Comparative Wisdom

We’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, whether it’s an Instagram highlight, or a magazine cover, or he-said-she-said travel stories, and sadly sometimes even a career high. And often we listen to these stories with 10 per cent awe and inspiration and 90 per cent jealousy and wonder as to “why can’t I also be doing that?”.

Let’s admit it, it happens. Even though we most often don’t mean to sound like haters and just want to be happy for our friends, peers, colleagues, strangers, we can’t help but feel this pit of something form.

This pit seems to suddenly cause us to undervalue everything we’ve considered a personal achievement or step to success. Instead we want what the other has, sometimes even if it makes no sense to our end goal.

It’s time to reverse the percentages and make our reactions serve us better.

Comparing ourselves to others takes away the focus from ourselves and our own journey and instead brings someone else’s path into our everyday. Most of the time we forget we have different goals than our peers, but when they achieve success in something we wonder why we aren’t also seeing that type of success in that arena, while forgetting it may not even be a goal we’re pursuing. Why do we care that a friend was in a music video, or another got drafted to a sports team, or another moved out to LA to pursue an acting career, while all we’ve wanted is to focus on stepping up to the next level at our current place of work, which might I add, we’re happy at.

Writing down our personal goals can help us stay on track and in turn, be genuinely happy for others. I find it helpful to write out my goals so that when I find myself questioning where I am in my life, I can easily remember what I’m working towards and not get derailed by someone’s curated Instagram highlight reel of them interviewing a celebrity I never even cared about. Remembering our goals keeps the focus on us and keeps us confident in what we’re working towards.

Confidence encourages sharing and I know people say don’t share your secrets, well yes, if it’s a secret recipe to the colonel’s chicken, then don’t. But if it’s useful learnings in life, share away, because someone might add advice to it and make our advice that much better or better yet, someone listening might actually need it. We need to put more good vibes out there to attract good things to us. Share our happiness, share our sorrows, share our discoveries, share our friends, share our life. After all no one is you and going to implement your advice and experience in the exact, unique way you did.

We’re more likely to share things when we’re confident in ourselves. Why would we need to worry about bridging friendship groups when we’re confident we’re a good friend to both parties? We’re more likely to be nervous to introduce friend group A to friend group B and fear not being needed if we were a bad friend to them. And if we do get left out, then we need to take note of how we can be a better friend that others would not want to exclude or lose out on. Share apps that we find, quotes that we read and stories we hear, share what inspires us instead of being scared that people are going to take our discoveries and inspiration and run away with it. Share without expecting in return.

The reason I feel it’s important to analyze how we compare ourselves to others is because it affects our mental well being and our relationship with others. Creating this sense of competitive fear makes us close off ourselves from others and creates “secrets” that don’t need to be secrets and would instead create more healing and bonding, if openly shared.

Jealousy tends to have this averse effect on ambition and instead of inspiring us, it tends to limit us by making us do things out of spite or worse, half-heartedly, so that when we end up failing we think it’s because we don’t deserve success or the world is unfair to us, when instead it’s simply because our heart wasn’t in it. We didn’t do it for ourselves. It was another person’s goal.

The more confident we are in ourselves (by reflecting on what our true goals are), the happier we can allow ourselves to be for others (by being happy for them and sharing our happiness and inspirations with them) and the more positivity we attract to ourselves.

First written by on madderandshade/wordpress on December 20, 2017: https://madderandshade.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/comparative-wisdom/

Reposted on this final madder and shade site in 2018