Comparison is the thief of joy
Given the prevalence of the fake it ’til you make it methodology, you would think that comparing your way to yay with someone else’s progress wouldn’t even cross your mind because you know it might not be real anyway. Often, the journey we perceive someone to be on is not necessarily the one they are on at all. So given that what we see of others on the surface is often their projected or feigned confidence, comparison with them is illogical and futile. Not only are no two of us the same, but no two of us are on the same journey. And yet, one of the most common grievances I hear from people, particularly women (and especially young women), relates to how their face/body/ career/partner/freckle distribution compares to others.
Comparison is the thief of so much joy (or the thief of yay, in your brand-new vernacular), but even so, I suspect many of you still find yourself wrapped up in its web from time to time – I know I do. I will openly admit, again, that even after growing both of our matcha businesses and the Seize the Yay podcast beyond my wildest dreams, I still spiral into worry sometimes about how our success and trajectory match up to others, and even how I personally match up to people around me. This is particularly the case during speaking opportunities or on other occasions where I’m asked to share our journey. I’ll often find myself getting bogged down in a rather destructive inner dialogue: Is my story interesting enough? Aren’t there better speakers with more interesting insights who could be doing this instead of me? But then, eventually, the realisation comes that I wouldn’t be there at all if somebody out there didn’t find our story interesting – our story is the one I’ve been asked to tell.
Almost every person I’ve interviewed for my podcast – from incredibly successful and/or famous people to quiet achievers – has surprised me by admitting that they still fall into the comparison trap and allow those thoughts to detract from their own very real and admirable achievements. If you’ve listened to my podcast, you’ll know that after the segment where we discuss my guest’s ‘way to yay’ comes a segment called ‘nay to yay’, in which they detail the major barriers they’ve encountered on their way to finding joy. In more cases than I ever anticipated, self-doubt has emerged as the most pervasive theme, followed closely by social comparison. The old adage, ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’ reminds us that things always look better from afar, but I’m not sure it entirely equips us for the constant barrage of perfectly manicured bright green lawns (both literally and figuratively) that roll onto our screens in this modern digital age.
I am a great lover of social media and the platform it provides for community building and connection through ideas. It has democratised influence in a big way and made it possible for people like me to engineer massive life changes off the back of a single good idea. Advancements in the digital world have also made it possible for me to leave an office job behind and work from wherever seems appropriate at the time. I’ll continue to blow social media’s horn for this reason: it has contributed to me seizing my yay and building a yay-bourhood.
This world of connectivity does, however, have many downsides; one of which is the visibility of everyone else’s lives. Never before has our culture encouraged the splashing around of every detail of our daily lives with complete strangers as strongly as it does today. We humans (understandably) like to put our best foot forward in any public interactions, but those interactions have suddenly become a 24/7 rolling live feed of highlights. Even if you live a relatively analogue life (although even my mum has discovered the joys of a good old Facebook tangent), it is our natural inclination to look at the lives of others as a sort of benchmark for our own. And if social media is, in fact, simply being used as a benchmark for inspiration, then comparison can absolutely be a healthy motivator or instigator for change. The problem occurs when we take comparison much further than this, with potentially destructive results.
Seize your pay
Before we go further, I want to emphasise that not all social comparison is negative. It can be used to your advantage in certain situations. I’ve looked to others for positive guidance and inspiration throughout all stages of my journey, both in my legal career and in business. When I worked at the law firm, I was probably even a little under-comparative in some areas, especially when it came to industry wages, and this ended up working against me.
Having come straight from university into a position where having a salary at all felt like riches, I didn’t think to compare my pay packet with anyone else’s. I was grateful to have landed the job that I did at a time when top-tier positions were increasingly scarce. I was also brought up in a family that believed that money, religion and politics were impolite topics of conversation, so it didn’t occur to me to do any subtle research into what colleagues or friends doing similar work were getting paid. For a few years, this unwillingness to compare actually put me at quite a disadvantage in negotiations and annual reviews because I had no benchmark for what was reasonable for my level of experience.
In many law firms or other corporations, it’s common for graduate-level lawyers to start with uniform pay increases. These only start to vary a few years later when they become experienced enough for their performance to meaningfully differ. A combination of naivety, discomfort with asking what anyone else was getting paid and general difficulty putting a value on myself meant that I didn’t even know when our pay had started to vary. This prevented me from having a chance to negotiate for an increase during my performance reviews. Had I stayed in that career, over time this could have meant years of lagging behind my peers financially. This is a tragically common scenario, particularly among female professionals despite the incredible pool of talent making it into executive roles.
