Tag: envy
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How My Dad’s Advice to Let Someone Else Shine Created My Fear of Success
“Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free.” ~Robert Tew
Everyone has fears. It is not an emotion that is only for a chosen few. One’s fear may seem irrational to the outside world, but I guarantee to that person it is debilitating. So much so, that it shapes their perspective and how they see the world. My fear is of success.
I know what you’re thinking. “That doesn’t make sense at all. Who doesn’t want to be successful?” Well, let me explain what I mean.
You see, I am an introvert, so I don’t really want to draw attention to myself at all. My “success” is a personal gain, not a flashy show of pride to the world.
I wasn’t quite sure where this fear of success began until this year when I was talking to my wife. Our discussions brought up a memory that I am sure started this fear.
When I was twelve years old, I loved basketball. It was my all-time favorite sport. You had to be good individually but also as a team.
Being introverted, I had to work hard at the latter, but it was a challenge I was willing to take on because I loved the game so much. I practiced all day every day. My grandma even brought me a basketball hoop to put in her driveway so I could practice. (This was a big deal because she loved her yard and thought the hoop made it look less appealing.)
Nonetheless, I got good and made the basketball team. So now I could work more on the team aspect.
One day I was at my cousin’s house, and we were playing basketball. A teammate lived across the street. After my game with my cousin, she came over and challenged me to a game one on one. I agreed
As we were playing, I noticed she became more intense and aggressive. I didn’t pay much attention to it and just kept playing. When I won the game, I went toward her to say, “nice game.”
She threw the ball at me and ran toward her house crying. I was so confused. My dad saw and made me go with him to her house, where she was sitting on the porch.
He asked her what was wrong. She said, “Why does she have to be so good? She always wins. I’m not even a starter because of her.”
My dad pulled me to the side and said, “You don’t have to be good all the time. Why don’t you let her win sometimes?”
I remember being confused. My twelve-year-old mind couldn’t understand why my dad would want me to lessen myself so that someone else could achieve, even though I worked hard. But he was my dad, and she was crying.
Later, I found out that the girl was the niece of my dad’s future wife. I guess he was trying to impress her. But that’s a story for a different blog.
From that time on I questioned the results of my success. If I succeeded would people be upset? Would I be taking someone else’s spot? Would this person hate me? Should I not try my best?
This fear of success became a big deal in my twenties. At that time, I decided to make good on a goal I set for myself when I was in high school—to become a poet like Maya Angelou and Nicki Giovanni and a writer like John Grisham.
At that time, I was working at a tutoring center, and there was this nice older gentleman name GW. He always saw me writing in my journal, and one day he invited me to an open poetry mic night that he held on Fridays in a barn.
I didn’t think much of it. When I went home, I looked up the guy and learned that he was a famous poet. So, I decided to take him up on his offer to attend.
It was great, everyone was kind and just wanted to share their work. After a couple of visits as a spectator, GW asked me when I was going to share my work. The thought was scary for me.
It took so much for me to even attend. I told him I was just enjoying being there. He then said something that I hold on to even to this day.
He said, “When you are a writer you have to become two people: the author Nesha and the regular Nesha. The regular Nesha can be afraid and introverted. But the author Nesha needs to be strong, confident, and want success, not fear it.”
He then told me he was going to feature me as the poet of the night, where I would do a set of my poems for fifteen minutes for everyone. I reluctantly agreed.
It took so much for me not to cancel. I had to constantly tell myself, “This is author Nesha.” I had to work on being in a room where all the attention was on me. It was a lot, but I’m glad I did it
This fear of success is tough to deal with, especially as I continue to pursue my writing career. I feel as though I have multiple personalities. “Author Nesha” wants success. I want to be a famous writer with people reading my books.
“Regular Nesha” is introverted and just wants to write because I love it. “Regular Nesha” is afraid. I am afraid that I will get successful, and everyone will criticize my art that I worked so hard on.
Will people say I shouldn’t be where I am because I am not good enough? Will I be taking someone’s spot? Will people want to meet me, touch me, speak to me?
This fear of success has also morphed a bit into social anxiety. When I do open mics (which is rare because of my fears) I need to have my wife by my side.
I remember one time I did an open mic, and as I was speaking, I noticed this woman crying and staring intently at me. My mind began to swirl with so many questions. Why is she staring at me? Does she think my work is bad? Will she want to talk to me?
When I was done, I walked to my seat near my wife. The woman came and sat behind us. She touched my shoulder, which brought fear to my heart. I turned around. She was still crying.
She said, “Your words brought me so much joy. I am crying because I recently lost my mom and your poem reminded me of her.” It was happening! Someone was talking to me!
All I could think was, this is going to spiral into a full-blown conversation. All I could muster up was “I’m glad you liked the poem, and I’m sorry for your loss.”
That night was difficult and exhilarating. Difficult because so many people came up to me and wanted to talk and shake my hand, and I was so afraid and had so many thoughts flying through my head. Exhilarating because OH MY GOD! People liked me!
This battle between “Author Nesha” and “Regular Nesha” is something I deal with daily. Not only in my pursuit of being a writer but in other aspects of my life.
I am an English teacher by day. In my staff meetings, I’m afraid to share my ideas because what if I succeed and some people like them? Will they expect me to always have good ideas? What if others are upset at me or think less of me because of my ideas?
But then again, I want to share my thoughts because I worked hard on them and feel like they are worthy to be shared.
I know you’re thinking, how do you survive? Well, first, I had to acknowledge that what my dad did when I was twelve was not right. He may have thought he was doing the right thing, but he should never have told me to dim my light so someone else could shine.
Second, I try to do things out of my comfort zone. For example, in my staff meeting we were discussing how to improve student motivation. Usually, I don’t speak, but I pushed myself to share what I do in my class, and they loved it.
Of course, I couldn’t help but question If they really loved it, or if someone was upset about my idea, but I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on what I can actually see and hear.
Finally, success is relative. My idea of success may not be someone else’s idea of success, and that’s okay. By learning these things, I can now follow through on things that scare “Regular Nesha,” and that is me facing my fear of success.
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5 Tips to Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People
“No matter what you do, someone won’t be pleased. Someone will think your choices are wrong. And someone will tell you what you should do instead. No matter which path you take, someone will seem to be doing better. Someone will have more than you. And someone else’s life may look more impressive on paper. If you’re being true to yourself, none of that will matter because you’ll have something more satisfying than approval and the illusion of “success”: a life that feels right for you, based on your own wants, needs, values, and priorities.” ~Lori Deschene
Have you ever walked past a grand-looking house, or driven through an upmarket neighborhood and thought, “I wish I lived here” or “The people living here are so lucky”?
If you have, then we’ve been part of the same club! I used to do this a lot.
While walking my dog, I’d look at a house and assume that the people living in that house must have been very happy with life. My assumptions were based on nothing more than the look of the front yard and the frontage of the house.
When I think about it now as I write this post, I wonder, “How could I have been that naive?” Despite being aware of the expression “never judge a book by its cover,” that’s exactly what I used to do. How can one ever guess what lies behind the grand entrance of a home? Who knows what stories the plush homes of exclusive neighborhoods hold inside them?
My regular bouts of comparisonitis got jolted by a sobering dose of reality through a shocking and tragic news story some years ago.
One of the homes that I used to admire became the location of a horrific murder-suicide that wiped out an entire family! I could not believe my ears and eyes as I read the news and watched the coverage on television.
My mind was thinking, in all its naivety, “How is that possible? What could have gone wrong for residents of that beautiful home? They had everything anyone could ever want, didn’t they?”
Do I Know You?
Have you heard the expression “human beings are like onions”? We have so many layers that hide our core self. As you peel away one layer, another appears!
It is extremely difficult to know another person deep down to their core. How often have you found yourself wondering about the unexpected or puzzling behavior of someone you thought you knew well?
The reality is that each one of us is unique, and it can often take a whole lifetime for us to understand our own selves. So, is it any wonder that we never manage to truly understand another person?
Yet, we compare! We do it day in and day out, without even being aware of how easily and how often we slip into comparison mode.
Humans are naturally prone to comparisons because this phenomenon begins quite early in our lives.
As young kids, we might have experienced the feeling of being compared to other children—by parents, teachers, relatives, friends, peers, etc. As we grow into adults, we start comparing ourselves to other adults. Sometimes the comparisons might be in a favorable light, and at other times, the comparisons could be unfavorable. Either way, it leads to feelings that are unhealthy—a sense of superiority or inferiority.
Feelings of arrogance or bitterness are never healthy, are they?
Whether your comparison results in thoughts of “Oh, I’m so much better than this guy!” or “How does she do it? I’ll never be as good as her!”, there’s little doubt that “the thief of joy,” as coined perfectly by Roosevelt, has taken residence in your head and is busy ransacking your mind of all joy, happiness, and contentment.
Why is it so difficult to avoid falling victim to the tendency of constant comparison?
Social Comparison Theory
Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed in his social comparison theory that the human species engages in comparison as a way of evaluating ourselves, like a benchmarking process. We get to know more about our own abilities, attitudes, or skills by comparing ourselves to our peers.
Festinger’s theory contends that human beings can only define themselves in relation to other people. I wonder if that’s why the age-old existential question “Who am I?” seems so difficult to answer, as we seem to be incapable of defining ourselves independent of others.
As mentioned earlier, social comparison can work in two ways.
1. Upward social comparison
This is when we compare ourselves to those who we believe are better than us. This type of comparison can lead to two kinds of thoughts, emotions, or outcomes.
The first kind is where we might want to improve ourselves to reach the level of the person that we are comparing ourselves to, or even go past them. This is one possible benefit of comparison if we’re prepared to learn, as it could lead to personal growth.
If comparison can be seen in this positive light, then “the thief of joy” might be entitled to a change of title and live inside us as “the giver of motivation.”
The second and more common outcome of upward social comparison is envy, jealousy, and bitterness—obviously an undesirable outcome that can only lead to disappointment and frustration.
2. Downward social comparison
This happens when we compare ourselves to people who we believe are worse off than us. This is like an “artificial boost to self-esteem” exercise. The “at least I’m not as bad as him/her” attitude might help us feel better about our talents, achievements, or life situation, even if only temporarily.
Social comparison begins early in life (for instance, a child in a kindergarten wanting the same toy that another kid has in his hands), gains momentum through school (new fads, fashions, and gadgets that kids want to follow or possess), and becomes deep-rooted in adulthood through comparisons in career, family, wealth, status, and lifestyle.
This tendency to compare completes a full circle when the phenomenon moves on to adults comparing their children on how well they’re doing in academics, sports, or any other activity.
Escaping the Comparison Trap
To feel mentally and emotionally healthy, it is essential to free ourselves from the comparison trap. I’m sure none of us wants to experience the feeling of unworthiness from upward social comparison, or superiority from downward social comparison. So what can we do?
Here are five simple ideas to get better at saying NO to the disease of comparisonitis:
1. Define what success means to you.
If we nailed down our own definition of success, the number of times that we indulged in comparisons would be significantly reduced. For instance, if our success definition were about raising healthy, happy kids, we wouldn’t really be bothered about someone else’s thriving business, would we?
2. Discover your own strengths.
Becoming aware of our strengths will help in minimizing the tendency of comparing our weaknesses with other people’s strengths. The great physicist Albert Einstein failed his French exams. Fortunately, he didn’t let that failure define him, as he was aware that his strengths lay elsewhere!
3. Think of the big picture.
Whenever you find yourself slipping into comparison mode (which will inevitably happen… we are human after all!), just remind yourself that there’s always more to a person’s life than what you’re seeing or hearing.
Don’t let a peek through a small window into someone’s life lead to disillusionment or disappointment with your entire life. In other words, don’t compare your whole movie with another person’s highlights reel!
4. Always be a student.
Develop the “continuous learning” philosophy. If you always think of yourself as a student with lots more to learn in life, it becomes easier to think in terms of collaboration, not competition, with peers. If you think of yourself as an artist who is still painting his/her masterpiece, you might not be tempted to feel inferior when you view other people’s paintings because your job’s not done yet!
