No-one is born with humility. It is in human nature to consider oneself as the center of the universe. This is some sense absolutely correct, we are all at the very center of our own experience. The mistake we all make however is that we don’t just think that we are at the center of it all, we think we are more important than everything else.
This feeling of self importance is not constructive. It is the opposite of humility and is something we should all work on overcoming. It is the greatest block preventing us from truly forging meaningful connections with other people. Ask me I know, it is very hard to have genuine connections with people when you think you are more important than they are.
There are also more global consequences to human self-importance. Human beings are in a position of power. This because we have the capacity to manipulate the world around us. This combined with a sense of self-importance, makes human beings very destructive creatures. A person who does not value things will easily destroy them. When human beings are like this they become the tyrants of the world.
Human beings have the capacity to be the care-takers of the world instead of its tyrants, but this requires that we get over our sense of self-importance.
So what can we do to help us get over our infatuation with ourselves? I have a couple of things which I sometimes use when I get caught up in myself, which, to my regret, happens quite a lot.
The first is to consciously place myself in the grand scheme of things. The true fact of the matter is that we are very small creatures on a very big planet in a very very big universe. This will help you put things in context a bit and get a bit more of a balanced view of yourself and things around you.
It is also useful to remind yourself that the world keeps turning even if you are no longer on it. We do not need to take ourselves too seriously. We must remind ourselves that it is not the end of the world. If someone disrespects you and questions your importance, before losing your marbles, remind yourself that it is not the end of the world. No matter how important you are or how important people perceive you to be, the world keeps turning, whether you are on it or not.
One of the more useful techniques to use when you realise you are possessed with a sense of your own self-importance, is to deliberately find something other than yourself to make significant. This can be anything, it can be the blue sky outside, a very funny friend or acquaintance, a pretty bird. The trick is to just snap your attention away from yourself to something else, and then to see what is worth appreciating in that thing. Everything has some redeemable qualities, so long as you are open to them. I often find myself complaining about people (which is a habit I am trying to break). When I realise what I am doing I always get a pang of guilt and immediately say something nice about them. The amazing fact that this shows though is that I can always find something nice to say about a person, no matter who they are.
This last technique is actually my favorite. The best way to stop gabbing on to yourself about how important you are is just to stop gabbing on about yourself period. This is really the ideal place to function from. We are happiest when we don’t feature in our own experience. We are happiest when we are infatuated with the world. In other words we are happiest when we are in awe of the beauty that surrounds us. To have this we have to snap our attention from ourselves to everything that is around us.