An enhanced sense of gratitude is admirable in many ways, but, as Sheryl Sandberg mentions in Lean In, knowing things could be worse shouldn’t stop us from trying to make them better. Career progression often depends on advocating for yourself, but these are traits that women are discouraged from displaying. So there are definitely some instances where comparison can be a useful and reasonable tool that absolutely should be drawn on in order to make sure you are truly asking for what you are worth. The difficulty is learning to navigate that delicate balance between dialogue you can use to your advantage and dialogue that tips you into a negative comparison spiral.
Stopping the spiral
Even though comparison has its uses in some situations, as we’ve just explored, too many of us take it much further than is reasonable. We benchmark too often and are left feeling worthless, defeated or insignificant after a mindless social media scrolling session. It’s a little bit like that incredibly hot but emotionally toxic person we’ve all gone after in our time: even though you’re fully aware of the likely disastrous outcome, you’re recklessly determined to pursue them anyway. Even though I know all this, I still often catch myself on a comparison binge.
In Happy, Healthy, Strong, Rachael Finch talks about how we have been in competition all our lives: sperm fighting to get to the egg, children fighting for top marks at school, and then adults competing to be better, faster, prettier, smarter or richer than others. Relevantly, she reminds us that constantly trying to outdo or outshine others can only lead to disappointment, toxic relationships and jealousy.
I’ve been very conscious of falling victim to this comparison trap, particularly since moving into a career that requires me to spend a lot of time on social media observing what others in the market are doing. Knowing that this new level of visibility could be a challenge to adapt to, I decided to tackle this head on rather than wait for it to subtly eat away at my happiness and confidence.
I realised that excessive social comparison was futile for two very key reasons:
1. You are only seeing what other people choose to let you see.
2. Even if what you see of their life does look great, how will wallowing over their life do anything to improve yours?
I Post-it-noted these two reasons all over my desk and walls to disrupt negative thoughts if I started to get distracted by them. I also wanted to remind myself that comparison is, as Nic loves to say, as useless as tits on a bull. So now, even if I do still catch myself comparing negatively, there’s a built-in circuit breaker. Like I keep saying, it’s all about hacking your own thought processes and redirecting them towards your yay.
Expectation vs. reality
I have been reminded many times about the difference between perception and reality, in both directions. And this reinforces how silly it is to waste my energy or time evaluating other people’s situations, especially if doing that leaves me feeling crappy about myself, my work or my life.
One thing that I always remind myself of when I want to get perspective is a list of competitors in the matcha space that Nic and I compiled when the market started to become crowded. You’ll recall that I started out very much the overthinker and lover of the certainty provided by data. True to that, I used to closely monitor their every move then spend hours updating our comparison spreadsheet, which measured our sizing, pricing, number of products, shipping locations and everything else you can think of against multiple other matcha retailers. Sometimes, we’d even change our minds about a major operational decision based on this comparative exercise and the limited information we had about what others in the market were doing.
Of course, it is important to have some understanding of the landscape you’re working in – this is another example of reasonable benchmarking. But letting the moves of others dictate your otherwise reasonable and well-thought-out decisions is a dangerous path to go down. A competitor that drew a lot of our attention over the space of a few years was one we believed to be a business a similar size to ours, if not bigger, based in England. When we set up warehouses in the United States, we decided not to set up a warehouse in the United Kingdom, fearing that this particular business already had too strong a hold on the market. Years later, the owners wanted to sell their business and they ended up approaching us to buy it. Nic and I were pleasantly surprised to learn that their recent yearly sales were less than ours had been per month, but we were also frustrated by how much we had let their presence in the market affect us.
The flip side of overestimating another business is underestimating how others might see you. A business we have always looked up to is T2, which was acquired by food and FMCG giant Unilever in 2013. In addition to their extensive tea offering, T2 also entered the matcha market around the same time we did. They added several matcha-based products to their broader offering, which was of a size and volume across the country that we felt precluded us from even trying to compete. We started to actively ignore the direction they were taking in matcha, believing that because of our more niche health and wellness angle we were operating in completely different spheres, and that it wouldn’t matter what we did because we were far too small to interact with a business like that in any way.
Thankfully, we didn’t make any negative decisions based on this assumption, because – as we found out later – it was wrong. On two separate occasions, we talked to T2 CEOs (one current, one former), and each told us that Matcha Maiden was well known to the team and definitely on their radar as a market player. There we were, thinking we’d have to introduce our business from scratch and that they would never have heard of us, only to find out these giants considered us as big enough to warrant consideration in executive meetings. I’m sure we’ve been in many other situations that illustrate this same point of flawed comparisons leading to time and energy being misplaced.
