Today I want to talk about How to Stop Comparing.

I thought about this topic because I saw a quote from Teddy Roosevelt this week that said, “comparison is the thief of joy.”

And that made me want to talk about it in this episode because our careers (and our lives for that matter) are full of opportunities to compare ourselves with others.

So, let’s look at where this need to compare comes from. According to psychologists, it gets programmed into us from a very young age. 

It might start when we’re young with a parent saying something like, “why can’t you be more like your sister.” 

It continues through our school years, with teachers comparing student performance or behavior, like keeping a chart with names and gold stars. Or my personal favorite…my algebra teacher in freshman year who seated us according to how we did on the last test. Low scores in front and high performers in the back row. Math was never my thing so needless to say; I wasn’t sitting in the back row.

It continues throughout our school years as we look to others as a way to measure how WE’RE doing.

And of course, it continues throughout our lives. Relationships. Families. Possessions.

Our careers are also a place where we look to others to measure how WE’RE doing.  

Basically, we’ve learned to measure our own performance or value by comparing ourselves to those around us. While some of us rely on comparison more than others, it’s something we all do on occasion.

In psychology, it’s called “social comparison theory.” The theory says that as humans, we’re driven to define ourselves and our value. And one of the ways we do this is by comparing our abilities and achievements to those of other people.

The theory goes on to say that we’re prone to “upward social comparison” when it comes to looking at our own abilities. Which basically means that we compare ourselves to others who are ahead of us, and we use that as a way to measure how we stack up to them.

There’s also something called “downward social comparison” which is when we look to others who are behind us or perhaps in more challenging circumstances. In this case, we look to them because it helps us feel better about ourselves because we think “well, at least I’m better off than that person.”

So, is the habit of comparing ourselves to others a good thing or a bad thing?

Well…the answer is, it depends on our motives for the comparison. And of course, like everything else we talk about on this podcast, I believe the answer is that it can be a VERY good and helpful thing if we use it with purpose and good intention. But it can also be a tool we use to make ourselves wrong or bad or not good enough.

For more, give the episode a listen.

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