The article includes this tendency to equate ego with what is essentially a secular state of sin, instead of looking behind what ego might be. The view reinforces the just world fallacy that good things happen to good people, if only they could be without ego - and failure can be attributed to said ego's conceits.
It's too much to unwrap in a comment, but suffice it to say, while some of this can be helpful to someone in need of it, one would not be alone if they found it cynical and trite.
Are you familiar with the concepts of mindfulness, awareness, and equanimity that have been imported from Buddhist (and other) practices? Perhaps I am biased, but under that lens much (but not all) of the advice in the article becomes much less trite.
Thank you... wanted to say much of the same. I think it is all part of the PC movement to virtually castrate all aggression (mostly in men, in women it's fine). You need a certain amount of ego in order to lead. And yeah, confidence is not the same as ego but they are definitively interconnected. You need to display confidence to convince people to follow you, and you need a bit of ego to secure that confidence.
And some may say, but that's not the point where it is "toxic" but several of the samples in TFA are not counter or even in demonstration of where it might or might not be a toxic level. Even in communist/socialist societies the successful demonstrate an amount of aggression, ego and confidence. It's human nature. When it coincides with competence all the better.
It's too much to unwrap in a comment, but suffice it to say, while some of this can be helpful to someone in need of it, one would not be alone if they found it cynical and trite.