When I shared 10 Ways to live an Extraordinary Life, I learned that some of you are struggling with comparison. My third recommendation to live an extraordinary life was …
Stop comparing. Someone will always have more or less than you. There will always be someone who is better or worse at what you do. You can’t assess who you are or what you have based on others and if your focus is on what they have or do, you can never fully appreciate all of the extraordinary blessings in your own life. Even your past and future cannot be measuring sticks for your life today. Keep your eyes on your own paper.
Based on your response and my own actions, it seems that comparison is a hard habit to break. While I compare much less than I used to, it’s easy to fall into the comparison trap.
To help with your/our struggle with comparison, I want to offer some alternatives to just stop, because if we could all just stop, we would. It’s sort of like someone telling me that if I want to lose weight I have to move more and eat less. True? Yes. Helpful? Not really. I understand the science, but how can I change my behavior?
3 Strategies to consider if you are struggling with comparison
1. Compare Fair.
If you are going compare, make a fair comparison. Compare apples to apples and compare up and down. What I mean by that is sometimes we use comparison to justify our behaviors, by noticing how we do something better than someone else. Other times we use comparison to put ourselves down and to measure our own situation to someone else’s much better situation. In essence, we compare to make ourselves feel good or bad. Instead, compare up and down. When you compare one way, compare the other way too. This practice reveals the pointlessness of comparison.
You’ll realize that no matter if you compare up or down, you are still exactly where you were when you started. If you don’t want to be there, move.
2. Own it.
Write it down. Roll around in it for a bit, and then own the fact that no matter how much you compare yourself to others, it doesn’t matter. The fact that someone makes more money probably isn’t the reason you are making less. The reason you are don’t feel well is not because someone else looks really fit and healthy. Comparison can stem from discontent with who you are and what you have. Once you understand your discontent, you can make changes that will matter. Writing about it and truly owning your thoughts and actions is the first step to figuring it out.
3. Never compare your inside to someone else’s outside.
Someone brilliant said that first, but I’m not sure who it was. This practice of comparing how you feel about your life on the inside to how someone else’s life looks to you on the outside is dangerous. You don’t know the whole story. It’s not an accurate comparison and the process results in feeling like you aren’t good enough. You are.
We learned how to compare ourselves to others from the moment our kindergarten projects received a grade and maybe even sooner. We hear other people try to compare us to others to learn where we fit in, and naturally learn the behavior for ourselves. The good thing is that if had the power to learn it, we have the power to unlearn it. Practice these strategies, and be mindful of when and how you compare.
Your life holds too much beauty and promise to compare it away. With practice, you can replace comparison with gratitude. Appreciate what you have, and who you are, and encourage the best for everyone around you.
So beautiful and true as always. I know many people, some of my family included, who play the comparision game, and from the outside it looks as though they have some sort of secret competition going on. When someone buys something new, another has to one-up them, by buying a bigger, better version. I always try to remind myself, when I get caught up in the comparision game that just because someone has nice things, does not mean that they have money.
In today’s day and age it is increasingly easy to compare yourself to others, especially because social media and blogs make sharing our lives with the world so easy. We have to simply recognize that how we and others portray ourselves online is only part of the story. A lot of smoke and mirrors can be used to make things appear different than they are.
One of my favourite quotes about comparision is, “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle”.
Thanks, Courtney!
Thank you for this post, it is calming to me and gives me a way to work with these feelings/thoughts. I want to break out of negativity and learn to be open to all the possibilities and beauty in my life as it is today. Your photography is so beautiful and it totally compliments your posts, thank you for sharing it here. 🙂
Wonderful post. It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only person who struggles with comparison and feelings of inadequacy.
For me, the key to dealing with it is owning up to the fact that I get something out of the whole crazy self-destructive process. Namely, it gives me something to get upset and worked up about so that I don’t have feel other uncomfortable emotions. So the comparison stuff is really just a convenient red herring that allows me to avoid feelings that I’d really rather not have to deal with.
I once read a saying that stated, “You are comparing your entire career to someone else’s highlights reel.”
One of the main reasons I have a love-hate relationship w/ social media is this. Most often than not, I fall short on this comparison game. It sucks the joy out of my day and I feel like a complete failure.
I know it’s not exactly the case but if somebody’s best moments/milestones are staring back at you through photos, status updates, etc. it’s hard not to be affected.
But the good news is we can do something about it. Now, my news feeds are very limited thanks to their settings. I always log out even on the apps so that I can be present and with purpose everytime I log back in. I only follow a handful of really interesting people. I regularly purge my accounts.
Small changes that more beneficial than harmful to my psyche. 🙂
“Keep your eyes on your own paper”! Love that. I’ve been blessed to rarely have compared myself,my life with others’.
I don’t know how that happened but I’m glad it did.
Great advice, Courtney. I recently heard a quote that social media sites promote the comparison of our own B-footage to someone else’s highlight reel. I let FB go and it has helped a great deal in this department. Owning it is easier when you’re laser focused on what you’re doing and not “peeping over at your neighbor’s homework” :).
Just saw Sarah above said that too. I guess we’re all feelin’ it.
I spent far too long comparing myself to others, especially when life took me a more unusual route. I wasted a lot of time!
However, I learnt to make lemonade out of lemons, see the silver lining to everything and gain confidence in my own being, and as I’ve got older (50 this year!) I have learnt to relax and be grateful for what I have – in fact, recently I purged some moodboard/inspiration boards and realised I had inadvertently achieved what I’d been dreaming about years ago, just by reclaiming my life and leaving out the clutter.
🙂
Your last paragraph sums up life beautifully.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot. As a matter of fact one of the first posts I published on my blog was about the comparison game. In my opinion it only takes the focus off ourselves, the one person that we need to focus on the most.
It’s the people we love who are the biggest culprits, parents comparing us to our siblings, friends comparing us to other friends. It does not take long before someone ruins my day by saying so and so is doing this, or doing that, or qualified for this and attained that. I got off that ride a while back, I have been good at ignoring the noise that other people try to make and drag me into. I have learned not to take things personally and focus on things that is of substance.
The grass is not always greener and even though we know we should not make comparisons, it’s sometimes hard to stop ourselves.
One thing that I learned from a parenting group for parents with kids with mental illness is that after learning about all the struggles we all had, if we put our problems in the center of a circle and then had to pick one to take back and own, we would all take our own struggle back instead of picking another persons.
This helped me to stop making doing the comparison, because it didn’t matter anyways.
It’s too easy to get caught up in everyone else’s world. Pulling back on social media helps to see the clarity of it all.
These tools can be a good thing but they can also be a terrible thing. It’s important to stay refreshed and grounded. Thanks for the thoughtful piece Courtney!
I like to compare to set goals and inspire myself. Most of the time I block out negativity and laugh at it when it does creep in.