03_14_2021

                We are constantly making comparisons in our lives. Take a minute and do a self-check.  How many times during the day do you converse with yourself with these kinds of thoughts?

• Reflecting on your day: You didn’t get as much done today as you did yesterday. 
• Finishing shoveling:  John did a better job clearing his sidewalk of snow than I did.
• Seeing your colleague at work: She always looks better in her clothes than I look in mine.
• In yoga class:  Last year I could do this pose without modifications.
• Out to dinner:  How come I always order more food than others?
• In meetings:  Why doesn’t the instructor ever note that I made a good point?
• One-up(wo)manship:  I’m not as far behind as she is on this project.

Here’s the thing.  Making comparisons isn’t always a bad thing.  Here are some examples of positive self-comparisons:

• Trying on your spring clothes:  Wow!  These pants didn’t zip last year!  I’ve made progress in losing some weight.
• Checking unrealistic expectations:  I guess I am finally learning to scale back what I think I can accomplish in a day.
• Seeing progress on intentions:  I’ve made it almost two months honoring meatless Mondays.
• Working on challenging relationships:  For once I didn’t let him suck me into an argument. Progress!
• Establishing habits:  I didn’t meditate everyday this week, but on the other hand, I only missed two days compared to last week where I missed four days.
• Bouncing back:  I must be making progress as the hurt from her criticism didn’t last as long as it did in the past.
• Finding your voice:  I surprised myself that I was able to voice my opinion even though I knew some in the group would not be happy that I wasn’t going along.

Perhaps, if you have the time, you might want to make some quick notes about the types of comparisons you find yourself making.  I am not sure why we tend to do this.  More than likely, there are some healthy and helpful reasons for us to use comparisons as progress or benchmarks for ourselves.  Take time management for example.  If I know that I only have a certain amount of time to complete a project, I will link progress with time markers to make sure that I don’t end up with an insurmountable challenge near the end of the project.

For example, if I am submitting a grant proposal and I only have 30 days to complete it, I’ll chart out how much I want to have completed in 5 days, 10 days, and so on.  Such tactics are helpful in breaking large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks.

Taking on a project that requires some ongoing attention or discipline, like losing weight or saving money, I like to check my progress in a healthy manner.  I refuse to step on a scale daily, but once a week is not an obsessive response.  I find seeing progress towards a goal as an extremely healthy and useful motivator.  When I was at a point where I had some discretionary income, just seeing my savings account grow gave me an incentive to curtail frivolous spending.

I think it is safe to agree that some comparative awareness in our lives can be helpful to us. On the other hand, I wonder if we were actually able to record each comparative thought we have a day, and then had to rate it as helpful or not, what would our balance be?

If you have been reading my Blog before, you’ll know that I am a big believer in the positive value of healthy self-compassion.  I don’t believe it does us any good to berate or beat up on ourselves.  As a culture, particularly if we look at how we talk with ourselves as women, I believe based on my experience and shared conversations with other women that we are more likely to put ourselves down than to encourage or be kind to ourselves.

One way in which we harm ourselves is that we tend to always be comparing ourselves to others. Vera Nazarian in The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration: Old Wisdom for a New World reminds us to “not get caught up in relativity.”  Once we start down the path of comparing ourselves to others, including ourselves at earlier stages of our lives, we can find ourselves spiraling into a sense of helplessness or despair.  As our feelings of self-worth and self-confidence are undermined by these comparisons, we drain our energies that could be put to more positive uses.

Here’s the fault line that makes these comparisons useless and harmful:  There are too many other elements in the picture that we aren’t privy to.  For example, we don’t know what might be going on in the other person’s life that we are comparing our life with.  That perfect marriage that we believe is in place may not be so perfect as we assume. 

I remember my therapist once reminding me that we don’t know what price someone is paying to stay in a relationship.  Her comment has been helpful to me and opened my eyes to see relationships with a deeper awareness.  This comment also helped me realize that I am not willing to give up what I love doing and enjoying. 

When we try to use others as a mirror for evaluating and measuring ourselves, we don’t know how their backgrounds and earlier lives compare with ours.  If we grew up in families with little discretionary income, it makes no sense to compare ourselves with others who grew up in wealthy families that allowed many more opportunities for them to grow and evolve.

I wish someone would invent a mirror that flashed us reminders that we need to love and cherish who we are.  We each have unique gifts and talents, and we need to celebrate and be grateful for them.  Hopefully, the more we come to appreciate our gifts, we will find ways to put them to good use in service to others.  It would be great if the mirror could remind us that we are making progress, growing, and evolving.  And finally, gentle reminders that each stage of our lives offers us different challenges as well as different gifts.