In a more personal context, there are countless examples of people who have seemingly ‘perfect’ lives later revealing trauma or other personal challenges that nobody knew anything about. If you ever need proof that money and success aren’t the answers to life, simply look to Hollywood. It may be too soon to say, but at the time of writing this, it seems we are all searching for a little more authenticity and well-roundedness in the content we are consuming, which would be wonderful for the digital landscape. But even if we start moving in that direction, there will always be those in the digital world and the real world who present themselves in a way that omits their flaws, challenges or downsides. This is absolutely a personal choice and may be based on many factors in that person’s life. But it doesn’t do the rest of us any favours in preventing a crisis of worthiness by comparison to their seemingly perfect exterior.
As frustrating as this might be, it is not on us to change other people’s behaviour, but it is on us to work on changing the way we respond to it internally (if we respond to them at all). Your energy and efforts are precious and limited resources; why spend them anywhere but on your own journey? Even if the way someone presents their life isn’t convoluted or calculated, there are always things sitting just below the surface – private battles or struggles we will never know the half of. The most outwardly ‘together’ among us have faced (or are still facing) the most challenging obstacles. My very wise mum always taught me to be kind to everyone, for you never know the struggles they are facing behind closed doors. She also taught me to be careful what you wish for because you never know the totality of what that coming true might involve.
'Your energy and efforts are precious and limited resources; why spend them anywhere but on your own journey?'
Take, for example, one of my dear friends Olivia Molly Rogers, who was literally named one of the most beautiful people in Australia and crowned Miss Universe Australia in 2017. When you add this to her academic qualifications as a speech pathologist and her natural talents as a self-taught artist, her life seems outwardly perfect. Throughout the pageant, Olivia exuded confidence, motivation and drive, and ultimately ended up winning the title. And yet, while recording my first live Seize the Yay show, she generously shared with me that at that time, and during her subsequent rise to fame, she was only just starting to recover from a crippling, long-term eating disorder and the associated diagnoses of anxiety and depression.
Her anxiety and depression still flare up from time to time, but Olivia is now a dedicated advocate and passionate ambassador for mental health and authenticity on social media. She regularly shares these ‘behind the scenes’ insights into her life for the benefit of others, making an invaluable contribution to the social media landscape.
My own way to yay has also been riddled with behind-the-scenes struggles. The periods where my anxiety has been at its worst, for example, are times where I was least likely (or able) to discuss what was going on behind closed doors – even if I was later able to be open about them. At the same time my body crashed with adrenal fatigue under the pressure of the gut parasite I brought home from Africa, I also experienced somewhat of a mental crash, triggering severe anxiety and panic attacks. In part, being so severely underweight led my body into panic mode, but this also came off the back of a prolonged, traumatic family separation, which my body was finally starting to process. I had never experienced proper anxiety before, having always believed people suffering from it should simply ‘chill out’ or get a massage. Looking back, however, I realised I had experienced several panic attacks throughout my life without knowing it, and that this late-onset anxiety was probably here to stay.
Fast-forward to the second half of 2016, by which time I had long-since recovered from the parasite and both of our two businesses were performing wonderfully. I was fully embracing the funtrepreneur life and living the wellness dream. That was, however, until my second major burnout – as I’ve mentioned, I used to be slow on the uptake when it came to my health. This time, I was so in love with our work and getting so carried away with the lack of structure that I forgot to take a break. It was at this point that I realised you can have too much of a good thing. I finally understood that burnout can be triggered not only by physical overstimulation, but also by excess emotional and mental stimulation.
I also learned that even ‘fun’ things are still work: going to events and catching up for work meetings didn’t feel like my legal work used to, but they still required lots of mental effort and energy. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was where the first seeds were sown for the idea of ‘play’ and the importance of emotional rest and not just physical rest.
After almost two years without a day off, I ended up with such severe anxiety that I was bedridden and largely unable to attend events, work effectively or interact with friends and family as my true self. And yet, for those several months of being unwell, my social media accounts were full of smiley throwbacks and filler content (or no content at all).
My posts revealed very little to my followers until much later, when I had recovered enough to discuss my problems openly. Even many of my closest friends and our key staff were unaware that anything was wrong until then. Not because I wanted to hide it – I’m a devoted oversharer in the name of authenticity – but because I simply didn’t have the energy to explain. If you had been comparing yourself to me at that time and basing your ideas about me on how things appeared to be, you would have been comparing against a completely skewed reality and wasting a whole heap of time and energy in the process. The only reality you have a real insight into and have to live out each day is your own. That’s where your focus, love and energy should be channelled.
