How Comparison Has Impacted My Journey
I have been struggling with comparison since I was young. In fact, my earliest memory of dealing with comparison was when I was a pre-teen- I had been out to dinner with my family and I saw a girl who was a few years older than me wearing makeup. I was too young at the time for makeup and I just remember thinking how cool she looked and I wanted to look like that. I later went home that night and played around with my moms makeup to try and recreate the look I saw. Of course it came out horrible and I also had no clue how to get it all off, so I hid in the bathroom until my face was red and blotchy from scrubbing my skin. I remember being so upset that I couldn’t make my face look like the girl I saw, and I was also so embarrassed to face my family looking how I did afterwards. Since then, I struggled with comparison consistently and it showed up in many different areas of my life, especially in my health and wellness journey.
If you struggle with comparison, know that you are not alone! Everyone deals with comparison in one way or another. We are all human! But it is how you deal with comparison that can either help you out on your health and wellness journey, or hurt you.
For a long time, I would use comparison as a way to shame and beat myself up. I would constantly be picking myself apart and always be thinking “I will never have what they have”. Using comparison this way hurt me and it also hurt my journey too. I was never able to achieve the results I desired so badly because I was so focused on feeling like I could never do it and I was also way to focused on achieving someone else’s results.
Achieving someone else’s results is nearly impossible. Firstly, you don’t know where they started from, the struggles they faced to get where they are and you most certainly don’t see the full picture of their life. You also are not them. You can only achieve the results that are meant to be yours. We could all eat the same diet, do the same workout plan, follow all the same habits and we would still never all look OR feel the same way. This was something that took me a long time to understand but once I finally did, everything changed for me.
It wasn’t until I started doing mindset work, that I realized I was letting comparison bring me and my health and wellness journey down. I started using comparison as a form of inspiration rather than a reason to pick apart my “flaws” and “imperfections”. When I would see someone posting a before and after photo on social media or see someone else living out their dream life, instead of thinking to myself “I wish I could have that but it’s just not possible for me”, I started saying to myself “if they can achieve those results then it is possible for me too”.
Reaching your wellness goals starts with your mindset. If you are always feeling like “I can never have what they have” or “I will never look like that no matter how hard I try” then it is time for a mindset shift. It is so important for you to remind yourself constantly that there is room for you. You are capable of living out your best and most confident life just as much as the people you are comparing yourself too.
Check out my blog post EVOLUTION SERIES PART 2: GETTING OVER COMPARISON ON YOUR WELLNESS JOURNEY here, where I dive in deeper on dealing with comparison.