5. Focus on small successes.
When comparisonitis strikes, take up a small project that you can complete in a relatively short time, and do well. It could be something that you might’ve been putting off for a while.
For example, let’s say you’ve started a new online business and you start to feel unsatisfied about the lack of progress. Maybe you’re looking at peers in your industry who are at a similar stage of the business cycle but seem to be gaining a lot more traction.
Instead of letting this get you down, how about you focus on something small—like writing a blog or doing a podcast? Doing that specific task well could help lift your spirits.
Unique Journeys
Have you seen pieces of driftwood floating in a river? They come together at some point due to the action of the waves, might stay together for a little distance, and at some point down the river, the force of the waves separates them and they go their own ways.
Our lives are like that.
People come into our lives and go out of our lives at different stages of our life’s journey.
We all begin our journeys at different points, end them at different points, and often our paths take different routes. Why then should we compare ourselves to others? After all, we are not running the same race.
Try this exercise…
Take a little trip down memory lane by rewinding your life some fifteen to twenty years. Think of someone that you always compared yourself with back then. It has to be someone that you’ve lost all contact with for many years. You also haven’t heard about them from anyone.
Do you have any idea what they’re doing now? In fact, let’s go one step further—do you know if they’re still alive? Chances are your answer is “I don’t know.”
So, my friend, in the long run, do comparisons really matter?
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How Accepting That We’re Ordinary Opens Us Up to Love
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” ~C.S. Lewis
I was talking to a mentor of mine several months ago, and they cut me off midsentence and said, “Zach, it sounds like you’re trying to be extraordinary. How about you just work at being ordinary?”
I paused then promptly broke into tears. Yep. Tears. Not ashamed to admit that.
Tears because the meat of the conversation was about self-worth and being enough. In that moment my deepest childhood wound was tapped into, and ordinary sounded horrible to me.
Who wants to be ordinary? Not this guy.
My mentor asked what was coming up for me, and I said my mom. Let me explain.
My mom was a celebrity. She was an Emmy award winning actress that was on the cover of TV Guide, and she dated one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
She died tragically of cancer when I was three-and-a-half years old. One day she was there, the next she was gone.
I interpreted her death the only way I knew how: I made up a story to make sense of it all. Mom left me because I’m not special.
Ever since then, for as long as I can remember, the thought of being ordinary hasn’t agreed with me. Like a taboo subject, I’ve treated ordinary like something society considers a no-no. To me, ordinary equals “not enough,” and not enough equals rejection, aka, abandonment.
In my mind…
Ordinary doesn’t get me love and affection. Ordinary doesn’t get me Facebook or Instagram “likes.”
Ordinary doesn’t get me acknowledged at work. Ordinary isn’t talked about at parties.
Ordinary isn’t interesting. Ordinary is abandoned just like when I was as a little boy.
The thought of being ordinary scares the you-know-what out of me. So much so that I’ve spent most of my life trying to be something more.
It’s been an insatiable quest to fill an empty cup of not enough-ness. It’s been me putting on a mask every day and trying to be someone else.
My hair has to look just right out of fear of you judging me. I have to say all the right things out fear of sounding stupid.
I have to wear the right outfits because I only have one chance to impress you. I have to be the ultimate people pleaser or else you might not like me.
I have to be extraordinary out of fear of you rejecting and leaving me. I’ve been afraid all these years that if you knew the real me, the ordinary me, you would turn around and go in the other direction.
Note to self. Hustling for my worthiness all these years has been exhausting.
And here’s the kicker. The act of me trying to be something is what keeps me alone in the first place because I’m not letting anyone see the real me.
The definition of ordinary is normal. It doesn’t mean rejected or not enough. Just normal.
In other words, it’s me being my normal self and not trying to be something else. Ordinary is authentic. Yet for some of us being authentic doesn’t feel safe. So we put on a mask and try and be someone else.
It’s what our culture does to us and social media glorifies. Status is such a big thing in our lives today.
But when you try to be something other than your ordinary self, whatever you’re attracting isn’t real because it’s not the real you. You’re not attracting real love or adoration.
Therefore, you keep looking and you continue the cycle. Once you change your mind about this (and yourself) you will see change.
Look, I get it. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the stories we tell ourselves. I need to be (you fill in the blank) to be liked and loved.
But here’s the thing, when we do this, we show up differently in life. People don’t want to be impressed, they want to be understood.
At the end of the day this was all about me being disconnected from my own inner wisdom. My inner wisdom is the core of my essence, and I was disconnected from this when I was on the call.
When we try and be something we forget who we are and what love is. Ordinary is your return to love. It’s not you out there looking for love.
It’s a return to what you were born in to. It’s like a return to grace.
Here are four questions that I have found to be extremely helpful in shining a light on this subject:
- Where in your life do you feel like you are struggling to be extraordinary?
- Where in your life do you want to apply the healing balm of normalcy?
- Where are you putting pressure on yourself to be extraordinary?
- Who are you comparing yourself to?
If you want to explore this area of your life, in a very human and grounded way, journaling around these questions might serve you, if you’re open to it.
Put down the weight of extraordinary and be your beautiful, ordinary self. Extraordinary people exist within people with the most ordinary lives.
We’re all unique in our own right and that’s the beauty of being human. We’re all ordinary and we’re all extraordinary.
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Afraid of What People Think? Free Yourself by Realizing How Unimportant You Are
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt
It’s natural to think that we’re always in the spotlight.
We think that people care about the way we dress, but they don’t.
We think that people notice our nervous habits, when in reality, they’re worried about whether people are noticing their own.
We tend to go through life as if our every move is being watched, judged, and evaluated on a moment-to-moment basis by the people around us. Here’s a reality check—you’re not that important.
I don’t mean that in a brash way. This shouldn’t make you feel small or inferior, it should liberate you. And if it doesn’t, I have a feeling that what I’m about to talk about will.
The Truth About Funerals
As you guys know, a funeral procession is broken up into two parts: the funeral and the burial.
During the funeral, spiritual leaders read various snippets from religious texts about the meaning of death, and close family members are allowed to get up and say a few words about the deceased.
The burial takes place directly after the funeral, although some religions operate on a different procedure. During the burial, the body is transported outside, and the deceased is put to rest in the grave site.
Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about funeral procedures. I’d probably be asking myself the same question reading this article, so here’s the bottom line.
The burial takes place outside on grass.
Do you want to know the number one factor that determines how many people attend the burial after the funeral procession is over?
The weather.
If it happens to be raining outside, 50% of people who attended the funeral will decide not to attend the burial and head home.
That doesn’t mean those people don’t care, just that they’re first and foremost focused on themselves and their own lives and needs, as most of us are. Which means they’re focused on what they’re doing than what you’re doing.
So why would you worry about what others think of your life choices? Why would you care about what other people say about you if you haven’t done anything to harm them?
Why would you live life being bogged down by the opinions of others if half of the people attending your funeral will skip the burial because of bad weather?
Coming across this information struck me like a lightning bolt. And no, I’m not going to sit here and lie to you by saying that reading this factoid about funerals led to some life-changing epiphany and now everything is sunshine and rainbows.
What I will say is that it had an impact on my mindset. It forced me to really look at my day-to-day life and analyze where my actions were being driven by the opinions of others.
Realizing just how little people cared about the decisions I made was one of many factors that influenced me to start shutting down the inner critic—that voice that tells you that everything you do is being judged by others.
The Confessions of a Chronic People-Pleaser
For most of my life, I let the opinions of other people stop me from living a rich, fulfilling life.
In social situations, it was more comfortable for me to agree with what was said than express my own beliefs.
It was more comfortable for me to sit back and watch instead of calling one of my friends out for something that he shouldn’t be doing.
It was more comfortable for me to avoid the situations I was afraid of instead of diving into them head-first and stretching my limits. The fear of failing publicly in front of other people was absolutely terrifying to me.
One particular instance from my high school years illustrates this perfectly.
It was my freshman year, and our first dance of the year had arrived. I showed up in all-white, trying to keep consistent with the “white-out” theme that had been planned for the dance.
As the dance started and music started playing, students began rushing to the middle of the gymnasium and dancing their hearts out.
That’s when the fear hit me. My insides felt like they were twisting around each other.
My breathing matched my heartbeat. It wasn’t calm and collected, it was frantic.
My mind went into full “stop him from taking action” mode by conjuring up a bunch of scenarios in which I look like a total idiot on the dance floor.
For the rest of the night, I was glued to that wall. Only thirty feet away, there was a bunch of care-free teenagers having the time of their lives.
I went to the bathroom about seven or eight times just to make the time go faster. I talked to other people who weren’t really dancing, and we were all playing it off like we were too cool to express ourselves in public.
The truth is that we were all just terrified of being ourselves in front of other people.
That moment set the trajectory for the rest of my high school experience. I wish I could go back in time to my fifteen-year-old self and tell him to wake up. I wish I could tell that shy, insecure person that rejection, public failure, and the opinions of other people don’t matter.
I wish I could tell him that at the end of someone’s life, the biggest factor in determining whether or not people attend their burial comes down to whether or not the sky cries more than the congregation does.
But I can’t do that. I can only look forward to what’s in store for me now that I’ve finally realized how unimportant my actions are. It’s not a shameful thing to admit that you’re unimportant, it’s liberating. It gives you the freedom to take risks and challenge yourself.
Life becomes a lot more fun when you realize that everyone around you is so absorbed with their own thoughts and feelings that they couldn’t care less what you do.
So next time you see someone that you want to talk to, don’t let the fear of rejection stop you, go introduce yourself. I promise you that if you embarrass yourself and the conversation goes nowhere, the person won’t even remember your name tomorrow.
The next time you feel the urge to call a friend that you haven’t spoken to in a while, but feel like it might come across as “weird,” I promise you there’s a 99% chance that the person will be extremely grateful for the call.
And if the person isn’t grateful and gives you the cold shoulder? Well, let’s just say that you’re not the one with the problem if you’re trying to be friendly and warm and are flat out dismissed.
I encourage you to write down the things in your life that you’re scared to do because you’re afraid of what other people will think. And then each day, cross one of those things off your list.
Constantly remind yourself that everyone is busy thinking about one thing—themselves.
Going through life with this mindset will make you much more likely to face down the demons that are stopping you from living the life you want.
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What Helps Me When I’m Tempted to Compare Myself to Others
“A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” ~Zen Shen
Wow, you’re a bit of a loser compared to this guy, aren’t you, Will?
He’s winning at life—great job, great house, obviously making better money than you.
I sigh deeply and continue scrolling.
He takes care of himself, no Buddha belly, unlike you.
It’s true. I begin to feel like a useless lump. I keep scrolling.
No yellow and crooked teeth, either.
“His teeth are pretty straight,” I think to myself, staring at the guy’s mouth on the screen.
Damn right, they’re straight, like tic-tacs coming out of his gums. Perfect and white, not like yours.
I sigh once again and continue to scroll on Facebook.
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Above is a typical dialogue between what I refer to as my Gremlin and me.
Does this voice sound familiar to you?
I’m talking about the troublesome terror that pops up like an unwelcome guest at the front door.
This nasty voice that loves to commentate and condemn—the voice that leaves us feeling unworthy and inferior, if we listen long enough. This, my friends, is the Gremlin of Self-Comparison.
I Imagine how different an exchange would unfold if it were another person (outside of my head) giving me the bashing.
If, for example, I was sitting on a park bench and a complete stranger walked up to me and said, ”Hey loser,” before pointing out how those around were superior to me. I imagine I’d walk off confused and leave this stranger alone after his unprovoked attack.
”Who is he to talk about me like that? He doesn’t even know me!” I would say to myself as I walk off.
I’d tell myself he must be deeply unhappy to treat other people this way, and I certainly wouldn’t take his comments to heart.
Most of us wouldn’t. We’d either ignore such criticism or defend ourselves.
So, here is the million-dollar question: Why do we accept talking to ourselves like this?
My belief is this: because it feels real, and we believe we are the voice. The truth is, however, we’re the listener, not the speaker.
But the voice of the Gremlin seems like a credible source. I mean, the voice comes from inside of us, why wouldn’t we trust it?
