From childhood measurements to workplace dynamics, comparison infiltrates every aspect of our lives. But how can we stop the endless cycle of comparing ourselves to others? In this podcast, we explore:
The psychological impact of comparison
The difference between healthy competition and comparison
4 practical strategies to break free from comparison
Jill Griffin helps leaders and teams thrive in today's complex workplace. Leveraging her extensive experience to drive multi-million-dollar revenues for brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Samsung, and Hilton Hotels, Jill applies a strategic lens to workplace performance, skillfully blending strategy and mindset to enhance productivity, teamwork, and career satisfaction across diverse organizations.
From childhood measurements to workplace dynamics, comparison infiltrates every aspect of our lives. But how can we stop the endless cycle of comparing ourselves to others? In this podcast, we explore:
The psychological impact of comparison
The difference between healthy competition and comparison
4 practical strategies to break free from comparison
Jill Griffin helps leaders and teams thrive in today's complex workplace. Leveraging her extensive experience to drive multi-million-dollar revenues for brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Samsung, and Hilton Hotels, Jill applies a strategic lens to workplace performance, skillfully blending strategy and mindset to enhance productivity, teamwork, and career satisfaction across diverse organizations.
Hey, I'm your host, Jill Griffin, and welcome back to the Career Refresh. Today I want to talk to you about how do you stop comparison and unhealthy competition. And we're talking about you. Right, many people struggle with comparison. Competition is about pushing yourself to excel, to come out on top, surpassing others in the process.
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Comparison, on the other hand, is about looking what's alike and what's different between multiple things, and from our earliest years, our parents and practitioners compared our height, weight, intelligence with other parents, measuring us against the children in our playgroup. And this has continued throughout our life and we have picked up this trait. According to Psychology Today, research has shown that about 10% of our thoughts involve comparing ourselves to others, and I'm going to tell you I think that number is way too low. From the clients and people I speak to and work with, it seems that we are in a widespread culture of comparison. Measuring yourself against others presents a complex dynamic. While it may ignite ambition, it also breeds feelings of insufficiency, particularly when you see others as better than you and surpassing you, which then sends you into a whole emotional turmoil internally and hopefully it's only in your brain and not outward behavioral issues. Healthy competition you know what it's about measuring your progress against the performance of the norm or the performance against the others. It's about how you're doing performance of the norm or the performance against the others. It's about how you're doing relative to the goal or the competition. It's having a willingness to be measured. You're not necessarily afraid of things being ranked, you seek it. This is where, if you work in a sales role, you don't mind seeing the leaderboard come out, because you're actually inspired and motivated about it. And it's not just about beating your previous goals. It's you want to look around and make sure that you excel past the competition and others and look if you're using it in a healthy way. You bring winner's energy to the situation. You propel yourself and the team forward. You are a great cheerleader. You often look for other people to cheer on because you know what it's like to be in the arena and you want others to have that experience too. So you create a performance-based culture where people combine. You know this energy of creating a championship team. It's a competitive spirit, but it stimulates innovation and it spurs the team to outperform the competition right. You're driven to win. All of that is beautiful. So I want to be really clear and why I went into detail on that is that when all of that is used in the right way, with a growth-based mindset, that type of healthy competition is great.
Speaker 1:
But when competition starts to inherently divide people and calling them winners or losers, prioritizing individual triumph over the collaboration or support or the progress of others and well-being, it becomes a dilemma that becomes familiar to many employees who work in competitive environments. I am not saying that everyone should get a trophy. There are definitely winners and losers. Someone's going to get the promotion or the job. Someone's going to get tapped, which means that someone doesn't. But it's what you're making the losing mean. That can be troublesome, and when you are in constant conflict with someone or something, then even if we sort of mentally clean up the mess with that person that you know we're competitive with, it just means that we're going to fill the spot with somebody else and this is really exhausting and gosh.
Speaker 1:
I wish I could go back and tell my 25-year-old self that losing it's just data and that I get to figure out what I want to think about the data and information and what's next. It doesn't mean I was gaslighting myself. Yeah, there were times that I didn't get the job or the promotion or the thing that I was going after. But this is where I think you know I've said this before that my head injury became the greatest gift that I never asked for, because it forced me to rethink and refocus everything and, frankly, learn a shit ton about growth mindset. It's where I moved from knowing mindset to a learning mindset Knowing being. I already know Learning being impossibility, learning being impossibility. So I want to take us back now deeper into comparison.
Speaker 1:
First, comparisons are unfair. We often compare the worst of ourselves with the best of others. Said another way, we're comparing our insides, our human messiness, to someone else's outsides that probably look all snazzy and jazzy and ready for achievement. Comparison requires metric and whether it's like she's smarter than me or why does everything come so easily for him, those are comparison statements that are really difficult to measure. They can't really be proven true. So you just sit there and spin and keep asking yourself questions again, taking you off your game and taking you off where you need to be focusing. Comparison steals your time and it steals your tomorrows.
