I'm Rebecca Hunter and this is Take Out Therapy. As a private practice therapist, I've helped a lot of people work through some of the most common everyday issues using new tools and greater insight. If you have any interest in doing some personal growth work, this might be the perfect place for you.
In the next 20 minutes, I'll walk you through a commonly explored topic in therapy and provide you with actual tools to deal with it. It's that simple. Obviously, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I think it could be helpful.
Thanks for being here. Hello, my friend. I'm so glad you decided to stop by and do a little personal growth work today.
I'm hoping today's episode is very helpful to you. I'm going to talk about something that we all deal with. And I don't care if you say, oh no, no, that's not a thing for me.
It's totally a thing for you because you're human. I want to talk about the comparison game. I want to talk a little bit about what Brene Brown refers to as comparison culture.
I believe it's Brene Brown that, I don't know, maybe she coined that phrase. Maybe she didn't. Maybe I just coined it.
Comparison culture. It's basically like we are enculturated, indoctrinated into measuring up, into comparing ourselves with others, into looking across the aisle to see what's up with Betsy over yonder. It's why I can't go to yoga classes.
I do all my yoga at home. And the reason is, is because I just sit in the yoga class and I'm like, well, my downward dog doesn't look like that downward dog. I know.
I just haven't done enough downward dogs. Comparison is out, people. It's 2020.
Let's take comparison out to the garbage. And let's bring in originality. What do you think about it? Let me talk specifically about what comparison I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the comparison that we do in this modern day land where no matter what we have around us or going on in our lives, there's some area in which we are falling short. And our reason for that is that it doesn't really look like, quote unquote, it should, which would, if you just dig one layer deeper, we can see that that's based on should, which is based on other people's behavior or what we've been taught and told is appropriate and not appropriate. Is that a good definition for you of comparison? Yeah.
Let's take that out of vogue, shall we? Keeping up is so hard when we start to look around us, right? And we look around us because we're human beings and human beings, actually, one of the ways that we relate to each other is that we kind of like when people are the same. It's why we stick to our people. I mean, really, we're racially divided.
It doesn't mean that there's any difference, right? It just means like we stick to people like us. And it's a human thing. And so and then you throw all this sort of BS cultural training on top, and then we get some ideas about what life should look like, what we should do, like we look to other people as our model for what we want.
I totally do this in my business, right? We look to other people because we have a perception about what they have versus what we have, which causes us to see an inadequacy. Now whether the inadequacy is for reals or not, we have no idea. Who cares about that, right? But we do compare based on what we think.
And we try to measure up based on our own stories about what we were taught about all the different areas of life. And we generally worry that we're not doing it right. I hear it so much, especially from parents.
It's an old story. It's a tired story. Here's what I want you to understand.
If you're basing your own worth by looking across the aisle at somebody else and what their life looks like, you're barking up the wrong tree, my friend. So let's keep talking about this. Because I was thinking about this episode and it occurred to me, it occurred to me, I mean, it's like being slammed in my face all the time.
There's all these people that are going to be coming back into the job market. And I feel for people because it's going to be a tight job market, right? We have our job seekers out there. And when we're looking for jobs, we need to be like selling ourselves, not feeling inadequate, not comparing ourselves to others.
We need to be at the top of our sales game of our own capabilities and our own unique skills. The other thing I'm seeing a lot of, so I thought that might be helpful to people who are going to, you know, be going into the job market. And then the other thing is like I see mothers and moms are really struggling right now.
Because we're being faced with the removal of our structure. You know, the whole school thing, you know, the whole going to work and separating from kids for hours and hours of a day, right? Man, we should have been thankful. We're in it, right? And mothers are looking around them for information on what they should do next.
And so that's comparison. If we just take again, just a deeper peek at that, right? And then we have like people in entrepreneurs, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I know a lot of entrepreneurs.
There's a lot of people out here trying to make their own thing in this system, right? And it's very easy right now, especially as an online business owner to look around me and be like, oh, boy, I really need to, you know, do a better job. And I'm not, I'm my thing doesn't look like this thing over here or my, you know, my web page needs to have this because this person has this, like, oh, boy, it's a slippery slope, isn't it? It'd be really nice if we could just walk in our own shoes. It'd be really nice if we could just use our own voice, be ourselves, be original, right? So we can do all that.
We just have to get out of the comparison game. So how do we get out of this comparison game? Well, for one thing, we've got to lose the judgment. Okay.
So one of the things that the brain does is like categorize things and the things it likes and things it doesn't like. And so we just very unconsciously do that all day long, right? If you walk into a room and you are, you know, don't like the color yellow, your brain's going to find the color yellow first, just so you know. Okay.
So the setup is there. So in order to get out of this comparison game, you have to understand that it doesn't actually matter what you think. I'm not trying to be rude.
I'm just saying it doesn't really matter what you think about someone else's life choices or behavior or ideas, or it doesn't really matter what they think about you actually. So just letting go of some of your brain's need to kind of like box things up will help, right? You can like something that somebody else is doing and see something that somebody else is doing and either integrate it into your life or not without having so much judgment about it. Hopefully that makes sense.
Oh, you know, I can do a whole episode on that. Another way we want to get out of this comparison based living is to just like set boundaries around your own life and your own needs. And it's super interesting in this COVID situation, because I think people really had to practice doing that, that people have had to set their own boundaries of comfort around things.
And it's been a really good practice for us all, right? To just say like, yeah, that's, that works really well for me. But you'd like this over here isn't going to, right? We've had to set boundaries with a lot of people are setting boundaries with their kids. A lot of people are setting boundaries with their spouses, right? Because we're all sort of living in a kind of a different way.
A lot of people are, then we were living before. And so we have to set boundaries, otherwise, like we're not going to make it. So setting boundaries around your own life and your own needs, it makes it so that you're living in your life.
