How do you balance between comparing your self to others in a healthy vs and unhealthy way?
There is a theory that you have to learn to fail in order to be able to cope with the inevitable failures you will experience. Yet so many children will only participate in activities where they know they can be best. They stop doing things where they do not excel, compared to others.
My son prefers individual sports, like bike riding, or gymnastics or Aikido. But he refuses to compete. I don’t think he is into team sports at all. Maybe he’s afraid he’s not good enough to compare to others on his team, or that he will let his team down.
When I was a child, I often compared myself to others, and when I thought that others would be too critical of me, or worse, be offended by me if I did something, I didn’t do it. I’m thinking of a time when I had the opportunity to join a jazz band being lead by Archie Shepp.
We all compare ourselves to others, I believe. Yet some comparisons aren’t healthy for us. They stop us from doing things we might enjoy. Teachers of some kinds of activities, like yoga, make efforts to discourage people from comparing themselves to others. They urge people to compare themselves to themselves if they have to compare at all.
Other people enjoy competing against others. The competition motivates them to get better. Comparisons stimulate them rather than stop them.
To some extent, we have control over how we feel about comparisons. Some of us can ignore those comparisons completely, and enjoy an activity no matter how bad others might think they are (singing, for example). Other people may withdraw from the world as much as possible, and never try much of anything because they believe they aren’t good enough.
How have comparisons affected you in your life? Do you struggle with this issue? Examples? Where do you draw the line between healthy comparing and dysfunctional comparing of yourself to others? How do you wish you behaved with respect to comparisons with others? Are you even aware of how comparisons might affect others?
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6 Answers
Comparing and contrasting with others is part of our social nature. I think we run into complications when we start making judgements based on our observations.
I don’t have a ton of time to elaborate, but in working on improving my self-esteem, I made greater strides when I stopped being hard on myself for being less than perfect, and instead started trying to incorporate the qualities that I found admirable in others into my own behavior.
Well of course we compare ourselves to others and of course many comparisons aren’t healthy for us – growing up as a woman is evidence enough…but since comparing yourself to others isn’t really avoidable, one must do it quickly and then persuade oneself that comparisons are pointless because you don’t know ALL abou the person, you don’t know their destiny, you don’t know what they’ve dealt with…all you know is what you’ve dealt with and what you should compare yourself to is your previous self or your future self and see where you stand in terms of those continiums
I think the focus needs to be on the self. Comparing myself to someone who is clearly more athletic or smarter than me is useless if I am going to take that as a negative.
Instead the thought process should be about how you are living up to your own capacity. This is definitely difficult in team sports and our ego driven culture, but the healthiest outlook for me is one where I don’t think about the times I am better or worse than another, as long as I am honestly striving to perform to my best ability.
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“Life is a constant struggle, not only against forces around us, but above all against our own ‘ego’. We can never afford to rest on our oars, for if we do, we soon see ourselves carried down stream again.”
(Compilations, Lights of Guidance, p. 113)
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”...learning not to concern oneself with the faults of others seems to be one of the most difficult lessons for people to master, and that failing in this is a fertile cause of disputes…there is a record of a reply given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in a private interview in Paris in 1913. He was asked ‘How shall I overcome seeing the faults of others—recognizing the wrong in others?’, and He replied: ‘I will tell you. Whenever you recognize the fault of another, think of yourself! What are my imperfections?—and try to remove them. Do this whenever you are tried through the words or deeds of others. Thus you will grow, become more perfect. You will overcome self, you will not even have time to think of the faults of others… ’
”...In a letter written to an individual believer on behalf of the Guardian it is stated: ‘If we are better, if we show love, patience, and understanding of the weakness of others, if we seek to never criticize but rather encourage, others will do likewise…’”
(From a letter written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice, August 13, 1980)
(Compilations, Lights of Guidance, p. 89)
I’ve never been one to compare myself to others, and as such I have very little interest in competition. I have always been the kind of person that competes against the ideas I have of myself. I am harder on myself than anyone, so comparing myself to others in pointless.
I 100% agree that you have to fail to learn and not be afraid of it. I’ve been really good about containing my self consious mind when it trys to tell me someone else is better than me in a certain way. I actually now know that some people are better at certain things than I am but that doesnt mean I can’t learn them. Once I realized that all I have to do is comit myself to learning what qualities I want from people I’m the coolest person I know.
I see what I like in other people and, if it’s attainable, I try to incorporate it into my own life. It’s usually something that people can see on the outside, such as fabulous makeup or a great figure. I work on my personality as well, but I do think it’s important to be as physically beautiful as you can be, since this can make the difference between being hired for a job and being rejected for one. What irks me is being compared negatively to women who are taller than I am, or to women who are beautiful because they’re a difference race, since I can’t change my height OR my race. When making comparisons between me and other women, I tend to focus on things that I have CONTROL over.
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