Playing the Comparison Game
This week’s topic is a personal one, and one that I do constantly, and I have a feeling that many of you may do it as well. It’s called the comparison game. We as women do it all the time! We see another woman and we immediately compare our hair, our shape, our clothes, our skin, our age, practically everything, and most of the time we come up lacking. Have you found you do this? I know I do, and I found myself doing this with a colleague recently to the point that my husband told me to stop because it was bothering him how much I was bringing it up. And he was exactly right. When I mentioned it to my daughter, I was surprised that she said she didn’t compare herself to her friends. She said she didn’t feel the need to compare her situation or even herself personally to anyone else because every situation and every person is different. That got me to thinking. If my teenager isn’t comparing herself to anyone then why am I?
So why do we do it? Personally, I think it’s human nature. We naturally look around and see what someone else has and think why do they have that and I don’t? It could be physical looks or circumstances. In my case more often than not, it’s about financial security and business opportunities. Let’s be completely honest, I’d love to work from home and be financially stable. Wouldn’t we all? So when I see someone who is doing that, whether it is on Instagram or in my own life, I can’t help but compare and completely sabotage my own self-esteem in the process. As Mel Robbins says in her newest best-selling self-help book: The Let Them Theory, we compare for two reasons: self-torture and to teach. There are certain aspects we can’t change. Certain people are born with certain attributes and natural skills; I can’t change that. What I can change, however, is how I see them. That’s where I can stop torturing myself and start learning from this game of comparison.
This is where I have completely dropped the ball. When I see someone else who is thriving in the real estate business, I should be learning from their success instead of scorning them and berating myself for my lack thereof. If someone is doing something well, why not learn from them? I mentioned in an earlier blog how I saw a much younger realtor making videos and how my immediate judgment was negative because she had not “lived” the content she was sharing, but then I decided to learn from her example and began making my own videos. I learned that it was much harder than she made it appear. She definitely made it look easy! What we need to do when we compare ourselves to others is to be willing to see the work that person has done to achieve that goal, whatever that goal is: financial success, weight loss, glowing skin, whatever! Then we need to be willing put in the work to achieve the same results for ourselves. Learn from their success. The problem I have been having is that I was stuck wallowing in my own self-pity. This person was more successful. This person had it easier. This person didn’t have as many challenges. How absolutely ridiculous! It’s not my place to judge and what was this type of self-torture doing to me? Absolutely nothing constructive I can assure you. All I was doing was digging myself a deeper and deeper hole of self-despair where I did not want to do anything about it. It wasn’t until I looked at The Let Them Theory again and re-read the chapter about learning from comparison that I realized what I had been doing and how I could change my mindset, which in turn could change my life.
Let them have their success. Let them have their perfect body. Then let you learn from them. Let them teach you how to be successful. Let them teach you how to be in charge of your body. You have to be willing to show up and do the work though. It’s not easy. No one said it was going to be. You don’t know their story and frankly, you don’t need to. All you need to know is that you can do it too if you use comparison to teach you how to learn from them.
Don’t play the comparison game and let it rule you. Be in control and let it comparison teach you to be better, to be the version of you that others compare themselves to. Then they can learn from you.