'The only reality you have a real insight into and have to live out each day is your own. That’s where your focus, love and energy should be channelled.'
The grass is greenest where you water it
The reality is no matter how great your life is, there will always be someone who is richer, more successful, happier or healthier than you (no matter which metric you measure by) because not everything in life is fair and equal. In very few cases will we ever actually be the worldwide ‘best’ at something (if you are, please feel free to skip right on past this section), but the most liberating realisation for me has been that I don’t have to be the ‘best’ to live an entirely fulfilled, meaningful and exciting life.
Since the only person’s life that you live day-to-day is your own, making that the best it can be ought to be your main focus. If you dwell on the macro-level questions about who is doing better or where you are in relation to your peer group, you draw your energy away from the micro-level details that shape the depth and quality of your day-today experience. A quote that I love is one that Steph Claire Smith and Laura Henshaw chose as their favourite on the podcast (the question every episode finishes on): ‘Don’t compare your life to others. There’s no comparison between the sun and the moon, they each shine when it’s their time.’ These two best friends beautifully illustrate how powerful we can be when we focus our attention on celebrating each other instead of comparing ourselves.
Because they’re both young, health-focused, fitness-loving models, Steph and Laura might once have been considered competitors or even rivals, and they could easily have been caught up in comparing themselves to one another. Instead, they joined forces to create Keep It Cleaner, a booming empire that started with an e-book and now includes an app, food range, podcast, book and bustling community. Not only have these two managed to side-step comparison, they’ve taken it one step further and harnessed the power of collaboration while also maintaining their individual identities and projects outside of Keep It Cleaner. Focusing their attention on celebrating each other and their own unique talents, personalities and skill sets rather than measuring them up against each other has borne more fruits than comparison ever would have done.
As anyone who’s ever tried to go to the gym in winter knows, motivation can be a terribly volatile state of mind as it is, so fuelling any negativity with comparison is not only useless but can send you backwards. Our energy is a preciously limited resource that is already spread thin by the pace and density of our lives, so using it up by poring over other people’s lives seems a wasteful thing to do, as that is only going to borrow energy from other things that you care about. That precious time and energy currency should be invested where it will have the most impact in the details of your own life. Whether others are living theirs better, worse or the same as you may be relevant to the extent of providing a benchmark or inspiration for you, but shouldn’t be allowed to creep far enough into your mind that it detracts from the highs, lows and learnings of your own pathyay (or in fact takes the yay out of it altogether).
'That precious time and energy currency should be invested where it will have the most impact in the details of your own life.'
I won’t deny that I still find myself caught up in the uncertainty and feelings of unworthiness that follow any comparison binge from time to time. These binges can completely strip me of motivation, confidence and excitement for the amazing life I get to live for hours or even a whole day. In fact, that’s exactly why I’m at such pains to emphasise how destructive excessive comparison to others can be, wasting precious hours that could have been spent full of action, productivity or joy. I’ve experienced how this energy expenditure ultimately affects nobody else except me, and then takes so much work to pull myself out of. Just like self-doubt, the temptation to compare will probably never leave you completely, so it is crucial to be able to recognise it immediately and develop the tools to shut it down before you spiral out of control and lose sight of the things that do matter. I am realising more and more how strictly we need to exercise our ability to choose where our mind goes in order to end up where we want to be.
Blinker your way to yay
It’s probably never been harder not to compare yourself to others given how much we all share of our goings-on, but I think it is possible to wean ourselves from the addiction of social comparison. I have spent the past few years refining my own practice, particularly as Nic and I have moved further and further into the world of social media.
There is, as with any ‘addiction’, always the possibility of relapsing from time to time into a comparison binge. I wasted half a day this week with my stomach in knots feeling totally inadequate because I indulged in a stalking session in order to compare myself to someone else. It is such a yucky, sinking feeling and it really does unnecessarily take the joy away from your achievements and endeavours. But even if we aren’t completely immune to the comparison trap, we can at least limit its discouraging and destructive impact with the right tools.
I have developed a little tactic I like to call my ‘blinkered approach’ based on the leather blinkers racehorses wear to block out the rest of the field, allowing that horse to focus purely on the finish line. Day to day, this translates to a very heavy curation of the world around me – both in social media and in real life. Just like any other naughty habit or addiction, social comparison is a behaviour that is generally triggered by something. One of the main underlying steps to seizing the yay is understanding that we have far more choice over our circumstances, and that life does not so much happen to us as happen because of the choices we make. If we choose to indulge the triggers in our environment, then we are also choosing to buy into the cycle of comparison, self-doubt and crappyness that can follow. At the same time, that means we can choose to shut out or ‘blinker’ ourselves against the triggers that surround us and thereby limit the impact we allow these behaviours to have on our lives.
