How I Kicked Comparisonitis to the Kerb

I used to be such a sucker for comparisonitis. I’m a good student, I would watch and learn from all the mentors and gurus that I could find. The ones I thought had the secret sauce for my success.

Whilst I did learn a lot from them, and I’m grateful to them, they also kept me stuck in a holding pattern for years. So here’s how I broke that pattern, and how you can, too.

Setting the wrong goals

By far the most common problem that I see in my coaching practice is my clients setting the wrong goals. It’s not their fault. They read the books, they’ve done the research, and they’ve taken the advice of the gurus, but they still seem to end up stuck.

And they’re not necessarily in the wrong business. But they are following mentors without considering those mentors’ drivers for success. I know, because I spent years doing it, too.

Our Drivers for Success

We all have our drivers for success, that’s our core values, but not everybody’s values are the same. They’re either subtly or extremely different. Unless you’re using your values to your advantage, they could be hindering you.

The rub came for me when I realized that most people don’t know what their values are.

Unless you’ve consciously checked in with your values recently, I would invite you to think again.

Our first set of core values and their priority come from our parents, our teachers, and other key influencers. And then, significant life experiences will also alter them, but that’s about as much thought as most people give their values.

They either want to maintain their family values, or they want to do the opposite of what their parents did. Your values and their priority are fluid, depending on what you’re doing, what you’re working towards, and what you’re focusing on. You’ve got different values at play in different circumstances and different situations.

So what’s this got to do with comparisonitis?

When we compare ourselves to others, we’re comparing our results, but not our reasons. And it’s our values that give us our reasons. When we let other people determine our success measures, it can be difficult to measure up.

I spent years feeling like a failure, even though I was following all the steps that the gurus were teaching me. I was taught to, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” Well, I sure did feel the fear. And I did it anyway, but it didn’t work.

And it fed this cycle of failure. I still do feel the fear, but it’s a different kind of fear. It’s a values-aligned fear, and I use it to propel me through the challenge, rather than pushing me to retreat.

Use the fear to move forward

My natural default is that I want to retreat away from growth and expansion. Even though that is something that I want, there is a part of me that wants to retreat from that. But now, knowing why I’m feeling that way through my values, it helps me to feel the fear and use it to propel me, rather than to fight against that feeling of retreat.

Everyone’s values are different

Not only are your values different, your definitions of those values are different. You might have someone that you respect, and they are very open about what they value. You might find that you have some commonality there with what you value. But your definition of that word is probably different to theirs, and that’s an important distinction to make.

If you’re in business, and you’re using your business as your means to success, to achieve what you want to achieve in your life, then you may be using a similar vehicle to your mentors and gurus, but your driver is not the same. And when you realize that, when you realize that the vehicle might be the same, but the drivers are ever so slightly different, that’s when you realize that everyone is truly running their own race.

So you need to get crystal clear about your values.

Whilst I don’t offer one-off coaching sessions as a general rule, I have found over the last decade, that usually that feeling of ‘stuckness’ comes from a lack of clarity. In this 90 minute session, you will experience newfound clarity on why you can’t seem to achieve your goals, or even identify what your goals might be!

We will work through my tried and tested process for values elicitation and values aligned goal setting.

Just bring an open mind, pen, paper and post-it notes, and I will do the rest!

Originally published at https://coachschool.academy on September 18, 2019.