#34: Why You Compare (and 6 Ways to Use It to Your Advantage)

Have you ever felt that quiet ache of not measuring up—like you’re always behind, no matter how hard you try? You know those moments where it feels like everyone else is ahead—more successful, more creative, more together?

I used to believe that if I just learned more, worked harder, or polished everything to perfection, I’d finally catch up to…well, everyone else. 

But here’s what I know now: comparison was keeping me stuck. It was robbing me of my voice, my creativity, and my joy. 

In this episode, I’m opening up about the subtle, sneaky ways comparison has shaped my journey and how I’ve learned to shift it. Because the truth is, comparison keeps us small. The great news is that we can learn how to use comparison to our advantage. 

HERE ARE 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE

1️⃣  You are hard-wired to compare yourself to others and it happens in a split-second (and it’s not your fault)

2️⃣ Your early childhood experiences have a significant impact on how you measure yourself today.

3️⃣ Your growth is measured by how far you’ve come. Not how close you are to reaching someone else's finish line.

Hit play if you're ready to stop playing small and start building a life that feels like yours.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:22

Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm your friend and host Carlene, and I am thrilled that you've decided to join this conversation today. If you're listening to this right now. And if you're interested in exploring and taking action on your dreams, I'm going to ask you to please click subscribe or follow or like, or leave a comment. And why is that? Well, because it tells whatever you're listening to, like whatever platform that you're on, like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, that this is good stuff. And if you like learning good stuff, if you are interested in living a life that lights you up. Listening to this podcast, I promise you, will make you see that you deserve to dream and you deserve to go after them. And that's my promise to you. Now today we are talking about one of the most common ways we all overthink. I. We overthink when we compare ourselves to other people. It, it's like it creates this spiral of thoughts like, ah, I'm not enough. I could never, or they're so lucky. Does that sound familiar? Or do you ever just find yourself comparing yourself to others? Like what they're doing, where they're going, what they're buying, how much money they're making, or even how they look. It's like a constant scan of the world, like you're zeroing in on that gap between us and them. And isn't it funny how we never come out on top in those comparisons? We never think, wow, I'm doing pretty great. No, we go straight to, we're lacking. And it's no wonder we do this. Think about it. Now, the reason that I'm thinking of this is because my first grand baby was born very recently, and she is the most beautiful baby girl I have ever seen. And I was thinking as I was preparing for this episode, how they do those tests when you're pregnant to see how big your baby is, and then they rank them in a percentile against other babies. Oh, your baby is in the 16th percentile or the 50th percentile. We aren't even born yet, and the comparisons have started. Now, of course, this is used for good reason. It's a marker to see if there may be a problem developmentally. And this comparison though, it continues after your baby is born, right? So they go to school and now your child's intelligence is ranked in percentile against their peers. Those standardized tests. Yep. You're ranked. The only thing I know is that whenever I saw these academic rankings, it didn't matter where I fell. It never made me feel good, and it also didn't motivate me to work harder or do better. Don't you think a better comparison would be what was my performance last quarter or last semester, and where am I today? Have I improved? Oh, I have. That's great news. And oh, how like I'm better at math than I was. See, do you see the difference when we compare ourselves to others, there is always a gap. And when we compare our today self to our past self, we can see growth. Or if there isn't growth, it's helpful information. So we can course correct, but no. To this day, students are ranked and forced to compare themselves against their peers, and this is the problem. Okay, here's another weird comparison exercise that I grew up with. Now, I was thinking about my days in the Catholic elementary school that I went to through eighth grade. First, let me tell you that I loved going to a Catholic school, but there were some odd things that happened when I look back on it. Let me set the scene for you. Our classrooms were set up in neat tidy rows. Often we were seated alphabetically. It was a Catholic school, so we wore uniforms. All the girls looked the same, all the boys looked the same girls wore those very attractive plaid jumpers or skirts with white button-down blouses, knee socks, and a button-down sweater. The boys uniforms. They were brown pants I think, and gold polo shirts. And it didn't really feel like individuality was valued. Like you had to just look like everybody else. That's the definition of a uniform. Right. Okay. And this is interesting when I tell you this strange thing that teachers had us do, so whether it was. Our first communion celebration in the church or our eighth grade graduation that was also in the church, or simply moving from one classroom to another. Throughout our days. We had to line up, but we couldn't just line up. Nope. We had to form two lines, one for the boys and one for the girls, and then they would tell us to line up by height within those two lines. I know this sounds crazy, right? So every time we did this, it was organized chaos, right? So before you know it, like