Don’t Compare Yourself With Others
Do not compare yourself with others because you never need to.
In this post, I will share 7 best tips on how to stop comparing yourself with others, so that you can stop doubting your self-worth, be highly confident, and fall in love with yourself again.
What you will learn:
- Why You Should Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
- How To Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
- How Do You Become Confident
- How To Love Yourself And Be Loved
- Quotes on Be Yourself & Don’t Compare To Others
Heads up: My post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through such links, I will be rewarded a small commission to buy ice cream, at no extra cost to you.
Wake-Up Call
2 Biggest Reasons: Don’t Compare Yourself To Others
Reason #1: It Destroys Your Self-Image
Upward comparison means we compare ourselves to someone who we believe is better than us. Such a comparison is a double-edged sword. If we use it wrongly, it can ruin our self-image (which is the foundation of self-esteem). And, with a bad self-image, you will interpret the external world wrongly and buy into lies that you are incompetent or you’re not good enough. I will show you how to reverse this and regain confidence in life again.
Reason #2: It Eliminates Your Motivation To Grow
On the other hand, the downward comparison takes place when we compare ourselves to people who are worse off than us. While it can help us to feel better at ourselves, a downward comparison might also make us become over-optimistic and take up challenges that are beyond our competence. It might also make us into thinking that we are already good enough and withdraw the motivation to grow. The key is always to know how to be balanced, so it empowers you and makes you a better person.
7 Best Tips: How To Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
Do not compare yourself to others because everyone has a different life journey. Just like Oscar Wilde has said “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken”. I have laid down my best tips to help you to replace the habits of comparing yourself to others below. I hope that you can live an empowering life onwards.
Tip #1 Find Your True Calling And Don’t Compare Yourself To Others
If you know what you truly want in life, you won’t be bothered by what others are going through in their life because it has become irrelevant.
Have you heard of Doctors Without Borders?
It is a non-profitable international organization. Doctors and journalists who joined it strive to provide medical aid where it’s needed most. And, the place that medical aid is needed most is often places hit by war, epidemics, famine, and disasters. Not only the volunteers have to adjust to unfamiliar food, culture, handle extreme weather conditions, tolerate low standards of living (including living in just a tent for an extended period), but they also have to sacrifice their family time, experience a high level of stress and risk their life. They are people with solid living purpose and mission.
Do you think they are keen to learn what other people are posting on Facebook every day? No, they don’t, their mind is occupied with a different set of priorities and they do not care where Bob has traveled last week, who is getting married, and what car did Mary just buy recently.
Hence, just find yourself and be yourself. You are meant to be different, so you can serve yourself and the world in your way. Write down what you truly want in life and start making an effort to make it happen. When you know what do you want in life, you won’t be bothered by what others are chasing after anymore.
Tip #2 Discover Your Unique Strengths
Each one of us has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. You must be aware of this, so you won’t do yourself an injustice.
Just like fishes are good at swimming, but if you compare their ability to climb a tree with the monkeys, you will conclude that fishes are useless. But, is that the truth? What about you? Are you the fish who have been comparing your tree climbing capability with your monkey friends all these while?
One of the best ways to discover your unique strengths is by learning what’s your personalities. See who you are, what you are naturally good at, and then develop relevant strengths from there.
How to Find Your Personality And Strengths
You can find your strengths and personality via Myers & Briggs’ personality test. There are 16 personality types under the personality test, and you can find yours via Truity.com for free.
Once you have finished the personality test, you will be shown the metrics telling you the type of your personality and you can learn more about it. As mentioned, there are 16 personality types.
For example, my personality type is INTJ (Introverted, Intuition, Thinking, Judging), also known as the mastermind.
Overview: INTJ is the third rarest type in the population, making up only 2% of the general population. They are analytical problem-solvers, eager to improve systems and processes with their innovative ideas. They have a talent for seeing possibilities for improvement, whether at work, at home, or in themselves.
You can also learn the following details about your personality type:
- How common is your personality type?
- Your Values and Motivations
- How Others See you
- Your Hobbies and Interests
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Growth and development
- You at work
- Top careers for your personality type
- Careers to avoid
- You as part of a team
- You as leader
- Relationship in love
- You as parents
- Communication style
Click Here To Start Your Personality Test – Free
The coolest thing about doing a personality test at Truity.com
The personality test can help you to discover the strengths you never know you have. Before doing the test, you only see the other’s strengths which you do not have. But after doing the test, you will know that not having the same strengths does not make you any less of a person. It only means you are just having a different set of strengths which others don’t. So, don’t compare yourself to others. For example, I’m an introvert, and being an introvert, I enjoy different things and have different strengths compared to extrovert.
Recommendation: Truity.com
Tip #3 Boost The Happy Hormone
The most common happy hormones in our body are Dopamine, Serotonin, and Endorphins. They are responsible to keep us motivated, self-confident and happy. Lack of it, we will experience fatigue and low self-esteem.
How to increase happy hormone in our body?