Speaker 1:
In my work with people who are navigating careers, many of them are also navigating long-term addiction recovery and the idea that that comparison is a thief and it's a lie, many often realizing that they had judged themselves by comparing themselves to others, but always to their own advantage. And we don't need to be working a program of recovery to see how our comparison thought might lift ourselves and put ourselves in a place of power over or better than, which, by default, immediately puts someone else down. Do you see the difference between that and a healthy competition? That's like all right. How do we win this? Comparisons can also be addictive Like all right. How do we win this? Comparisons can also be addictive.
Speaker 1:
It's this false sense of superiority or victimhood. How do your comparison thoughts impact the way you act? Do you try to escape these thoughts by over-consuming substances, food, streaming services, media, social media, shopping, spending money? That's where it's addictive. You are having thoughts that you are better than or less than someone else and, frankly, in both situations it doesn't want to feel good. I know you might think that feeling better than someone feels good, but at the end of the day, we are community-based people and we are tribal-based people and we survive through evolutionary biology by being part of the community or part of the tribe and being separate or that much better or superior then doesn't make us feel connected and ultimately it won't make you feel safe. Because if you're so superior, right, not everybody's going to like that and it makes you a target If you're the victim. In that, it also makes sense where you would be in the comparison of how bad you are or that you're not good enough, and then you run on that and make everyone better than you, also separating yourself.
Speaker 1:
The next thing, like it lends itself to comparison, puts the emphasis on the wrong person. When you put the focus on other people's lives, you can't possibly focus on your own. So how do you rewire your brain away from comparison? I'm going to give you the steps. First, take a victory lap. You have to go back and re-experience your own successes. They're going to be the things that you excel at. Find those things, recall those memories, savor those experiences. When we do this, we can then take action from a place of confidence. Because we've done it before, we can do it again.
Speaker 1:
Not comparison Be conscious of your reference points. Comparison Be conscious of your reference points. What we know for sure from neuroscience is that when we wake up, our brain waves transfer from delta to theta, to alpha and finally to beta, which is when we become super alert. However, if we are diving into social media or news right from our phones first thing in the morning, bringing that into our bed in our bedroom, we skip these vital stages. The habit spikes dopamine levels, leading us to a decrease in baseline dopamine over time. So starting your day with social media primes your brain for high stress levels, perpetuating a cycle of craving more media attention, more media validation, more media nuances. Right, you need that hit. It's that doomsday scroll that we joke about and that's what's gonna happen throughout the day.
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So put time limits on your apps. I would tell you to delete them off your phone and perhaps you can use them from your desktop, move them to the second or third screen. Second or third swipe turn off notifications. Therefore, you're choosing when to go in versus having that little red one or two or number next to your app telling you what it is. If your personal email and your work email are going into the same app client, you need to separate that Part one. Part two is I would also separate them on your phone. Perhaps your personal email is on one screen and your work email is on another screen, so when you're swiping through in after hours or the weekend you're not tempted to constantly be also connected to work email, which will keep you in that process of constantly being in comparison. Which will keep you in that process of constantly being in comparison.
Speaker 1:
The next I'm going to tell you is practice gratitude. So, yes, you've heard making a list, the five things that you're grateful for, and that's a wonderful practice if that works for you. I'd offer you what if, at the end of the day, when you're all scrubbed up and the lights are out and you're laying in bed, you just reflect for a few minutes on the positive experiences you've had today this can be the conversation you have with your colleague that you're grateful to yourself that you made it to your workout class, the chuckle you had with your dog, the connection you had with family or friends at dinner. Just reflecting upon the positive parts of the day, not the negative parts, the positive parts, right, so that you're reflecting and you're honoring those and positive psychology research. We know that gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps us feel more positive emotions, we sort of relish and savor good experiences and ultimately this leads to greater well-being and it helps you deal with adversity and build stronger relationships. It cuts down on comparison, because if you're grateful, you're less worried about comparing what he, she or they are doing. Right, it's not on your mind.
Speaker 1:
Next thing you need to do is interrupt your brain. When your brain starts to compare, you may just need to say Jill, stop, we are not doing this today. You have to stop the indulging and the way that we constantly indulge in this mindset. Because here's the thing it's been said that after like the third bite, you stop tasting intense flavors. We know that the sense of smell sort of deadens after six minutes. Your favorite song doesn't give you the same buzz all the time If you keep listening to it. You have to take a pause from it, you have to move away from it. You will get less and less enjoyment each time you do this and you're going to feel crappier and crappier. So taking a step away from it is a way to interrupt your brain.
Speaker 1:
So if you've ever fallen into a gossip conversation where you're contributing to the conversation too and then you walk away later and you just feel awful about it, it's that idea that comparison again delivers diminishing returns. Friends, this is all about learned behavior that you've picked up over time, that you can unlearn, and it's simple, but it's not easy. So I would love to know what you think. Are you in this comparison cycle? How do you view competition? How does your workplace view competition? As always, email me at hello at jillgriffincoachingcom, or you can always answer any of my posts on any of the socials. I'd love to hear from you. All right, friends until next time. Embrace possibility, stay intentional, inspired and kind. I'll see you soon.