It helps to understand why we compare in the first place.
We are programmed that way. Comparing ourselves to others is a natural and inherent instinct. In prehistoric times this innate ability allowed us to swiftly analyze others and identify possible threats, yet in today’s society these quick critiques could be causing harm rather than preventing it.
Let’s face it: Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds are perfect catalysts for those episodes of self-pity and dissatisfaction, when we’re staring at our phone screens alone late at night, admiring how well everyone else seems to be doing.
We have to wonder, who are the newsfeeds feeding?
Could it be our Gremlins? Our insecurities? Our ego?
It dawned on me a while ago that I will never win playing the game of self-comparison.
No matter how much money I make, there will always be someone richer.
Even if I get in better shape, there will always be someone fitter and stronger.
But just knowing these things doesn’t mean I am able to stop comparing myself to others. I’ve had to accept my Gremlin is here to stay.
So what’s the alternative to trying to win against the Self-Comparison Gremlin?
I do my best to live by the following three mantras, as they serve me well in living with my Gremlin. Not “beating” or “silencing” my Gremlin. Living with him.
1. If I’m going to compare, I will compare who I am today with who I was in the past.
We’re forever growing, learning, and achieving. However, we fail to recognize and celebrate this when we’re listening to the Gremlin and concentrating on other people’s lives. Compared to who I was in the past, today I’m happier, wiser, and stronger. I’ve overcome anxiety, debt, disappointments, and heartbreak, and you know what? I’m still here.
We’ve all had challenges and we’re all still here. When we rate ourselves by the accomplishments of others, we overlook our own successes.
There’s one risk in comparing our current selves to our past selves: When revisiting the past, I may recognize that some areas of my life were better previously than they are now. I then have a choice. If I want to improve this area, I’ll set a goal. If right now I don’t wish to change, I’ll accept where I am. But what I won’t do is focus on everyone else’s progress and feel bad about myself as a result.
2. The people I’m comparing myself to are not flawless.
No matter how infallible and perfect others may seem, I’ll bet good money they have their Gremlins too. We are all equal in life. I’m no better than anybody else but I’m certainly not any worse. It’s important to remember that social media is only a highlight reel.
We all know real life is far more messy, raw, and flawed.
This is the beauty of being human.
3. I love and accept myself as I am right now (including my Gremlin).
Our Gremlins mean us well. Really, they’re trying to protect us by identifying areas where we may be “falling behind.” They’re only cruel because they’re scared—that we’ll somehow miss out if we don’t keep up with other people.
I named mine Colin. What I find helpful about naming the voice is I’m able to check in and ask, “Okay, who is talking up there? Is this my trail of thought or is Colin going off on one?” The more I learn to love Colin and appreciate his good intentions, the less he pops up. When he does, I thank him and send him a little love for being a part of me. I let him know I hear him, although I may not choose to listen.
I do my best to accept myself as I am, with my Buddha belly and less than perfect teeth. Because our imperfections make us who we are. My new favorite word currently is flawsome—meaning we are all awesome despite our flaws. Cool, right?
Wouldn’t life be boring if we were all exactly the same? Plus, if we were all exactly the same, perhaps there wouldn’t be any more Gremlins, and to be honest, I kind of like mine now.
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Overcoming Envy: How to Stop Feeling Inferior and Insecure
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” ~Theodore Roosevelt
If you are suffering from the painful sting of envy, know that you are not alone. I was there too, for a very long time. Envy can be a crippling emotion. For me it has been connected to my depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It has been a very painful twenty years since my attachment to envy began, involving comparison, competition, judgment, harsh criticism of myself and others, in a never-ending, futile attempt to soothe my wounded ego.
I was constantly, obsessively, relentlessly afraid of being inadequate and inferior—to a classmate, to a boyfriend’s ex, to a fellow singer. “She’s prettier, happier, more successful, she’s married, she’s a mother…”
As we come to learn, the comparison game never ends. Sometimes you might win, sometimes you will lose, but ultimately it is always self-destructive.
My mind would constantly compare myself to other women, and whether I fell short or came out on top, it hurt. I was deeply insecure. I hated myself. At my lowest points I was suicidal, drowning in feelings of worthlessness and shame.
With some soul searching, I discovered exactly how this envy-obsession originated: It began with deep-rooted fears of inadequacy and of being abandoned and replaced, stemming from my parents’ separation when I was three years old, and then from my father’s starting a new family when I was twelve.
Even though I knew I wasn’t at fault for the breakdown of my family, I subconsciously believed that it meant I somehow wasn’t good enough. I was innately unworthy.
These fears morphed into deep recurring depressions, intense anxiety and panic, insomnia, and the obsessive thought patterns of envy and competition.
The mental grooves I had been digging for twenty years were very deep. They were painful, draining, and exhausting.
There were days I was afraid I would never have peace, that I would always be suffering from the mental torture of OCD. Deep down I was terrified of being abandoned and unloved. My fears manifested as an obsession with my perceived inadequacy and inferiority to other women.
It has taken a lot of hard work to undo the damage these thought addictions have done to my soul and psyche.
Our subconscious mind, which normally works to help keep us safe by alerting us to threats, has a way of becoming twisted after trauma. Instead of being my own best friend, I was my harshest critic, always convincing myself that I wasn’t good enough, and that someone else was better.
Attempting to run away from my emotional turmoil created this monster of a neurosis. It was a self-harming coping mechanism to distract myself from my deep inner pain. It had become easier to obsess about whether or not someone else was “better than me” than to do the hard work of finding my own self-worth and unconditional self-love.
Envy (and the comparison and competition that went along with it) was my obsession, and social media stalking was my compulsion. If only I had spent as much time songwriting as I spent on Facebook!
The suggestions I make for releasing yourself from envy are all things I personally do consistently. I now have a newfound freedom and confidence, in myself, in my place in this world, and in my connections to others.
Now that I’ve done this very important inner work, nothing would make me happier than to help others spare themselves some of the self-induced misery I subjected myself to for so long. Here are a few of the things that have helped me immeasurably.
1. Stop comparing and competing.
We know how harmful it is to compare and compete, we know we shouldn’t do it, but for those of us who have been engaging in this destructive habit for years, how do we actually stop? It comes down to changing the inner narrative—how we speak to and about ourselves and others.
I began to tell myself, “I am different, unique, and special, not better or worse.” We are all on completely different paths, with unique journeys, qualities, experiences, perspectives. Logically you can’t possibly compare one person to another, but we know fear doesn’t always operate logically, so we have to retrain our minds. “I love myself. I am beautiful. She is beautiful. I am blessed. She is blessed.”
Over time I stopped wanting to judge. I stopped wanting to compare and compete. I stopped bashing other women, in what had been my attempt to make myself feel better by putting them down. It didn’t feel good that I had been so negative, mean-spirited, and critical. It hurt that my fear had morphed into hate. I was embarrassed and ashamed that I had blatantly become a mean girl.
It felt so much better to appreciate people’s positive qualities, to see their light and focus on that light.
I started saying simply “she is beautiful” about everyone I saw, whether outside on the street, or online on social media. It wasn’t long before it felt true, because it is true! Everyone is beautiful—uniquely, beautifully special in his or her own way.
I stopped critiquing people’s physical characteristics, their lives, their success, their happiness. I stopped trying to measure them against me, and vice versa.
I began seeing us all as beings of light, beloved children of the Universe, with unique, incredible gifts and talents to share with the world.
I saw other women as potential friends and allies instead of threats. I no longer feared people; instead, I welcomed them and saw us all as extensions of one another—human beings doing their best at this thing we call life, all of us divinely connected, all of us struggling with very similar, common, messy challenges.
2. Embrace sharing and learning.
Instead of trying to one-up the next person, let’s change how we view one another. How can we learn from, and be a resource for, one another? How can we offer help, guidance, and support? Instead of being in competition with one another, we could be a network of people eager to celebrate each other, share in each other’s successes, and help each other heal and grow.
I began to ask myself new questions about the people in my extended network, and the new people I met:
What can I learn from them, from their journeys, from their successes and mistakes? What can I teach them? How can I be inspired by them rather than feel threatened? How can I better be of service to others? How can I give of myself? How can I support and be supported? How can we share our strengths and build each other up?
Where once I saw division and competition, I started to see our commonalities: We had similar fears, goals, and life experiences. I realized we all have so much to give one another. I started to appreciate people more and to see all the beautiful things they were offering the world. I began to see our healing journeys as linked. I felt layers of fear begin to fall away.
3. Focus on healing.
I got down to business and worked on my overall mental, emotional, and spiritual health; my self-love, self-focus, and self-esteem. I began daily meditation and gratitude practices. I tackle the OCD with EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as tapping), self-hypnosis, and ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) Therapy.
I listen to meditation music designed to help balance the chakras. I repeat affirmations such as “I am at peace within myself,” as well as ancient mantras. Two of my favorites include Sa Ta Na Ma—helpful for breaking negative thought patterns and healing the mind’s chemical imbalances that lead to depression—and Om Namah Shivayah, which helps access your truest, highest self and guides your divine transformation.
I use writing, especially songwriting, to explore and to dig deep. I journal, and then I journal some more! I make lists: lists of the things I love about myself, lists of the factors contributing to my depressions, lists of ongoing challenges I’m working on. I routinely go on social media detoxes. I practice celibacy.
All of these things help me to turn the focus inward, when for years I had defaulted to focusing on other people, namely with this inadequacy complex, but also with dating and unhealthy relationships.
The more I focused on myself and my happiness, the easier it became. I rediscovered Aisling in the simplicity of comfort and candlelight, in the wind in the trees, in cooking, in music. It was liberating to love myself in a real way, and to finally feel worthy.
We live in a culture that normalizes and encourages competition. We tear each other down, we judge, we are downright mean. We allow our traumas, wounds, and fears, not to mention our cultural conditioning, to make us hate ourselves, thereby hating others.
With time and concerted effort, though, I do believe we can heal our spiritual afflictions, even the very persistent, very destructive penchant for envy, self-deprecation, and sabotage.
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9 Mindful Social Media Practices That Will Make You a Happier Person
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” ~Steve Furtick
Social media is not a full (or even sometimes real) portrayal of someone’s life. If you forget this, you fall into the trap of comparing your life to what someone else chooses to share.
This is dangerous.
Comparing can lead to feelings of inadequacy, envy, and even hatred toward others. These kinds of feelings, if left un-dealt with, can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression. Or, if you are a person who already struggles with anxiety or depression, having these kinds of negative thoughts all the time could make it even worse.
I used to struggle with low self-esteem and negative thoughts. I didn’t deal with this and ended up having severe anxiety and depression. My life was turned upside down. I had panic attacks daily and felt overwhelmed almost every single day.
I let it get unbearably bad before I did anything about it. When I did decide to make a change, I did a number of different things in order to take control back of my life. One of those things included committing to a consistent mindfulness and meditation practice.
My health and life literally depended on me learning how to be more positive and mindful, and social media wasn’t helping.
As I started to become more and more aware, I realized that there was a lot of negativity consuming me from being online all the time. All those images of perfect bodies, perfect friendships, and perfect relationships were leading me to assume that my life wasn’t perfect.
I was always thinking in terms of lack, what I didn’t have, and what everyone else seemed to have.
Thinking like this all the time made me sick, in the literal sense.
My life and feelings dramatically improved when I began to apply the teachings of mindfulness to every aspect of my life, including the way I operate on social media.
The things I am about to share with you will help you to integrate mindfulness more deeply into your daily life. They will turn your daily social media experience from a negative to a more positive one.
The first thing you need to know is that when the mind is left unattended, it doesn’t do a great job of taking care of itself. If you are not consciously making an effort to choose positive thoughts about others and yourself, you may, by default, end up thinking negatively.
So, if you are scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and you do not have awareness of your thoughts, it’s likely that your mind will come to negative conclusions and assumptions about others, and also yourself, such as:
“She is so much prettier than me.”
“Wow, she has a good body. I need to look like her.”
“He has everything going for him. My life is so boring.”