the standing back to back with each other and measuring if someone had a growth spurt and then reorganizing ourselves from the prior day. That wasn't exercise in constant comparison to our classmates. And this is what we were taught to measure, to compare to others. Now. I was the shortest girl in class and I had a lot of pride about that. I was always first, and then I grew an inch, and I lost that coveted spot. I was now number two, and you wanna know something. If I couldn't be number one, then all I wanted was to grow enough to be moved to the back of the line. Where my taller friends were and I started feeling really insecure about being short. I felt like I was missing out because you know, there was a lot of passing notes and chatting in those lines. So I missed out on all of that. And I still don't understand separating boys from girls or the shortest to tallest thing. It's very weird now that I think about it as an adult. Like it's all very odd, don't you think? And I really hope that they don't do that anymore. I have a point, and my point is that comparing ourselves to others, it's ingrained in our society and how society measures our worth. So it's no wonder that we do this to ourselves as adults. I. Okay, so yeah, let's talk about how I carried all this comparison stuff into my adult life. Over a decade ago, I was deep in the comparison spiral. I was building my coaching practice and I was building something that I loved, but I just couldn't stop measuring it against people that I saw online. People who had bigger audiences, flashier websites, just more polished offers. I found myself second guessing everything, and I spent way too much money on courses that I didn't really need and way too much time tweaking things that really didn't matter. Is any of this sounding familiar to you and all of this just to feel like I was catching up? None of it, it didn't help me grow. It kept me stuck, and worst of all, it really kind of drained the joy out of what I loved doing. And if I just would've trusted myself, my, my words, my creativity, my decisions, and got out of that learning loop because, let's be honest, sometimes learning more is just a sneaky form of procrastination. And I know I would've made meaningful progress so much sooner. I was chasing perfection, which I had defined as exactly what everyone else was doing. And that perfectionism, it kept me from showing up fully. But you know what? Dreams, they don't want copycats. They want the real you. So showing up as yourself is hard and it's vulnerable. And that's what our dreams demand of us, because they're your dreams. They're not polished imitations of someone else's. So just take a minute right now to think about how has comparing yourself to others been working for you? Are you making better decisions? Do you feel better about yourself when you compare yourself to others? Have you kept moving forward on your dreams? Well, whatever your answers are to those questions today we are going to dive into why it's so hard to get out of comparison, why we do it. How it's holding us back. And yes, this part is key. How we can actually use it to push us forward instead of keeping us stuck and keeping us playing small. So let's get into it. Let's start with the brain science. You know how much I love the science behind these things, because this isn't just about mindset, it's about the neuroscience, the neurobiology. So social psychologist, Leon Festinger first coined the social comparison theory back in 1954, and his theory was humans have an innate drive to evaluate themselves. And we often do that by comparing ourselves to others. Neuroscience backs us up, studies from Harvard University, they show that social comparison is spontaneous and automatic. Especially in social context. In other words, your brain is wired to compare before you've even had a chance to stop it. It's how we develop our sense of self, what we're good at, what we're not so great at, and how we fit into the social world. So Thomas Mus Weiler, he's a professor of organizational behavior. He says, and this is his quote, it's one of the most basic ways we develop an understanding of who we are and what we're good at and what we're not so good at. Most of the time, this comparison, it happens like in a split second so fast that we don't even notice it. But when we dwell on the highlights of other people's lives, hello, social media, it can turn toxic really fast. What we wanna look at now is what's it costing us to do this? Because comparison does cost us dearly. It's easy to feel like we can never break the comparison cycle. Because it's just how we're wired, right? It's a game we will never win comparison. It steals our joy, our paychecks, our mental energy, our confidence and our self-acceptance and trying to keep up with everyone else. I mean, come on now. It's just exhausting. We lose focus and we take our eyes off our goals. When we're thinking about everybody else comparison, it makes us feel bad about how we're doing. And because we're focused on what everybody else is accomplishing, it diminishes our own accomplishments. Another thing that it does is it fuels these emotions of depression and anxiety are, are you feeling sad? Are you feeling anxious? Hmm, you might be comparing yourself to people. That drains us of all our mental strength to actually do our best in comparison. It also stops us from taking action. We just wanna hide, we wanna avoid, because we'll never measure up. I don't know what goes on in your head, but alls I know is when, uh, I'm comparing myself to other people, I have a lot of negative and anxious thoughts that are really hard to come out of. It's called, uh, rumination. Yeah. And comparison. It can cause us to overspend in an effort to, you know, keep up with the Joneses. When we compare ourselves to others, we make bad decisions or decisions that don't necessarily serve