Personal blinkers
Blinkering as a strategy sounds simple, and yet it has taken me an alarmingly long time to realise that I can blinker myself by removing negative influences so that they don’t impact me as easily. For me, as I imagine is the case for many of you, social media is the main breeding ground for my comparative tendencies, so that’s the area I have had to curate the most dramatically. Most of us probably follow accounts for people or businesses that evoke a sense of inadequacy or give us a little stab in the stomach, even if we can logically appreciate how silly that is. Since I was a child, I have been relatively good at separating my own worth from that of others, but even still, I could whip you up a pretty quick list of accounts that trigger me into comparing myself in a negative way.
Whether you measure yourself against others in the looks, body, career or relationship department, you can blinker those areas in order to filter out the discouraging effect they have on your confidence and motivation. I know at least among my friends, we tend to be much better at curating our real-life surroundings to limit things that make us feel bad (although not in all cases), but not as good at applying this curating to our digital environment. I have become much stricter over the past few years at unfollowing or simply muting accounts that trigger those questioning feelings in me or distract me from my work, passions and joy. This has involved a bit of juggling between my desire to stay connected and keep up with what people are doing on one hand and needing to protect my self-worth on the other hand, but part of the blinkers approach for me is always choosing self-worth first.
You might not always need these kinds of measures. There might just be certain times in your life where they feel more necessary than others. Our wedding, for example, was a time when I was more sensitive than usual about making the right choices among a literal ocean of options. I was probably more prone to comparing myself physically to other brides. Who doesn’t want to look and feel their best for their big day?
'Part of the blinkers approach for me is always choosing self-worth first.'
Prior to this, there was, of course, a wonderful phase of information gathering. I sought inspiration from other beautiful weddings and went to town on my Pinterest account as I started getting excited about crafting our special day. But once we started to make final decisions and lock things in, it became very hard not to see new ideas pop up and become dissatisfied with what we had chosen. My bridesmaids will have a good giggle remembering how much I absolutely adored the process of creating the incredible custom Pallas Couture gown I was lucky enough to wear on the day, only to have a breakdown in the final week because I’d looked at too many other dresses. Sensibly, they barred me from any social media that week, and by the wedding day, I’d fallen in love with my dress all over again. You need to be happy with what is right for you and remember it’s got nothing to do with anyone else’s choices.
Remember, you don’t need to block things out forever, you only need to identify when they might trigger you unproductively and work out how to arm yourself against that. I find, for example, that when I haven’t had much time for exercise or eating as healthily as I usually like to, I’m likely to get more drawn into other people’s bodies or fitness levels than I usually would. So, I need to be more careful about scrolling mindlessly on social media during these times. When I have been able to maintain a great wellness routine, nothing really bothers me, so those are the times the blinkers can come off and I can stalk away to my heart’s content.
'You don’t need to block things out forever, you only need to identify when they might trigger you unproductively.'
I also found this approach useful during my legal career to filter things out of my working environment that could interrupt my focus or productivity. A beloved topic of gossip in most workplaces is the intricacies of everyone else’s careers and who’s getting promoted, poached or doing anything interesting or out of the ordinary. The best thing you can do to avoid any negative self-talk or fallout from this kind of information is to avoid getting involved in the chat to begin with. In my experience, the gossip corners of the office are well-known to everyone, so you’ll be easily able to identify the spots to avoid if you’re having a less emotionally resilient day or period than usual and don’t want to hear it.
Business blinkers
We’ve also applied this blinkered approach to business over time to help block out things that might trigger unhelpful doubts or worry. From our social media accounts for Matcha Maiden and then Matcha Mylkbar, while we were initially one of the only competitors in the landscape, as new entrants began to pop up, I’d follow every single one and trawl through their content very closely. This very quickly resulted in me losing large chunks of time analysing what they might be doing and trying to deduce from what they were posting what their levels of success might be. Each time we would hit a milestone or achieve something exciting, there would be a measuring up exercise going on in the back of my mind that would adjust my level of joy accordingly rather than celebrating each event for its independent value.
Early on, we appointed wonderful distributors for Matcha Maiden in several states, but had been hoping to strike a deal with one of the biggest, national distributors in Australia. After many months of pitches, sampling and negotiations, we finally got the deal over the line – more than tripling our product distribution. We should have been overjoyed and excited about this huge step forwards, but then we found out that they’d signed a competing matcha supplier on board just months earlier, before they found out about us. Our products were positioned very differently towards different segments of the market, which had, in any case, exploded enough to allow room for both of us, but we allowed our excitement to be completely deflated.