“Why would he post that?”
“What an attention seeker.”
Sound familiar?
The second thing you need to know is that what you think and say affects how you feel. Positive thoughts lead to positive feelings and negative thoughts lead to negative feelings.
Now that you know these things, we’re ready to dive in. Here are my top nine ways you can be mindful on social media and consequently, become a happier person.
Before You Begin
1. Set an intention.
Before you get on social media, stop, take a breath, and remind yourself that your goal is to have a positive experience.
2. Remind yourself to stay present.
The only way to truly be happy is to be present, and the more you can apply this to your life, the less negativity you will feel. Notice your hands touching the screen, feel your body sitting on the couch or chair, and focus on your breathing as often as possible to avoid getting lost in your thoughts.
3. Take the time to clean up your feed.
Unfollow people that regularly complain or post negative content, and consciously choose to follow more positive people and pages. This will make a world of difference if you end up scrolling through unconsciously, because you will unconsciously be taking in uplifting information.
I used to wish that I looked like anyone but myself. I used to look at other girls with deep envy, wishing I had their perfect skin and bodies. Because my mind could not control itself, I choose to unfollow all fitness inspiration people in my feed and filled it with positive words and inspirational content instead. You get to choose who you follow. Make sure you choose well.
When Posting
4. Let go of your attachment to the outcome; don’t expect a certain number of likes.
Unconsciously, you might think that likes = validation and that the more likes you get the more liked you are as a person, or that if you don’t get likes that you’re not liked as a person.
The amount of likes you get has nothing to do with who you are, how attractive you are, or how many friends you have. Remember, some people actually pay for likes! They mean nothing.
Notice if you have this belief about likes. Do you feel differently about a situation when you get fewer likes? Do you compare the amount you get to the amount someone else gets?
These are all things we need to start to become aware of. You will feel happier when you have confidence and believe in what you’re posting, and when you don’t feel the need for it to be liked. Just simply reminding yourself that you don’t need this image or post to be liked, before posting, can be really powerful.
5. Post positive content or things that are helpful. Avoid complaining.
This is in relation to posting and also commenting. Ask yourself, Is what I’m posting positive? Is it helpful? Try not to complain or engage in arguments or negative conversations. This will drain your energy.
Make it a habit to compliment one or two people or express your gratitude to one or two people each time you go online. Without sounding so cliché, I would like to strongly recommend that you take the time to spread love and good vibes when you are online, not just because it is good for others but because it’s good for your health!
I’m not suggesting that we should pretend that bad things don’t happen, or that we should hide or suppress our feelings. We should, however, ensure that we do our best to see things in a positive light to avoid spiraling further down a path of negativity.
6. Challenge your initial reaction to criticism.
If you receive a negative comment, take some time to reflect upon whether or not there’s truth in it. It’s not easy, but try to detach from your ego and be honest with yourself.
If it’s true, express your gratitude to that person for bringing it to your attention. If it’s not true, forgive and delete or forgive and don’t engage. I heard this tip from Gabby Bernstein, and it has completely changed my experience on social media. It just makes life so much easier!
When Scrolling
7. Practice non-judgment.
We all know we need to do this, but do we actually do it? It can be helpful to remind yourself of the consequences of judging. When you think negatively about others, this makes you feel bad, not the other person.
Remember that negative thoughts lead to negative feelings. If you want to feel good, you have to start thinking good thoughts about others on a regular basis. If you catch yourself judging someone else, make an effort to find three good or positive things about that person.
8. Realize that envy is a call for inspiration.
Instead of seeing others with envy, look at them as a person to be inspired by. If someone has achieved what you want to achieve, then that means it’s possible for you to achieve that in your life too!
9. Be curious about the stories your mind makes up.
You can do this as an experiment: Scroll through your feed for five to ten minutes, with your full attention, and notice all the stories your mind makes up.
When something comes up, ask yourself if it’s helpful for you to believe that story. Is it helpful for you to think you’re not good enough? Is it helpful for you to judge that other person’s choices or life?
The mind thinks things that we wouldn’t want others to know. We have to acknowledge that this content is there and be non-attached to it at the same time.
It’s important to be curious about the mind instead of judging it or getting frustrated by it. This is one of the most important things to know if you want to be a more mindful person.
Your frustration on top of your judgment only makes things worse. It’s only by learning to accept yourself and others that you can bring a sense of peace and happiness to your life.
By integrating mindfulness into your social media experience, you can decrease anxiety and stress, eliminate negativity, and live a happier and more fulfilling life.
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Why Someone Else’s Success Isn’t a Threat to Yours
“Stop beating yourself up. You are a work in progress; which means you get there a little at a time, not all at once.” ~Unknown
I got embarrassed at the gym.
I sat down at the bench press, ready to hoist up 135 pounds of iron. My goal was eight reps for the first set.
Before I started my first set, I heard someone huffing to my left. I looked over and saw a young guy benching 315 pounds!
I counted his reps, and he went all the way up to eight. It was the same number of repetitions that I aimed for, only I was lifting 135 pounds, which is one 45-pound weight on each side (compared to his three on each side).
How embarrassing!
In that moment, I felt like I was wasting my time at the gym.
This young
guybeast was leagues ahead of me in terms of physical strength. For the same number of reps, he could lift 180 pounds more than me. That difference is so much that, despite the point I’m making, my pride told me to omit this story.Pride isn’t a good thing though, so here’s the story!
Others’ Success Is Not a Threat to Yours
I didn’t leave the gym early from discouragement because I realized two things.
1. I can bench press my bodyweight now (150 pounds), which is something I had wanted to do for a long time.
2. LA Fitness has mirrors for walls. Peering into a mirror, I noticed how much stronger I looked than ever before.
In other words, I had a lot of progress to be happy about, and that’s not all that I noticed. Literally one minute before this happened, I saw a man downstairs; he was walking on the treadmill, and he was obese.
I came full circle and realized that here I was feeling embarrassed for my puny bench press, when someone like the guy downstairs could possibly be jealous of my physical conditioning. It helped me understand why the overweight man, the beast, and I should all ignore each other’s progress.
Detach Your Progress from Everyone Else
Unless you’re having a competition with a friendly wager, your personal progress is 100% independent from the world and the people in it.
So what if the guy next to me can bench press a small car? That doesn’t impact me unless I make it my new standard.
So what if the guy on the treadmill is out of shape compared to many others at the gym? That doesn’t change what he’s there to do.
Also, there is a difference between using someone else as a representation of where you want to be and letting their success threaten your sense of satisfaction in the progress you’ve made or are making.
If you need to clarify your goal, you can then say something like, “I want the physique of Hugh Jackman.” That’s useful because it gives you a clear target (visually) of where you want to end up.
What I did in the gym did not start with me—it was from the outside in. I saw the guy in the gym, and I interpreted his strength as a strike against the value of my progress and goals.
I think it’s easy to mix up referencing and enviously comparing, because both involve the desire to improve. One is to clarify an idea while the other is a guilt-ridden, envious focus on who are you not.
No Pain, Still Gain?
I think it’s common to be envious of someone’s progress and want to use that as a motivator. But such “negative motivation” is mentally draining and relatively ineffective (guilt and discontentment are short-minded and inferior ways to move forward in life).
There’s something really important I’ve experienced in the last couple of years: amazing progress doesn’t require emotional pain; it only requires consistent effort. From the story, did you notice what seeing the 315-pound bench presser did to me? It made me hesitate to make progress, which doesn’t make sense.
Seeing him bench that much decreased my motivation to exercise because my efforts seemed futile in comparison. Of course, we’re human and we will always look around to see what others are doing, but when it comes to our progress, it seems we’re better off disregarding what we see.
The Permanent Cure for Envy Is Progress
It’s easier to let go of a disappointing comparison to others when you see and know you’re making progress. Otherwise, a sense of futility and despair can set in (and unfortunately, I know this from experience!) I don’t even expect or care to bench 315 pounds, but I know I can continue to get stronger every week, because I’ve proven it.
I mentioned earlier that I can bench press my body weight (150 pounds). Well, a couple years ago, I had a close call in the gym: I couldn’t get the barbell back up on my fourth rep (without a spotter), and I had to duck my head out from underneath the bar as it crashed into the bench.
How do I know it was close? The rough “grip” part of the bar actually scraped my head on the way down! And it was only 115 pounds. I’ve made a ton of progress since then. But if we’re going to make comparisons, let’s go for the extremes.
Compare my one push-up a day to this guy’s 315-pound bench press. Head-to-head, his achievement makes mine seem less than worthless, and yet, my one push-up a day transformed my life. This is why comparisons are invalid—your progress is only relative to you, not other people.
Since I started my one push-up a day mini habit two years ago, I’ve gained twenty pounds of mostly muscle because the more progress you make, the more you’ll be willing and able to make.
Who or What Is Your Most Bothersome Comparison?
Try this: Think about your version of the 315-pound bench press guy. Does someone else have the fame, power, money, or respect that you crave? Do you know someone who has your dream job?
Whatever you came up with, admit and internalize that it is irrelevant to your journey and personal progress.
There will always be someone who is further along the path than you are in every area. Instead of seeing that as a threat to your success, see it as irrelevant to your success, because it is! I can’t think of a single time that I changed my life because I thought I compared unfavorably to another person. Can you?
It’s great to have other people in life for support, socializing, and new perspectives, but when it comes to your personal progress, it seems best to leave others out of it, and especially so in the early stages of your growth in an area.
If you’re already world class in running, comparisons to other elite athletes might motivate you to get to the next level (and even in a healthy way). But in that case, you already have the solid foundation to build from. Many people don’t have such a powerful foundation, which is possibly why they want to improve, and so the comparison (to someone well ahead of them) makes them overreact.
In my case, I might try to lift too much weight and hurt myself or else quit going to the gym because it’d seem trivial by comparison. That’d be a mistake, as what seems to be a little bit of progress in the world’s eyes can compound and completely change your life.
The only person you have to measure up to is the person you were yesterday. If you can beat that person, trust me, you’re doing very well.
Envy image via Shutterstock
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How To Shine Your Own Light and Let Go of Envy
“As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.” ~Marianne Williamson
“Look at her, who does she think she is?”
“He’s so full of himself. He’s so big headed”
Have you ever heard these types of expressions being used? Have you said them yourself?
I have.
Or at least I used to. I was taught to believe that people who shine their light were showing off. That they were brazen and big headed. But what does being full of yourself actually mean? Seriously, what does it mean?
Is it being cocky or could it simply be having confidence in who you are? Is it being arrogant or might it just be saying no to playing small?
Plainly put, being full of yourself is to be brimming over with who you are. How utterly amazing is that? To be full of who you are. Not empty. Not lacking. Full.
Why do we believe that celebrating our greatness is something to be scorned?
We worry that if we let all of our colors blaze brightly, we’ll be perceived as being “too much.” We end up trying to throw shade on our most vibrant parts in order to blend in.
Are we supposed to walk some kind of middle line in life? Between shine and shame?
When we purposely set out to dilute who we are, we are denying ourselves our birthright to live in full bloom. Full expression.
When do we ever walk through a garden of gorgeous flowers and wish that they were less vibrant? Less alive? We don’t. We marvel at their utter beauty and proud glory. We don’t ask them to diminish their splendor. We simply ask them to be all that they are.
If we place ourselves in the shadows then we not only prevent our true light from radiating out, but we’re also left feeling envious of those that are basking in their own fabulous glow.
I used to look longingly at other people who I’d see exuding sparkly confidence. I’d yearn to have their self-assuredness and be able to live out loud without apology.
It wasn’t until I stopped wistfully wanting what I thought I lacked, and started focusing on what I was already rich with, that everything changed.
I said no to seeking approval. I said no to coveting the lives of others. I said yes to being me.
My life transformed when I stepped onto the stage of my own life, rather than hiding in the wings watching someone else’s performance. Every step I’ve taken since has gifted me farther toward empowerment and farther away from self-doubt.
Do you secretly envy somebody else’s life? Do you spend hours obsessing about how amazing they appear to be? What if you took some of that energy and invested it into your most precious stock? Yourself.
