One word, two meanings 

There is something interesting about the word ego.

In English, ego is our sense of self: our identity, our pride, our status, the image we hold of ourselves and quietly hope others hold of us too.

In Igbo, ego means money.

Same sound. Very different meanings. And I think there is a useful career conversation hiding inside that coincidence, because in our careers, ego and ego are often competing for the same decision. One is counting naira and dollars. The other is counting how things will look.

A good salary can quietly hide an identity you’re afraid to question. Know the price of staying before you decide the money is worth it.

“The money is good” 

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve even said it, at a dinner table, on a phone call with a friend, or alone in your car before walking into the office.

“The pay is good, so I’ll stay.”

And sometimes, that is exactly the right decision. I want to say that clearly before anything else, because a lot of career content treats money as something slightly embarrassing to care about. It isn’t.

Money matters. It pays bills. It creates options. It supports family, and for many of us, “family” is not two people. It is parents, siblings, a cousin’s school fees, a contribution to the village project. Money can buy you time, freedom and the ability to say no to things you would otherwise have to accept. There is nothing noble about pretending compensation doesn’t matter.

But here is where it gets complicated.

Sometimes the money is good and the career is quietly costing you everything else. Your energy. Your confidence. Your relationships. Your health. Your curiosity. Your sense that you’re actually going somewhere.

And because the salary is good, you convince yourself the cost is acceptable. You tell yourself it’s a season. Then the season becomes a year, and the year becomes five.

That’s when ego (the money) starts hiding the other ego.

When the other ego starts talking 

The other ego rarely announces itself. It sounds reasonable. Responsible, even. It sounds like this:

Read those again. Not one of them is about money.

Now we’re talking about identity. And this is exactly where career decisions become difficult, because the salary gives the identity a respectable disguise. It’s much easier to say “the pay is too good to leave” than “I’m afraid of who I’ll be if I do.”

I know this voice well. When I left my corporate role in September 2025 to build RISE with Betty full time, the hardest part was not the arithmetic. I had done the arithmetic. The hardest part was letting go of a version of success I had worked very hard to earn, one that everyone around me understood without needing an explanation.

A regional title at a multinational is a complete sentence. “I’m building a career transition platform for African professional women” is the beginning of a conversation, and sometimes a long one.

“Sometimes you’re not staying because the job is right for you. You’re staying because leaving would mean questioning the version of success you worked so hard for.”

Dr Betty Eziakor

This isn’t a character flaw 

Let’s be fair to ourselves here. If the identity ego is loud, it’s because it was trained to be.

We live inside a system that ties our worth to our title and our pay slip. At work, seniority is signalled through titles long before it is signalled through growth. At family gatherings, your job is your introduction: “she’s a manager at…” does the work of a whole biography. At weddings, at church, at every “so, what do you do now?”, the question is really asking where you rank.

Many of us also carry the weight of being the first: the first in the family with a corporate job, the first with an international employer, the one whose success is quietly shared by many people. Walking away from that can feel less like a career decision and more like a public statement.

Research on how people make decisions helps explain why this is so sticky. Studies report that losses tend to feel heavier than equivalent gains (often called loss aversion), that people show a strong preference for whatever option is already in place (status quo bias), and that we keep investing in a path partly because of what we’ve already put into it (the sunk cost effect). None of that is a personal weakness. It’s how human judgement tends to work, and a high salary plus an admired title makes every one of those effects stronger.

So if you’ve been stuck, I don’t want you to read this and feel judged. I want you to read it and feel seen, and then start asking better questions.

The Security Illusion

In my work, there are three blind spots I see again and again in women who are ready for a transition that hasn’t quite happened yet. One of them sits right at the heart of this issue.

The Security Illusion is powerful precisely because the salary is real. The bills really are paid. The family really is supported. But security is not only about this month’s income. It is also about whether your skills, relationships and reputation will still be valuable in three years, in a market that is changing fast.

A role that pays well but has stopped growing you is not as secure as it feels. It is secure for now.

Counting the true cost

So which ego is making the decision? Ego: money. Or ego: identity.

Neither should automatically win. The better question is: what is this decision actually costing me, and what am I getting in return?

A pay slip is very good at showing one kind of value and very bad at showing the rest. Try putting the two side by side.

Stay, negotiate, take it, or leave

There is no single right answer here. There are four honest options, and each one can be the right one.

Five questions to ask this week

Instead of asking “Should I leave?”, which is a heavy question that tends to produce either panic or paralysis, sit with these five. Write the answers down. Writing slows the identity ego down enough for you to hear the rest of you.

Look at your career through both meanings of ego. Then ask: which one is making my decisions for me?

Rising with you,

Dr Betty

Is it security, or the illusion of it?

Find the blind spot steering your next move

The free Three Blind Spots Diagnostic shows whether the Security Illusion, Competence Attachment or Reputation Anchoring is doing the most work in your career decisions right now, and what to do about it.

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Sources and notes. The decision research referenced is summarised, not promised as an outcome for any individual: Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979), “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica; Samuelson, W. and Zeckhauser, R. (1988), “Status Quo Bias in Decision Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty; Arkes, H. R. and Blumer, C. (1985), “The Psychology of Sunk Cost,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. The Three Blind Spots and the Security Illusion are frameworks developed by Dr Betty Eziakor through her coaching practice. This article is for reflection and is not financial advice.