a phrase i’ve only started to viscerally understand recently:
“you need to protect their ego”
in the past i thought this just meant ‘this person thinks highly of themselves, make sure to act congruently with that otherwise they’ll be offended’ but i now understand it to mean:

when someone is high ego, you need to carefully tip toe around their ego in conversation because each insecurity or deluded self-belief they have is a mini mental land mine, where if you step on it, they might explode on you—you need to protect yourself (and them) from their ego.

conversely, low ego people have no internal land mines. you don’t need to revolve what you say around their ego. you can say what you want about yourself without them making it *about them*. they don’t implicate themselves in what you share—they know it’s about you, not them!

said differently: with low ego people, you can speak freely. with high ego people, you must speak carefully.
to protect one’s ego is to dance around their mental sore spots in conversation, careful not to press on any strongly held belief or insecurity they have about themselves