Try this simple visualization exercise to get you back on point.
Imagine yourself sitting in front of a mirror illuminated with light bulbs, the ones you see in the dressing rooms that film stars use. Your reflection in the mirror radiates love, happiness, and confidence. The lights are bright and beautiful. So are you. So amazingly beautiful.
Remember this: every single time you waste energy wishing you had somebody else’s life, a light in your own life goes out. One of those bulbs dies. Your reflection loses a little bit of its sparkle. Those bulbs need your life force to keep shining. Why are you illuminating someone else’s reflection? Why are you giving your energy to their light bulbs?
Light up your life. This is the one time you don’t need to be environmentally conscious! Burn those lights, baby! I’m talking Times Square bright. Because otherwise all those lights will lose their will to shine and you’ll be fumbling around in the dark trying to find a torch. And that’s not the look we’re going for here.
So now you’ve got your own glow going here are a few other ways to keep the spark alive:
1. Get creative.
When we concentrate on our own passions it makes it much more difficult for our minds to stray and worry about what everyone else is doing.
If you feel stuck in a rut and unsure of how to move forward, then getting immersed in a creative project can be an amazing way to shift any stagnant energy. Maybe you want to explore photography; perhaps sketching or sculpting appeal to you. Creativity is a wonderful tool for self-expression and can bring so much joy as well as clarity.
2. Avoid too much toxicity.
It can be hard to feel bright and beautiful when we’re in an environment that doesn’t feel supportive. Limit time with negative people and spend more time with those who champion you and believe in your abilities. We all need some encouragement from time to time.
Take time to encourage others to shine their light, too—it inspires a domino effect which creates a global glow!
3. Stay present, but look forward.
In the yoga pose Warrior II, one hand reaches forward and the other hand extends back. The head (and mind) are centered.
It’s such a wonderful symbol of past, present, and future. The back hand is the past—don’t look that way, you’re not going in that direction. Stay centered and keep your mind in the present, but focus your gaze on where you’re going: forward. Possibility lies ahead.
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Shine your light like only you can. And don’t apologize for it. The world does not benefit from you living in the shadows. The world does not benefit from you wasting your energy on envy. And the world most certainly does not benefit from you living in shame and fear. It benefits from your incredible, colorful contribution.
Your empowerment carriage awaits. It’s time to get in.
Girl on the moon image via Shutterstock
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How to Stop Envying Other People’s Seemingly Perfect Lives
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” ~Steve Furtick
It’s in our nature to compare ourselves with others. The ability to weigh one situation up against another helps us make decisions and live our lives productively.
The downside is that when you constantly compare your own life with those of other people, you will always come up short.
Over-comparing causes envy. Envy is the feeling or sensation we have when we want to get something that someone else has and we can’t be happy for them when they have it.
Getting stuck in a cycle of envy is just about the best way to ruin your life. Fortunately, there are several ways to deal with envy that will guide you toward happiness and well-being.
Don’t Compare Your Cutting Room Floor With Someone Else’s Highlight Reel
Have you ever seen anybody post an unflattering photo on Facebook? Let’s face it, you rarely read about someone fighting with their spouse, hating their job, or declaring bankruptcy. Most people show you what they want you to see—a highly edited, glossed-up version of their life.
The next time you feel envious about someone else’s life, remember that you’re only looking at part of the story, the part they want you to see.
Think of something that another person has that you want. For example, maybe someone you know is far more popular than you. On the surface it may appear that they are surrounded with people who look up to them, and that they are well-liked and respected.
But in reality people might have a different view of them behind closed doors. In this case, the actual reality and what we perceive as reality are two very different things.
Even the most enviable lifestyle has downsides. For example, many people covet the glamour and glitz of the rich and famous. But have you ever sat down and thought about what kind of life a famous person has?
Ask yourself if you’d enjoy someone jumping out of a bush and taking a snapshot of you in your grubby tracksuit pants while you’re collecting the newspaper from the front lawn.
There are always two sides to every coin. What you think you see is not necessarily the reality. So the next time you get caught up in envy, always remember that unless you are that person you don’t really have the whole story.
Isn’t It Already Here?
I am by nature a private person, but I wasn’t always that way. In my twenties I was invited to every party, had scores of friends, and was (in my own mind, at least) funny, clever, and popular.
As the years went by I became more introverted, and not too long ago I started beating myself up for not having many friends. Why wasn’t I popular like other people?
One particular couple that my husband and I love catching up with came to mind. Whenever we wanted to see them, we had to literally book months in advance because they were so busy with other social commitments.
Then I started to really ask myself, what is the essence of what I think popularity will bring me? The answer was simple: I wanted to feel a sense of connection and belonging.
It was at that time I realized that the essence of what I wanted was already here. I have a loving husband, a great family, a couple of good friends who would do anything for me, and plenty of time to do what I want.
I also realized that I would absolutely hate not having a moment to myself; being popular would probably make me pretty miserable.
So the next time you feel as though you’re missing out on something that somebody else has, drill down into the essence of whatever you think that thing would give you and ask yourself, is it already here?
Do You Really Want What They Have?
If you really want to play the comparison game, remember that if you want someone else’s life you have to be willing to do a complete swap; that is, you would have to give up your life as it is and swap over to theirs.
Here’s an exercise that will help you decide if you really want out of your situation and into someone else’s:
When you’re ready, think of someone you know who has the kind of life that you envy. Then take a piece of paper and in the left hand column write the heading “What I have that they don’t have.”
Then in the right hand column, write the heading “What they have that I want.” In this column you are going to make a list of all the things this person has that you want. Write down whatever comes to your mind. For example, do they have a lot of money, a nice house, nice clothes, or the perfect partner?
When you’ve finished doing this, move to the left hand column. Write down everything that you value in your life. For example, family, friends, pets, and everyone who is important to you.
One caveat: the other person may indeed have friends, family, and pets just like you. But in this case you’re not so much looking at what they have (i.e.: a dog, a child, a husband), but the unique relationship and connection you have with your pets and loved ones. So remember to write down the names of your family members, friends, and pets.
Be as specific as you can. Get really clear and what you love about your life. It could be something as simple as being able to finish work early on Thursdays so you can go to the gym.
Now its crunch time; you’ll probably find that the list on the left hand side is much bigger than the list on the right. So ask yourself, is there anything in this list you would be willing to give up in order to have the life that the other person has?
What you’ll likely discover is that everything you have in your list is as valuable as or more valuable than the things that the other person has.
Practice Gratitude
One of the reasons we feel envy is that we often take the good things in our own lives for granted.
The happier you are with your lot in life, the more good things will come to you. Happiness studies show that truly happy people are not necessarily wealthy, powerful, or famous.
They have simply made a choice to be happy by paying attention to the good things around them. Since whatever you focus on will become the inclination of the mind, this makes perfect sense.
Every night before I go to sleep I ask myself the following questions:
- What do I take for granted in my life?
- Who are the important people (or animals) in my life?
- Who is in my corner?
- What freedoms do I enjoy?
- What advantages have I been given in life?
This allows me to take stock of what is important and gives me a nice feeling of contentment before I drift off to sleep. Try it for yourself!
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Our society has conditioned us to believe that your net worth equates to happiness. Accordingly many people strive to be more, do more, and have more.
But none of those things actually cause any lasting happiness. They are all impermanent and subject to change. Most importantly, they represent other qualities of heart that can be achieved regardless of net worth.
Ask yourself the question: “What really makes me happy?” Is it actually the money, possessions, or reputation? Or is it freedom, joy, peace, and serenity?
Happiness is the ultimate currency, and there’s no law that says there isn’t enough of that to go around.
Envy image via Shutterstock
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5 Ways to Deal With Envy So It Doesn’t Steal Your Happiness
“Happiness is found when you stop comparing yourself to other people.” ~Unknown
Throughout this year I’ve noticed myself feeling envious of other people. Particularly, I would feel envious of the famous people that I would see on television, read about in magazines, and follow on social media.
I wouldn’t even be envious of them for the things one might expect. It wasn’t because they were famous or wealthy. It wasn’t because they had millions of followers on social media. And it wasn’t because they were good looking.
Still, I would find myself feeling envious of an actress if she had a better personality than I did. I would feel bad about myself for not being as outgoing or bubbly or expressive. I would feel like I wasn’t as likeable for being quiet and an introvert.
I would feel envious of another celebrity for her ability to live a fun and impulsive life. I would see the way someone else could take risks and not seem to worry about the future. This made me feel like I was too cautious, and that it would keep me from having an exciting life.
I would feel envious of a musician for the level of success she achieved. This would be especially true if the singer was close to my age. I would feel as though I was wasting my life away, while other people my age already had careers.
Whenever I felt this way, I always wanted to try to understand these feelings. Not only did I want to understand them, I wanted to make them go away.
I didn’t want to feel envious of the people that I looked up to. I wanted to feel happy for them.
So, I would think about the person that made me feel this way and I would try to figure out what specifically made me feel envious. I would try to list my own strengths. I would try to see that this person wasn’t so different from me.
When that didn’t work, I would try to ignore the feelings. When that didn’t work, I just hoped these feelings would just fade over time. But I couldn’t seem to get the results I wanted.
It became clear to me that I would have to learn to embrace my feelings instead. One thing I’ve come to realize is that you can’t really control how you feel. Feelings are not inherently bad. But you need to look within to understand what is causing them.
By embracing my feelings, I realized that I would become envious of different people for similar reasons. I was envious of the person with a more outgoing personality because I wanted people to notice me.
When I thought I was envious of someone’s success, I realized I was envious jealous of the friends she made along the way.
Most of my envy came from a desire to make more friends and have more fun.
On this path toward understanding envy, I remembered a time when I was younger when I would always get envious of my friends when they won trophies. I didn’t participate in sports, so there wasn’t any chance of me getting a trophy of my own.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that trophies and awards don’t matter all that much. They can certainly help a person to feel good about his or her hard work. But what really matters is the journey.
What matters is playing the sport, or playing the music, or performing in the plays, or solving the equations. What matters is growing and becoming better than you once were. What matters is doing something you love to do. The trophy is really just a symbol of the journey.
If a person had a trophy, I would feel like she was better than me. I didn’t have one, so I would feel worthless. I didn’t realize that it represented something deeper. I didn’t understand the hard work or the journey.
Now that I’m older, I realize that I don’t get envious of people who win trophies or awards anymore. Coming to this realization gave me hope. It made me realize that envy is something we can outgrow.
Still, time is not the only remedy for unwanted envy.
5 Tips For Overcoming Envy
1. Look beyond the surface.
If we feel envious of someone, we’re probably only seeing what’s on the surface.
It might seem like a person has easily acquired success, love, and quite frankly, happiness, while we struggle to achieve any one of those things. However, it’s important to remember that life is a journey.
If a person has success, there is a journey that led up to it. If a person has love, there is a journey that led up to it. These things don’t happen overnight. They take time. And you have to give yourself time to achieve them, too.
2. Take some time to unplug.
Social media makes it so easy for us to see the best parts of other people’s lives. It can make it seem like everyone else is happy and successful, while we are struggling to keep up.
If you feel envious of someone, take some time to just focus on youtself. Do things that will make you happy, like taking a nice bath or drinking tea or going for a bike ride. Take some time to focus on things that make you feel good about yourself.
3. Look within.
If you are envious of someone, take some time to understand why specifically you are envious of him or her.
Maybe you’re envious of the person’s career or appearance or abilities. Why do you feel envious of that particular thing? Maybe it would bring you happiness. Maybe it would give you independence. It could be that the thing you really want can be achieved in a variety of different ways.
4. Know that your feelings do not make you a bad person.
When I’m envious of someone it can be frustrating, because I usually just want to be happy for that person’s success. So then, not only do I feel envious, but I also feel guilty.
We feel the things we do for a reason, and oftentimes we have to dig deep within to understand the true source of those feelings. Be patient with yourself.
5. Know that you are valuable.
If I feel envious of someone, it’s usually because I believe she is better than me. I’ll be envious of one aspect of that person’s life and think I am worthless because I don’t have that one thing.