- Consume the right food – Food like bananas, eggs, seaweed, fish, egg, and chicken provide us the essential amino acids (tyrosine and tryptophan) to produce the happy hormones. So, stop eating junk food, control your diet, and you feel overall elevated.
- Exercise – Physical exercise helps to increase the level of dopamine and it helps to improve your mood and keep you excited. This is why we always feel happier after exercise even though we might be reluctant to start exercise in the beginning.
- Listen to music you enjoy – The study has shown that listening to music that you love will make your brain release more dopamine.
Tip #4 Develop Your Passion
Every one pursues different things in life, so don’t compare yourself to others. Once you have found your passion, be sure to find time to practice and improve it. Watching yourself growing each day helps to boost confidence. In addition to that, if you have a passion, you will be focusing on what you love all the time and you will automatically stop comparing yourself to others.
There are a few ways to develop your passion:
1) Join a community
There are forums, Meetup groups, facebook groups, and organizations that you can join to make new friends and to develop your passion. If you love photography, then join a photography club and learn how to improve your skills while making a new connection. The meaningful and non-competitive connection will help you to develop a stronger passion.
2) Take courses online
There are plenty of free and paid courses online. You can watch Youtube videos improve your passion related skills and knowledge. Alternatively, if you want to experience in-depth learning, you can also go with the paid learning route like Udemy.
How To Find Your Passion And Build Self-esteem
There are 2 simple ways to figure out what is your passion.
The first way is to hunt the bookstores and dwell in the library. When you found yourself getting lost in time, mark down the category of book, and you know you have found your passion. I love to visit bookstores whenever I go to the shopping mall and I often spend most of my time at the personal development and marketing section of the bookstores. And, yes, that’s my passion in life. What’s yours?
Another way to discover what you love is to visit sites like Udemy, browse through the main categories and see what catches your eyes. You know you have found your passion when you keep digging deeper at a particular category of courses.
Tip #5 Count Your Bless via Gratitude Meditation
Stop looking and comparing with the others, it is time to shift your focus back to your own life and be grateful for what you have. Gratitude meditation is the type of meditation where you focus on expressing gratitude for the things in your life. It is a very simple form of meditation because you just have to relax and reflect on all the things and people you are grateful for in life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCq5MkNem6k
Meditation Mastery Secrets
If you want to feel greater peace of mind, clarity of thought, creativity & connectivity via meditation, you can check out Meditation Mastery Secrets. Meditation Mastery Secrets is created by Jason Stephenson who is a meditation expert with more than 600k followers on Youtube, and co-author with Jack Canfield on “Success Mastery” and a life lover. His program is simple and effective. You can check out the testimonials on his page below.
Recommendation: Meditation Mastery Secrets – find a deep & powerful transformation via meditation
Tip #6 Replace Social Media Apps So You Don’t Compare Yourself To Others
You can’t stop comparing yourself with others if the core apps you are using are only social media apps. Hence, the best solution is to replace social media apps with other productive apps. When you are bored or on travel, the first thing you do after picking up the phone is to check out some productive apps instead of social media apps. This way, you do not compare yourself to others automatically. If you want to go a little bit more extreme, you can consider removing some of the social media apps or limit the time you spend on social media apps every day.
Productive Apps:
- Trello – set goals, track progress
- Evernote – note-taking
- RescueTime – provide time management insights
- Duolingo – learn a new language
- Udemy – learning
- Ted – learning
- Youtube – learning
Tip #7 Rewire Your Brain Via Positive Self-talk
Self-talk not only influence the way we think and act, but it also shapes our overall personality. If the way you talk to yourself is highly negative, you will build a negative lens which through it, you only see the negative side of the eternal world. In other words, you become your own enemy.
In the book Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz found that his plastic surgery patients often had expectations that were not satisfied with the surgery. For example, a very charming person would still go for plastic surgery thinking that he is not good-looking enough, but the reality is that he is just having a bad self-image. On the other hand, while people are afraid of scars that can ruin their pretty face, a man can be proud of having scars on the face instead because he sees it as a sign of masculinity. This shows that how we interpret things is super important as it can influence we way we see ourselves and change our lives subsequently.
If we constantly focus on or mention any negative statement about ourselves, we can belittle our self-image and ruin our self-confidence. So, make sure you are doing the opposite, always see yourself at your best, be conscious when having an inner talk. Make sure it is a positive one.
Recommendation: MindZoom Affirmations – reprogram your mind with thousands of positive affirmation
Ted Talk: Don’t Compare Yourself To Others
How Can You Become Confident
When you have enough confidence, you do not compare yourself to others because you no longer need validation from others and they will no longer be your benchmark.
No matter where you are right now, I can help you to develop self-confidence. I believe low self-esteem is a learned process which means that no one is born with low self-esteem. Instead, you’re having a low self-esteem today because you have trained yourself to be good at it without even knowing it all this while. And, this is good news, because it means that you can unlearn it and relearn new pattern which can help you to achieve higher self-esteem.
