Comparing yourself to others is like stepping into a black hole. You can always find someone who can outdo you in some way or other so that you end up on the bottom.
There’s nothing good or healthy about this. It’s an exercise to confirm that you’re not good enough.
Here’s how to stop doing this, and what to do instead.
When you’re focused on outcomes and end results, and you measure your sense of worth and value in terms of your achievements and performance, you can easily see yourself as a failure when you don’t succeed.
Worse yet, you become the failure. That leaves you swinging between feeling really worthy when you achieve, and really unworthy when you don’t.
Recently a client said to me that he wanted to do something “great” with his life. He’s a young man at the beginning of his career, and he has aspirations to succeed.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a normal desire, but as we continued talking about it, I knew there was more going on. There was a strong sense of urgency, and even a little tinge of desperation.
Sometimes everyone needs a reset. Life gets too crowded, energy pours out in every direction like a bad plumbing leak, problems abound, demands are high, and you are just worn out. This can leave you feeling depleted, overwhelmed, used up, fragmented, out of control, and discontent. These are signs that you have become disconnected from yourself. It’s time for a reset.
So the obvious question is ” What exactly is a reset?”
There is an ebb and flow to life. Everyday is not the same, and no one feels exactly the same all the time.
On some days, you have a lot more energy and creativity, things seem to flow, and the general feeling is one of sailing through a green light.
Then there are the red light days. We all hate these days. Energy’s low, mood’s blah, everything seems difficult to do, the level of frustration is high, and going back to bed and sleeping until the next day sounds like a really good idea.