The truth is that we are all valuable. You may not have everything you want in your life right now, but that does not take away your worth. You don’t need to compare yourself to others because you are perfect the way you are.
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Turn Your Envy into Inspiration and Cultivate Your Own Joy
“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” ~Harold Coffin
What happens when your neighbor upgrades to a mansion leaving your house in its shadow?
What do you do when your friend’s business is expanding while you’re living paycheck to paycheck?
How do you view the blissful couple next-door, seemingly in a never-ending honeymoon phase, while the strife in your household could be cut with a knife?
Although we are each walking our own journey, as social creatures we tend to compare ourselves to others. This habit may start in the classroom at a young age—“Look how nicely Johnny is sitting; why can’t you behave more like that?”
Facebook is the real-time reality show of nearly every one we know. We have friends posting their kids’ achievements, doting anniversary love notes to their spouse, and pictures from exotic summer vacations. We are getting a sneak peek into the lives of others and concomitantly thinking about our own.
While these comparisons can be a slippery slope leading us down the rabbit hole of “never enough,” we can also use this tendency to our advantage.
When Difficult Emotions Happen to Good People
Oftentimes, when a moment of envy emerges we push it aside, deny it, or fall into the pit and drown in it. Is there any other choice?
A good friend was telling me about the lavish interior-decorating project under way for her brand new, sparkling apartment. I remember feeling a sincere desire to be happy for her. But as much as I tried to evade the truth, I was envious.
Taking a deep breath and a moment of reflection, I nurtured those feelings inside me. I wasn’t envious because I’m a bad person or secretly wished for the demise of my friend. I was hurting because I was unknowingly aching for a beautifully designed home to call my own.
Compassion and love toward myself was the antidote; I decided to spend the next few months creating a home that brought me joy.
In order to achieve greatness we must utilize both our positive inclinations and our negative inclinations for our own benefit.
Here is how envy can be both helpful and healing:
You see our friends’, neighbors’, or colleagues’ good success and feel a pang. Question that emotion. What is leading you to feel that way?
If my colleague got the promotion and I didn’t, perhaps I can take an internal audit and determine in what ways I can be a better employee. On the other hand, I may not even be in a profession that is suited to my personality.
About eight years ago, I traveled around Israel and Thailand for nine weeks. I remember sensing that one of my best friends was feeling a tad envious of my voyage around the globe.
Can a relationship tolerate a certain degree of envy? Yes, as long as we channel it in the right direction.
A year later, she went on her own trek to visit her brother, who was teaching English in Cambodia at the time. Rather than sinking into her own envy, she channeled it to propel her life and actualize her dreams.
As long as we realize that we do not need to burst someone else’s bubble but instead can cultivate our own joy, we are able to utilize any emotion to our benefit.
When other people achieve a goal or a certain level of success, envy is not about wanting to take that away from the other person. Rather, if we learn to honor our emotions, we can discover hidden treasures within ourselves.
We can rediscover new passions and dreams that have gone neglected. We can become aware that we unconsciously seek a better relationship with our spouse or kids. We may realize that we have a desire to be a leader in the community.
Instead of focusing on the other person, we can look inward, set our goals, and get to work. The question then becomes, how badly do we want it? How hard are we willing to work for our lives?
Even if we don’t reach our goal, when we do everything within our ability with the cards we are dealt that is the truest measure of success, regardless of the results.
Maybe We Have Exactly What We Need
It also helps to consider that maybe we have exactly what we need.
Consider a seed planted in the earth. Mother nature places that seedling in dirt, sometimes in harsh terrain and inclement weather. Beneath the surface, the seed must break, rip, and tear open in order to fulfill its purpose.
How do we know what the universe is sending our way in order to rip open our unique potential? With this in mind, there is no longer a need to compare. Each seed is given the nutrients it needs in order to grow.
Happiness Magnified
There is the common saying, that nobody’s life is perfect. Another person’s situation may look good from the outside but there is always something beneath the surface, a challenge that we don’t know about, or a skeleton in the closet.
Yes, each person does face his or her unique set of challenges, but that way of thinking always rubbed me the wrong way. This belief almost lends itself to wishing challenges on another person. I believe we can do better than that.
We can elevate our thinking to realize that success and positivity in the lives of those around us only leads to a cycle of happiness in our own lives. When we can truly rejoice at our friend’s wedding, our family members’ success, or at another’s accolades, then the happiness we feel is only magnified.
When we live in a way so that other people’s joy only adds to our own, how much happier can our lives get?
We may not be married, but isn’t it inspiring to know that such true love is possible?
We may feel stuck in our own job, but isn’t it motivating to see someone else take a risk and go after his or her dream job?
Perhaps we didn’t have the best relationship with our own parents, but doesn’t it strengthen your faith to know that incredible parental bonds still exist?
We easily feel empathy when a loved one is going through a challenge. Now is the time to feel the joy of others. By doing so, we create a circle of light in our own lives and increase our own happiness.
By changing our filter, our thoughts, our own abundance is increased exponentially. We can use every single emotion in our tool chest for the betterment (not embitterment) of our own lives.
Jumping woman image via Shutterstock
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The Key to Freedom: Minding Your Own Business
“The day you stop racing is the day you win the race.” ~Bob Marley
Let me take you back to the beginning of my day, how I used to do it.
Flicking through my Facebook newsfeed, clicking on profiles, scrolling through comments, monitoring social interactions, checking how many likes my last post or profile picture got. Then I’m going to my therapist, to talk about how worthless my own life is, how inadequate I feel.
I’m not saving the world, pursuing my passion, making friends, or traveling. Neither am I getting married or engaged nor having children—and I do not have a clue what the heck I even think about all of these prospects, whether I even want them.
I can barely look at myself in the mirror. I hate my life and my own weakness for not taking control of this pathetic situation.
The smiling faces on my social media page grin down at me like clown masks in some perturbed haunted house in a nightmare. I ask myself, why am I taking their happiness so personally?
We can’t seem to escape comparison. We seem to be enmeshed in it, entangled in it, trapped and suffocated by it. We can’t seem to understand who we are or where we are in life without looking around us to compare our position.
Somewhere inside us we believe that if we can gain all the information that we can through comparing ourselves to those ‘better than us,’ maybe we will find the key to that elusive happiness, which comes only from the confidence that we are good enough.
If we keep on social media stalking those who are living the lives of our dreams, maybe we will pick up on that thing that makes them so different from us—so much ‘better.’
I believe we aren’t after their lives so much as what we perceive is their ease. As much as the freedom they ooze, or the contentment they display, we want their happiness. We forget that most people only display the highlight reels of their lives on the Internet.
In fact, I used to tell myself that we create ourselves, and I tried to make myself a collage of all the people that I admired—Beyoncé included.
I told myself, that I didn’t have any preferences. I treated myself as a blank canvas, and by that I mean I slowly rubbed out anything that came from within, without reason or logic, and replaced it with everything I was attracted to externally, like a magpie.
The noise I was letting in from outside was torturing. And deafening.
When the toxic concoction of low self-esteem, ambition, insecurity, and unfavorable self-comparison escalates, you may get depressed, as I did.
My former way of life (in combination with a complex range of other factors) made me ill. While everyone is different, I realized, for me, the key to recovering my mental health was to supplement professional help and therapy with a radical simplifying of my life.
Today, I wake up in the morning and open my eyes, taking a good look around at where I am, noticing a kitten asleep at my feet. I talk with my sister who I share a room with; we both get dressed for work, joking and teasing the other on our rushed fashion choices.
I look out of my open attic window and smell the fresh crisp air, watching the stillness of the tree-lined street against a backdrop of rolling green hills, before the storm of traffic and rush hour.
I get changed and choose my clothes. I pick out a book for my short commute to a digital marketing agency where I work as copywriter. I walk to work lightly, observing my surroundings and feeling life flow through me, a dull vibration at every step.
I sit on a seat on the public bus as children get on with their parents, gossiping and teasing amongst each other. My mind is still, and I feel strangely alone—but alone in my own company. I am with myself.
I am whole. How curious. What changed? Very little, externally. I unplugged from the noise around me and started to mind my own business.
It happened one day, quietly, and I found it made my thoughts less erratic, my mind less split and divided. I didn’t force myself to come off social media; I knew I was way too stubborn and addicted to do that. So I turned my attention, gently, not in distraction, to the present moment instead.
I peeked out of the quicksand that is an obsession with comparison and self-deprecation, and asked myself out of curiosity, what’s going on in my own life?
I looked around and thought: this is it. Your dreams haven’t come true yet, and your past is filled with soreness. But there is no escape from that which you consider to be a hellhole, this is your life.
And you are living it.
Then a curious thing happened. I allowed any pain to pass through me like water in my hands. I processed the beauty in the same way, and I felt a part of life. Like life itself, in fact.
I realized that I wasn’t in a hellhole at all. Relentless clinging to my thoughts, obsessions, and desperate escapes from life—resistance—had made it so. And all I had to do to be free was let go.
Don’t worry, minding your own business doesn’t mean ignoring everyone else’s existence. But it does mean you get to control how you give and what you give, so that it is conscious, not masochistic martyrdom.
Rather than thinking, I should travel abroad and save all those poor unfortunate souls less privileged than I (which is escapist, and also patronizing, and also doesn’t tackle the issue at the root), I began to help my mother, my siblings, my friends and began to write and share work on poverty and mental illness, as these were my most immediate experiences.
Everyone has a different path, of course, and this is only one route, which brought me peace.
I decided to pay attention to my existence, seeing as it was the only thing I had, after all.
And, I started to really see the things around me, like the dust on the corners of my floorboards, and the hundreds of books I’d bought and piled up in desperation for some kind of knowledge that might bring me certainty or security, thinking I should maybe arrange them in alphabetical order.
I would barely acknowledge these tiny details of living when I was caught up in the whirlwind of my mind—and now they grounded me in a stillness that calmed me.
I was able to let myself live and feel worthy of the miracle of existence, with all its highs and lows. Above all, I felt a gorgeous freedom, liberating, vast and expansive, allowing me to have fun with curiosity, gratitude, and peace.
I told myself I would enjoy the days I had, as I passed through this world, just like everyone else was also passing through. By freeing myself every day, and indeed every moment, from the limits of comparison, competition, chasing, and clinging, I began to mind my own business.
We can all experience this freedom. We just have to choose to see life through our own eyes, by being present in the only moment that matters: this one.
Free, happy woman image via Shutterstock
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When You Feel Behind: Turning Envy into Positive Action
“It is the way that we react to circumstances that determines our feelings.” ~Dale Carnegie
I can remember the incident so clearly.
A few years ago, my friends and I were all sitting around a table in a restaurant. It was the holiday season, and I was in good spirits. It was nice to see everyone again. The snow was drifting gently outside, reminding me of eggnog and Christmas trees.
After we ordered our food and took turns asking each other what we were up to, it was one of my friends’ turn to share. She casually mentioned that she recently got a job offer. Everyone looked up, in a mix of surprise and curiosity.
“What company?” someone asked.
She answered proudly, full of giddiness and excitement. As I looked around, I could see some expressions beginning to sour. As for me, it felt like a stone had just dropped in my stomach.
I couldn’t believe it. Out of everyone I knew, she seemed the least likely person to get a prestigious job offer. My spirits were suddenly dampened as I tried to process what had just happened.
All throughout dinner, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she had gotten a job offer from a company that I personally knew numerous other people had unsuccessfully applied to.
I had tried for the longest time to obtain an interview from the firm, unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, she was failing many of her classes at the time, and seemed to have few relevant work experiences.
It completely turned everything I had thought about life and careers upside down, as if all my efforts to secure relevant internships and achieve in my academic career had gone to waste. I felt like I had failed myself.
Slowly, I shifted from blaming myself to blaming everything and everyone else around me. At the time, I told myself that things were simply not fair.
It’s been a few years since then, and I’ve had many days to reflect upon this experience, as well as how I’ve grown since then. Here are some things I did to turn from envious to positive and the lessons I learned along the way.
Focus on yourself.