Does that make sense? Like you're putting what your needs are first, and then everything comes after that. So that's not making decisions based on comparison, right? So it's like, okay, well, you know, there's an after school program coming up. And do I want, you know, Johnny to take part in it? Well, let me call, you know, my friend Kathy and talk about it with her to see if her no, we get out of the comparison game, not by losing our community, but by making choices about our own life and our own needs, instead of looking to others to help us make choices about what we need.
Like, is it going to work for him to do that? Would that be a good experience for him with or without a friend, right? Or if you, you know, obviously, I mean, I just pick examples out of the sky. So there's a lot of things you can kind of think about in this regard. You know, for one thing I can say about this boundary thing, because, you know, this is a little conversation, it's like, one of the ways we can get out of the comparison game by setting boundaries around our own life and our own needs is kind of what I've done with my private practice.
I work the hours that I really want to work. And it doesn't really matter to me like when other therapists in the area are seeing clients like I don't really care about that. So I set my own work hours, instead of saying like, well, Susan down the road, she sees clients in the evening.
So I should have one evening No, I don't want to work in the evening. Thank you, though. That's kind of what I mean.
So that's how we get out of the comparison game. We just get unhooked a little bit from other people and their structure, and create our own structure, right? We create the kind of life that we want to have not what others want for you, like not what your parents wanted for you, right? Or like not what your peers are doing, or what maybe looks good. Right? And we get into this game as parents a lot.
So it's very important to do a values assessment to figure out like, okay, well, how do I want my life to be? Right? Do I want to have a heavily scheduled life? Or do I want to have like, more chill time, more time to just like hang out? Because that's going to make a difference. Right? What kind of life do I want to have? Do I always want to be dieting and looking at myself in the mirror and assessing my hair color? No, I actually don't really always want to be doing those things. The life that I want to have, I don't spend time on those things.
I promise you guys I shower. But I'm not, I'm not involved in those kinds of activities, because it's not my value. And it doesn't bring me joy, to be honest.
So when we're getting out of the comparison game, one of the most important things that I don't want to overlook is like, you have to compare yourself to yourself. Okay, don't compare yourself to others. Somebody said, why compare yourself with others? No one in the entire world can do a better job of being you than you.
Yes, of course. So when you're looking at your progress, or where you are in your life, look back. Look back.
You might be able to see some progress, especially if you, you know, keep a journal or have some kind of record, right? Which is super helpful, because generally we don't see our own progress. But if you look back and start understanding that you're comparing yourself to yourself, in order to have your own best life, that can be really, really helpful. Because here's the thing, I really want you to see how you are unique.
Originality is in, my friend. It's time to amplify that. And the only way that we can be a little more interesting, frankly, is to stop comparing ourselves to others.
You know, one of the things that I've noticed now that my kids are grown and almost out of the house is that in my parenting years, one of the things that I did was set a boundary around my need to have a community of people that I could actually talk to about real things that were going on in my parenting life. So I had friends who, we talked about the struggles. And I know a lot of people that really yearn for these kinds of relationships and frankly, like, push harder for them.
Be willing to kind of find some different people, find a different outlet. Because it's very helpful to be able to just be real, you know? Because parenting is really hard and, well, lots of things are really hard, frankly. If you're not a parent, I apologize for going on and on.
But a lot of things are really hard. And if we can just like talk about the stuff that really sucks that we each know in our own unique way, like the screaming at bedtime, the crying and the desperation some days, the messes, the criminal activity. You know, the struggles, right? At some point, I just kind of decided I wasn't going to pretend that it was easy.
And that has really helped me over the years. And to be honest, it's different than other people, right? I'm the person who says the thing like, well, my kid played Fortnite for 11 hours yesterday and he won so many games. I was pretty excited for him.
I'm that person. No, seriously. That was kind of a joke, a little inside joke for those of us with teens.
I think what I want to say is our fear of being ourselves, it holds us back a lot of the time. And it could have held me back in a lot of different ways. But what I've realized is I'm only looking to myself for information about how I'm doing.
And I recommend that because it has absolutely saved my sanity. It has helped to validate my own experience. And it has allowed me to just kind of do my thing in my own way, in the way that I want to do it.
Okay? And so I want you to know that that's there for you, too. Yeah, because we're awesome, right? You guys, thanks so much for being here and listening to the podcast. And if I had any requests to make of you, I would ask that you subscribe.
And you leave a review. And I love your emails. You guys send me the sweetest messages.
I'm glad you're here. And if there's content that you want to hear about, get in touch, friend. I'm here doing the work right alongside you.
Before you go, let me ask you a question. Do you think about things way more than you think you should? Do you go over and over situations or conversations or conflicts in your mind to the point where it basically drives you bananas? Overthinking is a major complaint of people entering my therapy practice and my private group, actually. And it's not that complicated to get a handle on.
It's just like any other personal growth topic, guys. You got to just be willing to dig into it a little bit. When people don't get a handle on the overthinking habit, they tend to end up with an anxiety problem.
So I created a super affordable online class that will teach you about how to get rid of all that thinking. It's $37, you guys. And you know me, there will be homework.
It's way worth the investment. It's just a complaint I hear a lot that has a relatively simple path to solution. So I wanted to just share it in a simple method.
It's on my website at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. It's called The Overthinking Solution because, you guys, some problems can actually be solved. I hope you found today's show helpful. It would mean a lot to me if you'd rate, review, or subscribe so that we can reach more people with this type of information.
Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health, and this is how I'm doing it. We just need to have these conversations.
If you really want to dig in, join me on social media or join my private Facebook group for more tools, support, and possibilities for change. Head to the link in the show notes at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. Way to show up today.