us. We will never be able to stop comparing ourselves to other people, but we can decide if we want to use these comparisons to better ourselves and move forward. Or if we wanna keep bashing ourselves and stay stuck. It's a choice. I bet you didn't know that there is a choice when it comes to what you're doing with the information when you're comparing yourself. I am going to give you, some tools to use here. Okay? So remember, this is not your fault. We can't stop this snap reaction of comparison because it's how we're wired, but we can use it to move forward. The secret, you wanna know the secret? The secret is we need to hack how we're using the information we're getting when we compare ourselves to others and use it in smart ways. I'm gonna give you six practical ways to get out of. Using this information in a negative way and start using it to help you move forward. The first one is, what's the first, uh, thing that you feel when you compare yourself to somebody? Usually it's jealousy or envy, right? And so instead of letting that keep you stuck, let jealousy and envy guide you. Don't shrink. It actually rise, jealousy can actually be your soul whispering, Hey, this is what you want too. It's not a sign of weakness. It's kinda like a signpost pointing you towards your own dream. here's an example. I remember, oh my gosh. Oh, this was years ago. Uh, I wasn't working. My husband was the main breadwinner and things were just tight. And we took very simple vacations if we could drive somewhere that that's what we did. But we didn't do fancy vacations. And I remember all my friends. Started traveling and they were posting photos of all their travels on social media and stuff. They were going to France and Italy and Iceland, and I felt that pang of like envy, like big time. But instead of staying stuck in that feeling, I asked myself, what if this jealousy is just my inner self pointing to something that I really want? I did wanna go places. So I sat down and I made a list of places that I dream of visiting, and I researched cost, and then I picked one destination and we set a travel savings goal. And bit by bit we made it happen. Jealousy actually became my push to start taking action on my travel dreams. Okay? That's number one. Let jealousy and envy guide you. The second thing that you can do is ask yourself what you can learn. Here's what I mean. You wanna reframe the narrative. You wanna ask if you're comparing yourself to somebody, you wanna ask, what do I admire about this person? What could I learn from them? What would I ask them if I had the chance? And maybe you do ask them,'cause you might know this person, or you might be able to reach them online somehow. Ask them. Here's, here's an example. When I first started offering coaching and services and stuff, I found myself constantly comparing what I was building to people who had been in the game for years, I was new and I was comparing myself to people who had been doing this like. For, for decades. And they had full client loads, they had teams, they had polished branding, they had huge email lists. And I was over here solo being scrappy and just trying to get traction. And I realized I was comparing my beginning to somebody else's middle or even 10th year. And that's not a fair comparison, right? That shift in perspective, that was everything. Instead of feeling like I was behind, I started asking what did their early days look like? What systems or habits helped them grow? What could I learn from their journey to apply to my own? And maybe their first product flopped. Maybe they started with no audience. So what tools or practices can you learn? From their evolution, from their growth. Alright, we're moving on to number three, which is to embrace an infinite mindset. I know. What the heck does that mean? What I mean is a lot of times when we're dreaming, we feel like somebody's already done that there's not enough room for me out there, and I am here to tell you. That's kind of a bunch of BS because there's enough for all of us, the success of others. It doesn't take away from your potential. You always have to think abundance. There's enough out there over scarcity. Abundance, over scarcity, always. So here's an example. Let's say you have an idea for a wellness app, but somebody already launched something similar. Well, that's great. That means there's a market for it. So you know what you have to do. You have to massage that idea into your own tone, your own personality, your own audience, because your version will have your story, your energy, and no one else can replicate that. So you wanna know what makes it yours is you. Nobody else can create something that you want to create. Alright, number four is, I know, and this is gonna sound counterintuitive. But you need to cheer for other people. Yeah, we need to cheer for other people. It's really, really important. So you wanna shift from that competition mindset to celebrating. You wanna be the person who genuinely don't fake it. You have to be genuine. Be the person who genuinely claps when others are winning. And it doesn't just change how you see them, it changes how you see yourself. And Uhhuh, I have research behind this, so psychologist Shelly Gable's, studies show that actively celebrating others wins. First of all, it deepens relationships and it increases your own happiness. When we respond with enthusiasm to others, good news, our brains release oxytocin and dopamine. Those are, those feel good chemicals and they help us feel more connected, trusting, and joyful. Cheer for other people start cheering in a very genuine way. Number five is something that I referred to in one of the opening examples is to compete with yourself. Your only true competition is who you were yesterday. We're talking progress over perfection. We're talking growth over keeping up. So let's say like a year ago, you couldn't run a