It’s so easy to find that we are comparing ourselves to others.
It must be natural to make these types of comparisons, because nearly everyone does it.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s a good move.
Comparing yourself to others is a reliable way to reduce your confidence, motivation, and self-esteem.
If you want to become the best possible you, avoid comparing yourself to others.
The Dangers
There are several challenges that occur when you compare yourself to someone else:
1 – Everyone has a different starting point.
You might be just learning to play golf, but your friend has been playing for 10 years.
You might be interested in playing basketball, but you’re only 5-feet tall and your friend is 18 inches taller than you are.
You might be just starting out in your Avon business and your mentor has been building her business for 18 years.
You can’t compare progress, results, or success unless the starting points are the same, and they never are.
2 – Everyone has a different level of talent and natural abilities.
Some people are born with a high IQ.
Some people naturally have amazing hand-eye coordination.
Others have a natural knack for music or math or are amazing with numbers.
Again, different starting points.
3 – The resources available to you and another person are different.
If you want to play the violin and your father is a wealthy concert violinist, you have a huge advantage over someone born into a financially-challenged family that has no experience in music.
The same is true if you come from an educated family vs. a non-educated family. Your resources, and expectations of what is possible are different. As you work to grow your Avon business, we hope to help you increase your expectations of what is possible. 🙂
4 – We tend to compare ourselves to the best in the world.
You don’t compare your Texas Hold’em skills to your neighbor the electrician. You compare yourself to the tournament winners.
You don’t compare your Avon business to the other Reps in your area, you compare it to the people who are on stage at RepFest.
We don’t compare ourselves to the average. We compare ourselves to the best the world has to offer.
5 – There’s always someone better.
There are only a handful of people that can make a reasonable claim to be the best at anything.
There are nearly eight billion people in the world. That’s a lot of people you have to surpass to be the best.
It’s easy to see why making comparisons can be dangerous. There’s little to gain and too much risk.
Comparing yourself to others doesn’t provide useful information. You’re only going to upset yourself, and that type of comparison isn’t fair in the first place.
The Solution
Here’s what you can do instead:
1 – Compare yourself to yourself.
A better option is to compare yourself to yourself.
Pay attention to your progress over time. Notice your improvement.
As long as you’re making headway, you have a good reason to be excited! Strive to become better each day.
2 – Limit your exposure to social media.
In theory, social media exists to connect people.
But In actuality, social media is often used as a way of showing off.
You rarely get the real story.
What you get is someone’s best attempt to make their life look better than it really is. You usually don’t see the back story, or what it took for them to get there.
Everyone, except you, seems to be living a spectacular life. It’s not true.
Be cautious with social media.
Although I personally couldn’t live with social media, I’ve had other people tell me that they are happier once they removed social media from their lives.
3 – Use the success of others as inspiration.
The success of others can be useful to you.
You can study how they became so successful.
Their success can inspire you to become the best you can be. And it can help you to see what’s possible, because if you know they’ve done it, you know you can too.
Just avoid comparing your success to theirs.
Do you compare yourself to others?
Making this type of comparison can be detrimental to your confidence and self-esteem.
Instead, compare your current version of yourself to the version of yourself from three months ago.
That’s a fair comparison to make. It becomes easy to see your progress or lack of progress.
The best comparison you can make is to your past self.
Set a few goals and spend some time each day working on those goals.
You’ll be happy when you see the progress you’ve made.
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