4 Key Steps To Become More Confident:
- Pick a passion – choose something you love. It does not matter if you have never done it or learn it before. Just pick something you are highly interested in.
- Plan out the learning milestone – break the learning process into multiple milestones. Make sure the first few milestones are super easy to achieve and the level of difficulty must not increase too much from one milestone to the next one.
- Start practicing and learning – learn from trusted sources and start practicing.
- Control inner talk – Not only you have to practice the new skill you are trying to learn, but you must also pay close attention to how you talk to yourself. It can be very hard to monitor your inner talk in the beginning but with some practice, you will get used to it very soon. Whenever a negative self-talks slip into your mind, you must slow down and restructure it so it empowers you. External events do not have a meaning until we give it one. You have low self-esteem because you are consistently giving the wrong meaning to the external events and yourself. Now, you have to be conscious of it and start to learn how to replace the bad self-talk into a positive one. It is a new habit you need to build.
If you follow these 4 steps deliberately, soon you will find yourself having higher self-esteem for a few reasons:
- Reason no.1: you are busy working on your passion, so you do not have time for comparison, and when there’s no comparison, you will not feel less of a person.
- Reason no.2: when you have a passion, working on it helps to produce the happy hormones. Not only it elevates your mood but it also helps to improve motivation and self-confidence.
- Reason no.3: when you keep practicing, you will grow and become better at it. Your mind will start to think “hey, I have something which I can be good at” This helps to plant the first positive seed in your mind.
- Reason No.4: when you start practicing self-talk, you are watering the seed of confidence which you have planted earlier, and it will start to blossom. And, that’s how you develop self-confidence. First, you plant the positive seed, and then you take good care of it until it is full blossom by controlling your inner talk.
During the process, learning how to replace negative self-talk with a positive one is the key.
For example, when your mind says “this is too difficult for me, maybe I’m just not fit for it”, immediately doubt it by saying “Is this really that difficult? It can’t be that difficult. Others can do it, so I totally can do it too. I just need to practice for a few more rounds.” Did you see that? The first negative thoughts demotivate you while the second thoughts motivate you to keep moving forward.
As long as you do not stop practicing, you will eventually get it. And then, your mind will say “I knew I can do it. I just need some practice to unlock my full potential, that’s all” Your mind will reinforce the idea that “you can do it”, “you are good at it” and this slowly builds up your confidence. When you become better at it and start receiving praise from family and friends, it will further reinforce the idea that you are good at it and this helps to increase your self-confidence.
It is an upward spiral and you will feel more empowered each day. Then, you can expand your confidence in this area to the other areas of your life. This is how you master self-confidence.
How To Stop Comparing With Others And Feel Loved
If you want to be loved by others, first you need to believe that you are worthy to be loved and you have to love yourself first. Otherwise, you will subconsciously avoid love from others and yourself because you think you do not deserve it.
Step 1: Make A Decision To Be Loved
Put your hand on your heart, and say “I decided I want to love myself more and I want to invite more love into my life. I’m enough. I’m complete. And, now, I allow myself and others to start loving me.”
Step 2: Forgive
Once you have done the above. It is time for forgiveness to take place. A new future cannot unfold itself until you let go of the past. It can be a bitter process for you, but if you want to be truly free, you have to make a firm decision to let go of the past.
Letting go of the past is not easy for everyone because we are afraid of losing our own identity and we need to face the fear of uncertainty at the same time.
If you have been hurt by someone, especially those you love, the sense of betrayal can be so strong that you can no longer believe in anyone, let alone believing that they can love you by heart. Also, you might find it hard to let go of the past because you have been clinging to it for so long. You know nothing else besides anger and hatred which you become good at it because you have been practicing it for years.
On the other hand, if you have hurt someone including yourself, you might feel extremely guilty about yourself, and think that a person like you does not deserve to be loved. Either way, you have not been practicing love and to be loved for so long that you have even forgotten how it can be done. But no worries, I will teach you how to let go of the past.
To practice forgiveness, give yourself permission to release the pain from your heart, and allow the pain to flow to a piece of paper. Write down what has happened that causes you unable to love and to be loved. If the reason is valid, allow yourself to get angry about it, and then when you calmer, ask yourself, “Is it time to let go now, so I can be free again?” You can’t change the past but you still have the present and the future. You certainly do not want to spend the rest of your life trapped in the past.
When you are ready to let go, again, put your hand on your heart, and read this slowly “I now give myself full permission to let go of the past, so I can be free, so I can love and be loved again”
Step 3: Embrace The New You
Start learning how to love and be loved again. For people who have been there with you whenever you need them, let them know that you appreciate and love them. You can always express your feelings by writing if you think it is hard to express it verbally. When people give you their love, learn to accept it, and if it’s appropriate, you can return it with a simple hug. Reward people for loving you, not reject them. Slowly, you will get used to it, and to love and to be loved will become second nature for you again. It takes time to heal but if you allow it, it will happen
7 Quotes: Be Yourself & Don’t Compare Yourself To Others