Harboring negative feelings toward others, whether it’s hate, contempt, or envy, takes up energy and ends up exhausting us. It’s unproductive and it doesn’t better our lives. If anything, people easily pick up on these unattractive, negative vibes.
The most important part of ridding oneself of envy is changing the way we approach the situation. Realize that there is nothing you can to do change events outside your control. What you can do, however, is find ways to make changes in your own life.
I was spending so much energy on someone else’s achievements that it took away energy from my own. After the feelings of envy and disappointment passed (as they always do), I decided to explore different ways of improving myself.
I took up new activities, such as writing, and made an active effort to speak to different people from different walks of life to learn more about their experiences. Learning from others with more experience than me became a key theme in my life. I wanted to understand other people, their struggles, and how they overcame obstacles to become successful.
When I became more productive and filled my schedule with things to do, it felt like I had less space and time in my calendar to be envious. I was too busy!
Things are not always what they seem.
When we talk to people, especially those whom we rarely see, we tend to highlight the best parts of ourselves and our lives. Just logging into a social media website shows this phenomenon.
Similarly, you’ll likely only see the tip of the iceberg when you first talk to someone. Dig a little deeper and little specks will appear. Everyone’s life has both good and bad, but it’s unrealistic to compare our own lives, which we know inside out, to the shiny, clean surface of someone else’s.
As for my friend’s situation, I truly do not know how she obtained an offer from the company. Perhaps they liked something they saw in her credentials, or she was a better fit. Maybe someone she knew vouched for her abilities.
The point is, it doesn’t really matter for me. It’s so easy to wrack our brains over things that don’t fit within our worldview. Some things are difficult to understand, but we can do our best to acknowledge that we don’t have all the information at hand and try our best to work with what we do know.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
At the time, it felt like I was falling behind. Despite all my efforts, it was if someone had “leapfrogged” over me and was soaring ahead. I worried that setbacks would accumulate over time, and I would spend the rest of my life behind everyone else, always trying to catch up.
How wrong I was.
The thing is, life isn’t a straight line moving in one direction. It’s sort of like a stock market—wiggly and filled with ups and downs. It’s unpredictable, but if you focus on improving yourself, despite the ups and downs, the long-term trend will be upward.
Envy is an unproductive feeling. It’s perfectly natural and happens to everyone, but it can consume our own lives to the point that it’s unhealthy. Envy is a feeling of helplessness.
I learned that I have control over myself and my actions. I could take steps to improve myself by putting out a detailed action plan and implementing it.
Make learning become a major theme in your life. Seek to learn from others’ successes and difficulties and apply them as lessons in your own life.
Because regardless of the inevitable hurdles everyone faces, nothing can take away the knowledge one has gained from listening to others and the wisdom in knowing what to do.
Excited woman image via Shutterstock
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6 Things to Do Instead of Comparing Yourself to Others
“Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat.” ~Scottish Proverb
I grew up believing I was never enough. Ever. Not when I got all A’s in school. Not when I was in the talented and gifted program. Not when my father made more than enough money for me to buy whatever I wanted.
I became an adult who compared herself to others too, always wondering why I didn’t have what they had or why I wasn’t as pretty or as cool.
I brought this behavior into my relationships and my business. I would get super jealous to the point of stalking when it came to my romantic partners. I was controlling and pushy because I thought they would leave me for someone better.
In my business, I would obsess over other entrepreneurs and wonder how they “had it all,” convincing myself that no one cared what little ole me had to say. I played the victim all too well. And it kept me stuck, alone, and broke.
After a series of dramatic events, including a baby, a layoff, and a divorce—in one year—I hit rock bottom. It sucked, but that’s what it took for me to realize how terribly I was treating myself.
I committed to making changes in my life, my behavior, and my attitude. I had to embrace who I was and who I was going to become. I had to risk becoming nothing to become something.
If you catch yourself playing the comparison game often, it’s important to remember one thing: you don’t know anyone else’s story. You can only base your assumptions on what you see, and that’s a pretty shaky foundation to put all your bets on.
A complete shift in focus and mindset around these behaviors needs to happen. Here are some things I learned to do instead of comparing myself to others.
1. Compliment them.
Most of the time, when you are jealous or comparing yourself to others, it’s because you think they have something you don’t. The natural instinct for most of us is to criticize them. We try to pump ourselves up in by putting them down.
It’s a terrible practice and it puts you at a low vibration, feeling even worse. Instead, find something you really admire about them and compliment them.
If it’s someone you know personally, send them a message or a note. If it’s someone you don’t know or someone with celebrity status, send a tweet or leave a nice comment on the blog. I guarantee you will brighten up their day and feel good about it.
2. Believe in yourself.
You are a beautiful, amazing human being. You were put on this Earth to do something unique. We all are. Unfortunately for some, they never embrace it and end up living unhappily.
Believe you have a purpose and a mission in this life, whether it’s big or small. If you don’t believe it, then no one else will either. There are few people who will love you unconditionally. You should strive to be one of them.
3. Embrace your journey.
The comparison game is a sneaky trick. It makes you think you are on the same path as everyone else. Though some paths may be similar, every person has a different journey. Embrace yours.
Stop comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle. You have no idea how much this person struggled or how hard they worked to get where they are. Stay focused on your own path and forge ahead.
4. Find your awesome.
Along with comparison comes a whole lot of negativity. We start beating ourselves up and talking badly about ourselves for not being as pretty, as smart, or as successful.
Remember, you are unique and awesome. You have talents, traits, and accomplishments that make you who you are. Write a list of amazing things about yourself and put it somewhere you can see it daily. Make it the background of your phone or computer and read it to yourself all the time.
5. Feel the fear.
Most negativity comes from a place of fear. Fear of failure, success, looking silly, or being judged.
Fear is something that never goes away entirely. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is their ability to see the fear and continue anyway.
What are you afraid of? Identify it. Then ask yourself what’s the worse that could happen. Chances are, it’s not as bad as you think.
6. Live in alignment.
When I was going through my personal struggles, most of it came because I wasn’t in tune with who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was frazzled. Something felt off.
I had an insane work ethic, but I didn’t work on my relationships. I was preaching self-care, but I was overweight. When your life is not in alignment, it will always feel like something is missing.
Take a look at how you’re living. Are you in tune across the board? If not, examine the areas you need to focus on.
Comparison comes from a place of lack. If you find yourself doing this often, figure out what’s missing and where you can improve.
Chances are, the person you’re comparing yourself to is reflecting something back that needs expansion. Pay attention and trust yourself. There’s always a deeper meaning. Figure out what it is, so you can move forward.
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Why We Compare Ourselves to Others on Social Media and How to Stop
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” ~Steve Furtick
We all have certain triggers that can cause our confidence to take a sudden nosedive.
For some, it’s a trip to the gym. If you’re self-conscious of your body, watching fit people strut their stuff in their tightest fitting gym clothes likely has you over analyzing your every body part.
For others, it may be a certain individual—a family member, friend, or enemy that, for whatever reason, leaves them with the dreaded feeling that they just aren’t enough.
We all know the gut wrenching feeling that arises when we see or hear something that immediately has us second guessing our appearance, personality, or skill set.
Unfortunately, social media provides us with numerous platforms that help to quickly trigger that unpleasant self-disdain.
Facebook recently reminded me of just how powerful a determinant it is to my confidence level.
I found myself comparing all aspects of my life, both internal and external, to a person I had never met. She was a stranger in every sense of the word, and yet somehow, her profile page caused me to question my accomplishments, appearance, and even personality traits.
I didn’t realize just how illogical this was until I explained it to someone, and, now as I type, I’m reminded even further.
Regardless of how illogical these comparisons may be, our emotional responses to such images can be so strong that they completely overpower our sense of logic.
The reality is, people are constantly showcasing the best aspects of their life onto social media.
The arrival of a new baby and a recent trip to the Caribbean are both ideal picture-posting occasions. But do these same people post photos of 2 a.m. feedings or lost luggage? Not often, because that wouldn’t show them in an ideal light, but it would provide a sense of reality.
Reality is what is lost on social media. We emphasize the best versions of ourselves instead of the real versions.
Life can be hard, ugly, and downright depressing at times. But those likely aren’t the adjectives most of us would use to describe the photos we post onto our accounts.
The feeling of lack and dissatisfaction that we feel when scrolling through our newsfeed often results from comparing our true reality to our “friends’” idealized, perfectly Instagramed realities.
We are using the same scale to measure two entirely different realities.
However, we fail to step back and recognize just how wildly unfair and unrealistic these comparisons actually are.
So how can we stop ourselves from making them?
1. Reduce your time on social media.
This can be a challenge since we live in a culture that puts such a high value on social media outlets. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Allow yourself five to ten minutes a day to check your social media accounts and then be done with it. Especially avoid looking at profiles of people who trigger thoughts of comparison. You have nothing to gain in doing so besides anxiety and sadness.
2. Redirect your focus on the things that really matter.
When you direct your attention toward the real world, you have less time and energy to direct toward meaningless activities such as social comparisons.
Focus on a high-energy work out at the gym or finishing a book you’ve been putting off. Immerse yourself in activities that leave you feeling better for having engaged in them (versus Facebook stalking, which leaves you wishing you hadn’t).
Make a list of activities and then schedule them onto a calendar. Since we often spend time on social media when we have little else going on, having scheduled plans will reduce the time we are sitting idle.
3. Assess where those negative comparisons are stemming from.
As unpleasant as these comparisons can feel, they can serve a positive purpose in that they inform us of an area of our lives that may benefit from some improvement. The incident served as a reminder that I want to be secure enough in who I am and where I am in life that I don’t feel the need to measure it in comparison to anyone else (least of all, a stranger).
After my strong reaction to a stranger’s Facebook profile, I decided to work on developing a stronger sense of confidence and self-worth. I’ve done this in a number of different ways such as:
- Putting a higher value on my relationships. I have amazing friends and family, but I admit that I often take them for granted. I’ve tried to become more present in my interactions with them, as well as in encounters with complete strangers.
- Valuing my time more. In the past, I’ve been much more cognizant and respectful of others’ time than my own. I’m practicing putting my needs first and learning to accept that it is okay to do.
- Doing more of what I love. Sounds simple, but I’ve really made an effort to go on quiet walks with my dog more or allow myself an hour to read a book. Doing things simply because I like to do them has given me an increasing amount of self-value.
- Eating well and moving. I make sure to put my body in motion for at least thirty minutes a day (even if it’s just walking the dog), and I eat small, healthy meals throughout the day so I don’t find myself snacking mindlessly on junk. Putting a higher value on my body by eating clean and getting exercise has naturally given me a higher sense of self worth.
So, next time you make an unfair comparison, instead of allowing it to make you feel poorly about yourself, view it as an opportunity for a little self-evaluating.
Ultimately, social comparisons aren’t indicative of what others have that you don’t, but rather what you already have but aren’t quite aware of yet.
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A Mindful Way to Find Relief from the Pain of Envy
“The more you hide your feelings, the more they show. The more you deny your feelings, the more they grow.” ~Unknown
Envy is such an overpowering and overwhelming feeling, often something hidden, or masked by a smiley face, or fuelled into rage and resentment. I’ve experienced all of these emotions in my life, and as I neared my fortieth birthday, I felt that I could not go on. I was crippled by the “envy story” stuck on repeat mode inside my mind.
As I watched friends and family swoop by me in terms of outer achievements and success, the envy door took me to places within that I’d not expected.
Envy began to feel like this creepy character, always waiting to erode my self-esteem and to crush those around me through criticism and put-downs.
What I discovered was that life will give us more and more reasons to be envious until it teaches us the power of deep surrender to what is. It can show us that sometimes what appears rosy on the outside is not always the case.
My envy had begun in primary school when my best girlfriends made new friends and I was left on the sidelines.
I lacked social confidence; I was quiet and quite shy, and my envy grew as most of my friends signed up for the school show, got boyfriends and I didn’t.
Envy continued into my adult life because I had tried to avoid it and managed to stuff it down with food and distractions, but it found new reasons for me to be envious. This time it was not friendships, but appearance and achievements.