mile without stopping. And now you're training for a 5K. That's your competition, your own milestones. So whether it's running or painting, or playing the guitar or launching your first offer, track your own progress, not someone else's. You are your own measuring stick. Compete with yourself. The goal is growth. Okay, number six is to unlock the power of contentment. What the heck does that mean? Right? Well, contentment doesn't mean stagnation. It means being at peace with where you are while you're working for where you want to go. And gratitude is the gateway to that. And here's what I mean by that. Let's say that maybe you're still working a day job while you build your dream business instead of seeing it as a failure, practice gratitude for the stability that allows you to experi. Experiment with your creativity on the side. Celebrate the calm of your current life while building what's next? Okay, I have a bonus story here. I just have to share this'cause it came to mind, um, when I was thinking about this at 3:00 AM and this one is about motherhood. When my girls were little, I found myself falling into a totally different kind of comparison trap. The mom hustle, you know, the one, it's where being constantly busy, juggling a million activities, running yourself into the ground becomes like this badge of honor that you wear. Oh my gosh. I kept hearing mom say, I've been running all day, or I'm so busy. And I started thinking maybe that's what being a good mom looks like. So I subscribed to the mom hustle and I enrolled my daughters in the toddler gym classes, the music classes, all the things. I kept the house running, handle the shopping, the cooking, paying the bills, all the doctor's appointments, everything. But I remember sitting in a music class where we just sat in a circle for an hour. And my girls could have cared less, like they didn't wanna be there. And that's when I asked myself, why the heck am I doing this? Like this comparison to other moms was not serving me. And I realized that I was trying to keep up with a version of motherhood that didn't even align with my values. I am not a hustle person, so I made a decision. I wasn't going to over schedule my kids just to feel like I was measuring up as a mom. Instead. I decided it was time to set a different rhythm for our family. So aside from school, the girls did girl scouts and one sport or activity at a time. One of my girls did travel soccer. Another one of them did competitive cheer. Another one loved art classes. They all learned piano and they swam in the summer, but it was over the course of like all their years growing up, not all at once. And you know what? It was enough. They were fulfilled and they weren't burnt out. And so was I Creating that white space for my family was critical. I think it was critical to our mental health, um, to the level of stress in the household to them not being so pulled both academically and just being busy, going from one activity to another. Our kids need white space. They need time to be bored. They need time to just be, and you know, one else to dream, to daydream. That's where it happens in the white space. Our kids aren't gonna learn how to dream if they're chasing all over the place before and after school doing activities. And so that was the choice that I made. As a mom, right, and comparison, it showed me what I didn't want. It clarified what kind of mom that I wanted to be and what I wanted for my girls. A childhood with space to breathe. First. Thank you for letting me share that story. I didn't ever know it was really a story until I started thinking about the comparison trap for this episode. So what I want you to know is that you are not behind. Like it's so easy to look around and think, oh, I should be further along. But here's the truth, there's no universal race. There's no finish line that we're all trying to cross at the same time. There just isn't. Decide that today is the day that you start to put in the work to show up as yourself, to have the courage to pursue the things that scare the crap out of you, and stop worrying about what others are doing. Here's your gentle nudge and a few action steps to take this episode beyond your earbuds right now. The first thing you can do is you can ask yourself honestly, how is comparison impacting the choices that you're making in your life? Are you choosing your path based on your values or someone else's highlight reels? Another thing that you can do is get curious. Yes, it's a good thing to be curious when you find yourself wanting what someone else has. Pause and ask yourself, why do I want that? Is it aligned with what really matters to you, or is it just what you think you should want? And speaking of shoulds, let's audit your shoulds. Are you doing things just to keep up? What would it look like to unsubscribe from the hustle or whatever it is, and choose rest, intention, enjoy instead of it. Another thing that you, you could do is you could start, uh, a comparison journal so you can track the moments of comparison and ask what they're revealing about your desires and what you want, and what next small step you can take toward your own dreams. Remember one thing, let comparison point you to possibility, but don't let it trap you in someone else's dream. It really boils down to this. You have two choices. Watch other people live the life that you want and resent them for it. Or take responsibility and go get it for yourself. And I'm pretty sure that if you've listened this far, what your choice will be. Chase your dreams, my friend. And until next time, remember, dreaming isn't foolish. It's sacred, and you, my friend, are worthy of joy, creativity, and a life that feels like your own. Thank you so much for listening, and I will be back next week to welcome you to our next conversation.

Carlene 26:12

Oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.