Nowadays, I can see that this was a hugely positive sign for the direction of the matcha market overall, and the arrangements we have with this distributor have proven enormously beneficial for both matcha brands. By getting sidetracked and comparing our product with theirs, Nic and I lost out on a beautiful opportunity for celebration. The blinkered approach to business took me a few years to fully develop as I slowly realised the damaging impact comparison was having on our own experience of business. Ultimately, I ended up unfollowing or muting all the accounts that detracted from the things that were going amazingly in our own world.
Though it makes sense to have some understanding of what your competitors are doing, I had to make a call that it was better to know less and compare less than to know more and drown in a sea of emotion. Blinkering those distractions allowed me to put my head down and focus on the only thing I had control over: the effort Nic and I were putting into our own business and giving it what it needed to continue growing. As years went by and we became more confident in our own achievements, I slowly started to re-introduce a lot of the information I had filtered out, only this time I knew it would not result in a comparative spiral. Just like personal blinkers, you can whip them out when you need them most and retire them once you’re more confident in your ability to resist the comparison trap.
This same heavy curation is available in the real world, too. An environmental example of being overly comparative is writing this book. A (not insignificant) part of me was reluctant to write a book without first reading every other book of a similar genre written on similar topics for ‘reference’ and ‘research’. In other words, I wanted to compare my ideas with other authors and decide whether my ideas were worthy of publication.
Instead, once I knew this book was really going to happen, I ended up reading a grand total of zero related books. Any books I’ve referred to in these pages were read long before I knew I would write my own. By now, I know myself well enough to know how distracted and discouraged I would have felt every time I encountered something I’d either taken an opposite view on, hadn’t included in my book or simply hadn’t written as eloquently. So I simply removed that risk altogether.
Other authors might not take this same approach; they might be very comfortable drawing guidance from the writings of others as they craft their own books. However, I knew very early on that I had to return to my blinkering approach in order to keep focused, motivated and confident enough to press on. It might sound a bit reckless to advise you to simply turn a blind eye to relevant information around you, but I can only speak to what’s been helpful for me. I truly believe that if you know information could be more harmful than helpful, it’s better to block it out altogether – at least until you’re mentally prepared for it.
Similarly, my earlier advice about starting before you’re ready and ripping off the bandaid might also seem a bit irresponsible. But again, I believe that a hasty and even messy start is better than never starting at all. The unruliness of this kind of spontaneous approach is perhaps why it’s so powerful; it allows your mind to shut off obstructive overthinking so you can get on with the important things that will move you forward. Seizing your yay is more about mastering your mind than anything else. For me, compart-mentalising with blinkers is a huge part of the game.
'Seizing your yay is more about mastering your mind than anything else.'
Reframe the comparison
Rather than focusing on what others are doing, something I’ve also found helpful is to swap social comparison for temporal comparison. This is similar to one of the techniques we mentioned when talking about journalling. Instead of comparing myself to anyone else, I simply compare what I’m doing now with what I was doing at an earlier time. After all, comparing yourself with your earlier self is really the only legitimate comparison you can make.
Since entering the podcast world, I could easily have become distracted and disheartened by the technical proficiency, millions of downloads and guest lists of other podcasters. I could have wasted my time lamenting my inability to ever catch up (I’ll openly admit, this has crossed my mind a few times). However, a far more productive comparison is to look back at the total noob I was when I recorded my first episode. Doing this gives me so much progress to celebrate. I have since learned so much about audio production and editing, I’ve welcomed guests I would never have dreamed of interviewing and have now been around for over a year, meaning others are probably now feeling that same ‘I’ll-never-catch-up’ feeling about my podcast. Reframing the comparison this way is so much more joyful and positive.
Defuse the comparison bomb
Another way to reframe comparison, for me, is by doing what feels like the scariest thing in order to defuse the comparison trigger. A great example of this has to do with body image, which is a sore point for many women. Negative body image doesn’t plague or consume me like it does some people, for which I feel very fortunate, but it does still strike me from time to time – I am a woman, after all. With images of perfect bodies constantly at our fingertips, it is so easy for us to beat ourselves up about the way we look.
Newsflash: we are all composed of completely different genetic make-ups, lifestyles and environmental factors, so we are not meant to look the same as each other. With my Asian heritage, my body (which I lovingly refer to as that of a 12-year-old boy) is never going to have voluptuous curves or cleavage, and I’d look ridiculous if it did. But the upside is that I can run without a bra and wear sack dresses. You win some, you lose some.