It brought me to a crucial stage in my life where almost everyone I knew was getting every single thing I had ever wanted.
My bucket list was empty while everyone else’s was overflowing, with nice houses, greater financial prosperity, lots of vacations overseas, and so on.
At one point it felt like life was having one big cosmic joke on me as I looked into my purse and saw nothing there, while people on social networks were complaining they could not afford a new smartphone.
And so it continued until it amplified.
This experience gave me no choice but to do the one thing I had been avoiding all along—surrender to what is.
In 2013 I began a practice of mindfulness, after what felt like a long time of failing to positive-think my way into a better life.
Through mindfulness I saw how great this envious feeling was within me. I could no longer avoid it, ignore it, or smother it with over-working or over-eating. I knew this emotion had a great gift for me and now was the time for me to find out what it was.
As life showed me other people’s higher levels of outer achievements, I realized that I could no longer keep re-playing my failure story. It wasn’t possible that I was here to fail forever.
I noticed that I couldn’t fight envy by amassing greater riches than my neighbors. Envy wouldn’t go away if I got my teeth straightened, lost weight, met someone new, or became top in my chosen career.
There would always be more that my ego wanted. There would always be somebody who had straighter teeth, who was slimmer, who was higher up the professional ladder than me.
If an envy story is playing, it will always seep into our way of viewing the world until we meet it at the front door and welcome it in.
Recently, I attended my younger sister’s wedding. She’s twenty-five, in her ideal job, now married to the love of her life, and they are about to buy their first home.
Together, they are financially abundant and she is socially confident. Because of this, my comparison junkie reared its ugly head, with loud flashing lights and alarm bells. My sister, through no fault of her own, was a red flag to my envy bull.
As a single woman, in my late thirties, renting my tiny flat and currently living on a tight budget, the wedding threw up so much envy.
It was pelting me like tomatoes and rotten eggs at a criminal in the medieval stocks, but this time I knew how to handle what was coming up in me. I welcomed it all in.
Being more of a social introvert, I watched as more gregarious characters interacted at the wedding, as extroverts mingled easily and took to the dance floor during the evening, and I felt this whoosh of envy plough through me, starting at my solar plexus and rushing up through my heart and becoming lodged in my throat.
The envy wanted to scream, “Give me a break!” I breathed slowly, and gently said inwardly “Welcome envy, welcome.”
This did not take the envy away. It’s not a fast-food approach to personal growth; it’s a mindful acceptance of what is and an act of self-kindness to the hurt, sad child within who remembers times before when she didn’t feel good enough.
And by welcoming envy, I left the wedding soothed—not upbeat, not calm, not even happy, but a bit more at peace, and I was okay with this. This was a new experience for me, and I was grateful that envy had something to teach me.
Envy can pervade our identity, close our hearts to loved ones, and prevent us from experiencing meaningful relationships.
It can also be a gift, but not until we are willing to unwrap this gift can we see it for what it really is—a journey inward to the place where a more compassionate understanding can be revealed.
To bring relief from the pain of envy, you need to accept it, not resist or suppress it. It may feel scary to embrace this feeling, but it can help tremendously to acknowledge it and tell yourself, “I’m feeling envious at the moment, and that’s okay.”
You can then use your envy as a driving force toward achieving your goals or passions in life, but make sure they are your goals.
Sometimes in the heat of envy we can get lost in the achievements and outer reality of others and believe that we need to be like them to be popular, confident, likeable, and so much more.
Make sure you do a check-in with your own values. Are your goals based on your true inner passions, wants, and needs? Or are you pursuing something because you have compared your life with another’s and are feeling inferior?
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How to Overcome Envy So It Doesn’t Poison Your Relationships
“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.” ~Marquis de Condorc
I struggled to offer a tight smile to a friend who had achieved a life-changing career break.
Although I was thrilled and excited for my friend, I was sad and disappointed in myself. I, too, had worked hard and waited patiently, but unlike my friend, my work and my wait continued, unacknowledged and unrewarded.
At first I didn’t notice I had been bitten by envy. But its invisible poison infected my bloodstream, polluting my future interactions with my friend. I was guarded, afraid of being hurt yet again by yet another one of my friend’s successes.
Each conversation rubbed between us, creating a visible strain in our relationship. Over time, I started to avoid her. She couldn’t understand why I was pulling away. Envy was killing our friendship.
For years, I sat on the other side of envy. I was the one who friends showered with praise while hiding the sorrow in their hearts.
One particular girlfriend who was equally talented and creative felt stuck in a dead-end teaching career that seemed to restart each two years at a different school, preventing her from the security of tenure. She devoted all her free time to her students, sacrificing her dreams of writing and art. Finally, after yet another lay off, she crumbled into depression.
She glanced over at me and felt the sting of envy. Here I was, married with children, both with publication credits and art exhibits, and a teaching gig to boot. Why couldn’t she have a little bit of what I had?
At the time, I didn’t know how to comfort or encourage her. Envy festered until it overpowered the love we once shared. The friendship dissolved in bitterness and misunderstanding.
Now, years later, as more and more of my friends enjoy greater and greater success, I understand what my estranged friend must have endured all those years. If I didn’t do something, envy would kill off my friendships just like it had done years ago.
But how do you treat poison envy?
It’s taken a lot longer to learn how to turn away from envy, but here are the steps I used to free myself from its bondage and transform my life.
1. Stop comparing yourself to others.
The first step to overcoming envy is to stop focusing on what others have and face the truth about yourself.
As long as I was staring at my friends’ successes, I could not see that the dissatisfaction I felt had nothing to do with their victories and everything to do with my own perceived losses.
Once I turned the mirror away from others, I discovered I was not where I wanted to be in life. The envy I felt toward the success of others only masked the disappointment I felt in myself.
2. Stop judging.
Judgment, even self-imposed judgment, divides and conquers the soul into tiny squares designed to punish. I was stuck, unable to leapfrog to the next level of success, which was bad. My friends, on the other hand, were standing at the top of the mountain, which was good.
I didn’t understand that good and bad are relative terms. Without them, things just are.
Once I stopped judging myself, I was able to accept where I was. It may not have been where I wanted to be, but I was no longer angry about it.
3. Start seeing things clearly.
With no one to blame, I was forced to accept responsibility for where I was and how I got there.
Without the veil of envy, without the mirrors of comparison, without the torture of judgment, I saw the truth clearly: I was not where I wanted to be because I was not who I needed to become.
I had the education, the work experience, and the job skills needed to get promoted, but my attitude of entitlement kept me sidelined. It was only in realizing I was no one special that my humility allowed for my true light to shine. Others took notice of the internal change, and I was promptly promoted to the job I had been craving.
Once I stopped comparing myself to others and acknowledged the truth about myself, the damaging effects of envy melted away. I was no longer pitted against my friends.
Now I enjoy the blessings others have been given without the shadow of self-pity. And I am able to champion their success even if our blessings our different.
I start each day anew, focused on my journey, no longer derailed by the journeys of others. I keep my friendships intact, even flourishing, without the bitterness of jealousy or the darkness of sorrow or the strangling voice of defeat.
You, too, can treat the poison envy in your life. Start by turning the mirror away from others and toward yourself. Stop judging your life by impossible standards. See yourself clearly for the first time: a wonderfully flawed human being with passionate goals.
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When Your Friend’s Happy News Fills You with Envy Instead of Joy
“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” ~Aeschylus
It’s crazy, isn’t it?
Your best friend enthusiastically shares some big news. You say all the right things and display the right emotions. But inside you’re burning up. Instead for feeling truly happy, you’re filled with uncontrollable envy.
It’s not that you’re a bad person. You really want to feel happy for your friend. You really want to get rid of these feeling of envy. But in the moment, you just can’t.
When the Green-Eyed Monster Took Me Over
A few years back my closest friend told me she was pregnant. I responded with appropriate excitement, said the right words, and showed the right emotions. But with each smile, word, and act of joy, I died a little bit inside.
The first chance I got to be alone, I wept bitterly. It seemed so unfair that while I’d been trying unsuccessfully for over four years, she got pregnant within a month of getting off the pill. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted a baby yet!
Bad as all this misery was, I felt worse that I had these feelings in the first place. She’s always been a good friend to me, and here I was, seemingly incapable of being happy for her.
I tried applying conventional wisdom—replace my envy with gratitude, look at all the good things I had, and stop worrying about what I didn’t. But I found out the hard way that’s not how it works in real life.
I was worried. I feared that if I didn’t get over this feeling I might lose a very good friend. Worse, I might lose myself and become a bitter, resentful person.
It took quite some effort to finally come of the situation without ruining my friendship or letting it poison my soul. Here are some of the lessons I learned along the way:
1. Envy is a strong involuntary feeling that you cannot get rid of by just wishing or willing it away.
Nobody gets up in the morning thinking, “Today I’m going to feel unhappy for my friend’s happiness.” (At least, I hope not!) And yet, sometimes when we want something bad and find that our friend got it instead, it fills us up with envy. It’s not pleasant. It’s not welcome. But it’s there.
Just because you don’t like it, you can’t wish or will it away.
Research has found that thought suppression is often ineffective, and can actually increase the frequency of the thought being suppressed.
In an experiment, researchers found that subjects asked not to think about a white bear paradoxically couldn’t stop thinking about it. Other studies explored this paradox further, and support the finding that trying to suppress a thought only makes it more ingrained.
So first thing, stop trying to get rid of these thoughts. Accept them for what they are—normal feelings that arise in a normal human being.
2. Nail down the source of your envy to let the person who made you envious off the hook.
At first glance it may seem like the person who made you envious is the source of your envy. However, if you dig a little deeper, you may realize that the reason you feel envious has little to do with the person who brought out the feelings.
In my case, the real source of my feelings was that I desperately wanted a baby. Sure, the fact that my friend got what I didn’t triggered the feeling of envy, but the source was my want and my fear that my want won’t be met.
3. Let this knowledge lead you toward personal growth instead of resentment and bitterness.
At this point you have a choice. You know that there is something you want but can’t have. Will you become resentful of those who can, or will you make peace with the way things are?
I knew there was nothing that my friend could do about my inability to get pregnant. I also realized how illogical it was to expect that nobody in this world have a baby just because I couldn’t.
It didn’t mean that I stopped feeling envious instantly; I still desperately wanted to have what my friend had. But separating the source of my feeling from the person made it possible to feel happy for her, in spite of my continued feelings of envy.
Ever so slowly, I started to feel excited about her pregnancy and the opportunity to experience the miracle of a baby through her.
4. Focus your attention on addressing the source of your envy, instead of trying to eliminate the feeling.
Your envy is probably here to stay—for a while anyway. Instead of fighting it, address the source of it.
I knew deep down that four years was a long time to wait to have a baby. But I hated to face it head on. When I realized how easily I fell prey to the green-eyed monster, I knew it was time to take my head out of the sand and deal with the issue.
I started infertility treatment. My friend was right there by my side as my biggest source of support through this emotionally exhausting roller coaster. In turn, I was able to share with her the excitement of her pregnancy. In fact, it was a huge motivation to keep going on rough days when all I wanted to do was give up and curl into a ball.
I finally got lucky. Five months after she delivered her son, my daughter was born. Our friendship had survived the difficult test.
The Green-Eyed Monster Is Never Too Far Away
I could probably stop right there, and that would be a fine place to wind this story up. But I promised to keep this real, so here’s the rest of it.
The year that I had my daughter, three of my other close friends had their first kids too, in addition to this one. It was as if the stork had declared a “friends and family” promotional event.
In the subsequent years, however, it was clear that my little tryst with the stork was over. All my friends had their second kids, but my attempts at growing the family further just did not pan out.
As my friends got pregnant one after the other and had babies, I looked at their growing bellies and subsequently, their tiny little bundles of joy with longing.
Even though it’s been years since we’ve decided to move on, I still wish at times that my daughter had a sibling to share her life with. And at odd times, I still feel pangs of envy about my friends’ perfect families.
Then I remind myself: while you really can’t stop feeling a sense of envy every now and then, you can choose how you deal with it.
What’s your choice?