There was no pressure, no identity attached to it. It was just something that came with the role.
Back then, I was modeling without knowing it.
Later, I’d learn what it means to do it consciously, and how that awareness changes everything.
When the Ego Builds the Wrong Model
When you start living independently, that invisible role fades. You’re no longer the older sibling people depend on. You’re just living, learning, exploring, figuring life out one day at a time.
In college, I started to look outward for examples. I watched my friends — the ones who seemed confident, successful, good at what they did — and I tried to pick up what they had figured out. How they carried themselves, how they managed pressure, how they knew where they were going.
Without realizing it, I was doing what every person does: searching for models to borrow from. That’s how we grow. Through imitation.
But eventually, something shifts.
We reach a point where something real is at stake — a child, a family, a purpose — and we start questioning whether the image we’ve been chasing actually fits the life we want.
In my case, that moment came later.
I had followed what most people around me considered success. I moved to the U.S., landed a solid job in tech, bought my first property, got married, and had kids. On paper, everything looked great. The story of success kept getting better.
But somewhere in the middle of all that, a question started to surface: Is this the kind of example I want my kids to learn from?
My idea of being a good role model wasn’t just about those outcomes; it was about passing down my principles, my values, the way I handled struggle and alignment.
When my oldest son was born, I started to notice the small inconsistencies: the moments when my actions didn’t fully match the values I wanted to model.
That realization hit hard. It didn’t feel like guilt; it felt more like clarity: my outer success and inner compass were out of sync.
That’s when the seed for Self Disciplined was planted. Born out of misalignment, as an attempt to heal it.
And that’s when I understood.
The real obstacle to becoming the kind of role model I wanted to be wasn’t ignorance or lack of willpower. It was ego. The version of myself I had built by trying to fit someone else’s definition of success.
The ego that was built from all those years of imitation.
The one that learned to equate success with validation.
The job, the money, the praise.
The one that resists correction because change threatens its identity.
You can build an impressive life around that model. You can even receive admiration for it. But once you have something meaningful to protect — your children, your integrity, your peace — you start to see how fragile that model really is.
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Why the Ego Defends the Image
The brain doesn’t like contradiction. It’s wired to preserve a consistent story about who we are.
When our actions clash with our values, the brain detects a mismatch known as cognitive dissonance — a term first described by psychologist Leon Festinger in 19571. His classic experiment showed that when people were asked to perform a boring task and then paid only one dollar to tell others it was “fun,” they later convinced themselves it actually was fun. Their minds changed the story to reduce the discomfort of lying for such a small reward.
That’s the ego at work. It would rather rewrite the narrative than face internal conflict.
In daily life, that same process happens whenever we justify behavior that doesn’t fit our principles:
“I had no choice”
“everyone does it”
“it’s just how business works”
Neuroscience gives that reaction a physical dimension. The same brain network responsible for constructing our sense of self — the default mode network (DMN) — activates strongly when our identity feels threatened.
A 2016 study by Jonas Kaplan and colleagues at the University of Southern California2 found that when participants’ political beliefs were challenged with counter-evidence, the DMN and insula lit up in the same way they do during experiences of pain or threat.
Confronting misalignment literally hurts.
Ego doesn’t just distort how we think; it also amplifies how we feel.
Anger, pride, or defensiveness act like its bodyguards, turning discomfort into self-righteousness. Research shows that anger often emerges as a way to restore control when we feel threatened, giving us a false sense of certainty and moral power3. Neurologically, anger reduces prefrontal regulation and strengthens the amygdala’s grip, making us react faster and reflect slower4.
That’s why moments of anger are such revealing mirrors of discipline: they show how quickly the ego can hijack alignment.
And it doesn’t stop there. We are social learners; mirror neurons, discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti’s team in the 1990s5, fire both when we act and when we observe someone else act.
That means your children, your friends, your team, they don’t just hear your values, they see them. Their brains rehearse your behavior internally, long before they decide consciously whether to imitate it.
So the ego’s defense doesn’t only protect a fragile self-image; it also trains others to build the same defenses.