I have nonetheless caught myself measuring my body against those of stunning, sculpted models whose literal job it is to take care of their physical appearance. They spend all day in pursuit of that end, while I, in contrast, am squeezing fitness in wherever I can between running three businesses and other random work (none of which requires me to look a certain way). I keep bringing myself back to an apples and oranges analogy: what sense is there in comparing when we are living completely different lives? I wouldn’t be willing to do what they do for their bodies anyway.
Instead, I return to temporal comparison and try to measure myself against where I currently am and what I know to be my fittest, healthiest body. Another thing I do is try to have a little laugh at the situation and lighten the serious comparative mood. Something that has worked wonders for my confidence and killed my temptation to compare (in the weirdest way) is a little exercise I call ‘bloops’. I used to find myself agonising over getting the perfect photo to post on social media – one that ‘measured up’ to everyone else’s, but then I realised how much time and emotional energy I was wasting on this process. I would end up posting photos that reflected only one take of the 2,039,823 takes that didn’t make the cut.
So, one day, along with posting a nice, edited photo I decided to also post the worst, most goober-like photo I could find – the image I was least comfortable with sharing. Again, this was all about ripping off the bandaid and forcing myself to relax about the whole thing. A benefit to this approach was that I would be more authentic in the content I was sharing. Though putting up that first bloop felt so scary, I now love sharing those blooper posts: eyes half-shut, mouth half-open, stomach bloated, camel toe on show … It’s all fair game! I feel more comfortable doing this than I do posting my posed, professional highlights. The thing that surprised me more than the affirming, positive responses I got from people was how adopting this practice affected my relationship with myself: it’s made me much less harsh on myself and far more comfortable in my body from all angles.
A woman I adore for her work in the space of body image and body confidence is Taryn Brumfitt, founder of the Body Image Movement and director of the documentary Embrace. Nothing has hit me quite so poignantly in helping me learn to love my body for the miracle it is than Taryn’s work. As she likes to regularly remind us, ‘Your body is not an ornament, it is the vehicle to your dreams!’ After giving birth to her third child, Taryn experienced feelings of loathing for her body, and seriously considered cosmetic surgery. She settled on a tummy tuck, boob job and liposuction and booked herself in for surgery. A few weeks later, she pulled out – worried about the impact it could have on her daughter.
Instead, Taryn decided to get herself in top physical shape by entering a female body-building competition. She worked tirelessly to lose 15 kilograms in as many weeks and get herself looking the best she ever had. When competition day came, however, she ultimately found the experience of being judged uncomfortable and felt no closer to accepting her body. Later, she eased off on her training and even threw out the scales, gradually learning to accept herself exactly as she was.
She was undoing what she calls the ‘brainwashing’ that led to her thinking her body had to look a particular way to be beautiful. As part of that process, Taryn posted a before- and-after photo that blew up the internet by flipping the typical slim-down before-and-after photo on its head. Her before photo was her competition-ready, ab-tastic self while the after was a nude self-portrait of a more voluptuous, much happier person. More than 200 million people saw the photographs, and 7000 emails poured into her inbox to thank her for redefining the way we think about our bodies.
This response encouraged her to start a Kickstarter campaign to fund her ground-breaking body image documentary, Embrace, which has since become Australia’s most successful crowdfunded documentary. Her campaign and film have been supported by the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Ricki Lake and Rosie O’Donnell for its incredibly powerful message on our conditioning towards our bodies. I can’t recommend a film more highly to help combat the harsh tendencies we have towards our bodies (and ourselves generally). Taryn is now in the process of crowdfunding again to produce another documentary, Embrace Kids.
The more you can surround yourself with uplifting content like this, with diverse views, the better your mind is equipped to resist the negative spirals that comparison can spark. Of course, there’s always going to be temptation to compare ourselves to the bodies, careers, success and lives of others. Like addressing any other destructive habit, it’s not about expecting yourself to become completely immune, but rather learning to flip the dialogue productively, and as quickly as you can. We were never meant to be the same as each other and our differences are both necessary and inevitable. You can choose to lament those differences or celebrate them for the things that make you special and unique. I spent my youth trying to pad my bras and otherwise conceal my differences to conform, but I now try to own the quirks and characteristics that make me different, and I’ve never been happier in who I am.
'It’s not about expecting yourself to become completely immune, but rather learning to flip the dialogue productively, and as quickly as you can.'
Adopt an attitude of gratitude
The best antidote to negativity is gratitude. Much like combating self-doubt by focusing on the reasons why you are skilled and capable of making things work, focusing on what you are grateful for can help combat the things you’re lamenting that you’re not. I often remind myself that someone else out there is dreaming of having something I take for granted, and this can really help me gain perspective on things I’m fretting over unnecessarily. But even without flipping the comparison, gratitude isn’t necessarily about whether your situation is better or worse than someone else’s; it’s about simply being thankful for what you have in and of itself.
Regardless of what anyone else has, there are countless things you could observe in your life that you have or that you are to be grateful for. Many people have taken to gratitude journalling as a big part of their wellbeing practice. Even though being adopted doesn’t come up as often as you’d think in my life, when I’m practising gratitude, I always come back to it. I did nothing to warrant special treatment or deserve a chance at the life I have versus the one I was born into (I was only a six-month-old blob at the time, after all), and yet my parents came to give me an incredible life in Australia. So now, every part of living here is something to be grateful for. This sense of appreciation flows on to include the amazing, supportive family and friends Nic and I are surrounded by who fill our lives with joy and depth, and have played instrumental roles in making us who we are.
The importance of gratitude has perhaps never been so starkly clear as during the coronavirus pandemic that hit the world in the very last stages of finishing this book. While we would never wish for such tragic events to teach us a lesson, I think it came as a timely reminder to many of us to appreciate the smaller, simpler things in life and not to take anything or anyone for granted. Try taking some time out each day to write down your own list of things you are grateful for. This could be anything from the roof over your head, your able body and mind, or the friendships you are surrounded by. Even in times as challenging as global social isolation, we can be grateful for modern innovations like FaceTime and Zoom that still allow us to stay in touch. Things as small as being able to move freely without pain, speak easily without impediment or see clearly without obstruction are things to be grateful for. The miracle of our bodies makes our harsh comparison of their external shell seem silly.
The things you are grateful for could be even smaller and more trivial than this, but they are still worthy of acknowledging or writing down: your coffee in the morning or the cute dog down the street that plays with you. (To everyone in our neighbourhood, Paul says ‘you’re welcome’.) It doesn’t have to be a grand, completely life-changing event to spark gratitude, it can be small and simple. The things you’re grateful for don’t even have to be positive things. There might be difficult or challenging situations in your life that highlight things you appreciate or that teach you lessons you are grateful for.
You can see how focusing your attention on all the great things in your life can help move you away from the throes of negative comparison. One of the people who inspires me most in this world is Dave ‘Barney’ Miller, who was a guest on the podcast along with his wife, Kada. Both of them embody the art of gratitude and appreciating all we have in life. Barney is a world surfing champion but, unlike your average surfing champion, he is also a quadriplegic.
In 1999, at the age of 20, Barney was a promising young surfer when a tragic car accident led to him being airlifted to hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He woke up in hospital to be told he was a complete C6 quadriplegic and he would never breathe independently again or use his right arm. His unwavering resolve and deep sense of gratitude to be alive saw him through intense rehabilitation. And this, in turn, has since led him to not only breathe independently and use his right arm, but also get back in the water to his beloved surfing – often assisted by best mate, Mick Fanning.
Barney met Kada eight years later, when they both pulled each other out of difficult times. Through their shared commitment to his rehab, he was even able to kneel to propose to Kada and stand at the altar at their wedding. In 2017, Barney fulfilled his dream of becoming a world surfing champion, taking out the title at the inaugural US Adaptive Surfing Championship and then the ISA World Adaptive Surf Championship. Barney and Kada have both faced more challenge and tragedy than most – together and separately. Even so, they never lament, ‘Why us?’ Instead, they focus their energy perpetually on gratitude.
In the very first chapter of their book, The Essence of You and Me, their joint words reveal the strength of their mindset very clearly. ‘We tend to live in a world of pure imagination … [in] that we believe in every fibre of our cells that we have the ability to influence our life experience through our thoughts, choices and perception.’ Barney and Kada’s resolute, unwavering ability to look at the bright side of life is a constant source of inspiration to me.
I don’t include their story so that you start comparing yourself to Barney and Kada (though I, too, have done this – I’m in awe of their strength). Thinking about what others have to endure compared to us is still a cognitive measurement of how we stack up against someone else; it’s just a downward comparison instead of an upwards one. Rather, I mention their story to show them as an example of the practice of gratitude in two people who do it so well. True gratitude – the kind that can help combat comparative thinking – is based more on our relationship with ourselves and how we feel about our own circumstances.
Staying in a grateful frame of mind keeps your focus squarely on what you do have, rather than what you don’t. And this applies to your work life as well as your personal life. Grab a journal and start writing down some of the things you appreciate in your life. It can be a wonderful tool for clarity, mental health and happiness.