Self-governance — understanding it as a form of agency in which the we act from what we truly believe in6— begins the moment we notice that loop and decide to break it.
Realignment Through Self-Governance
At that point, we face two paths.
The first is to face the discomfort, to sit with the gap between who we are and who we meant to become. To ask the hard questions:
Would I want my children to copy this version of me?
Would I want them to succeed this way?
Those questions sting because they force us to confront a mismatch between our results and our values. But that discomfort is the door.
The second path is easier at first: letting the ego win.
We rationalize, we compare, we say “everyone does it.” The gap between our principles and our actions widens. The people around us sense it. They stop seeing us as someone to learn from.
Self-governance begins when we choose the first path. When we treat alignment as a living practice, not a moral scoreboard. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about being coherent.
In Adaptable Discipline, I describe this as training comeback speed, the ability to return to alignment faster each time.
For me, a manifestation of that practice shows up most clearly in moments of conflict. I used to get defensive, ready to bite back the second tension appeared. Now I try to stop and assess my words, to focus on finding resolution instead of proving a point. That simple yet powerful pause is where discipline starts repairing itself and self-governance begins to grow, because discipline isn’t control, it’s continual realignment. Each return strengthens the muscle of self-governance and makes clarity easier to recover after disruption. Over time, it becomes less about perfection and more about returning faster.
You could think that what’s happening in those moments is abstract, but it’s actually very concrete from a neurological standpoint. Every time we interrupt a reactive loop, we’re retraining the brain to pause before it protects the ego. That’s why small, consistent acts of reflection — even brief pauses — reshape how we handle discomfort.
Science supports this too. Reflective practices — journaling, mindfulness, even writing what we regret — help the prefrontal cortex override the ego’s defensive impulses.
Research from Psychological Science (2014)7 showed that self-affirmation and reflective writing reduce defensive reactions by activating areas of the brain linked to reasoning and self-control. In other words, reflection trains the brain to prefer honesty over justification.
What this tells us is that every act of self-awareness, every pause, every reflection, isn’t just emotional clarity; it’s cognitive reinforcement. The brain learns that returning to alignment feels safer than defending the ego. That’s how resilience turns into integrity. One small return at a time.
Eventually, those moments of clarity start shaping who you are. They become the evidence that you can choose to come back, no matter how far you drift. And that’s self-discipline at its finest: the practice of noticing, realigning, and returning until your actions echo your principles.
We move from impulse, to acting from what we truly believe in.
Every return you make strengthens your ability to teach it. Realignment doesn’t just show others what’s possible; it creates the kind of presence that helps them practice it too.
What To Take From This
We all model something. Whether we intend to or not, we teach through our behavior.
What people learn from us isn’t perfection; it’s our returns. Our ability to see the drift, name it, and come back.
In tomorrow’s paid companion, we’ll go a layer deeper. We’ll train how to spot when ego takes over, recognize its early signals — defensiveness, pride, irritation — and replace those reactions with practices that bring you back to alignment faster.
Continuous alignment is what helps you develop self-governance, and because of that, self-governance doesn’t begin when everything is calm; it begins the moment you notice resistance and choose to return anyway.
If you want to be the kind of role model worth following, don’t aim to look flawless. Aim to stay aligned. That way, because your values are visible in how you live, the people who matter will learn the most important lesson of all:
Discipline isn’t about control, but about constant realignment, the willingness to face discomfort and, through each return, transform it into self-governance.
Have a wonderful week!
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Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041593
Kaplan, J. T., Gimbel, S. I., & Harris, S. (2016). Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Scientific Reports, 6, 39589. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39589
Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000). Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Cognition & Emotion, 14(4), 473–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300402763
Glenn, A. L., Raine, A., Schug, R. A., Young, L., & Hauser, M. (2011). Increased amygdala activation and reduced prefrontal activation during moral judgments in psychopathy. NeuroImage, 49(1), 902–910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.08.045
Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996). Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive Brain Research, 3(2), 131–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/0926-6410(95)00038-0
Falk, E. B., O’Donnell, M. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2014). Self-affirmation and reduced defensive processing of threatening health messages. Psychological Science, 25(1), 197–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613500795
Superb👌🏽