Competition
Speaker 0: Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety specialist private practice therapist, and total mental health geek. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and I'll teach you what you need to know to have emotionally healthier and more peaceful way of life. I promise a little free mental health education can't hurt. We should have had it much earlier, but It's never too late to learn.
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Let's dig in. Hi there. I'm so glad you decided to stop in for a little bit of a lesson today. I'm try to keep this one short, actually. What I wanna talk about today is something that pops up in relationships that is never very helpful.
And that, my friend, is competition. Have you ever been in a relationship where A little bit of competition is a good thing, but a little too much competition is really not a good thing. It can be a friendship, a sibling relationship, or any family relationship, or a romantic relationship. Even at work. Right?
But there's something about competition that kind of isn't really working with our best selves. And I wanna talk about it today because I think that we can achieve what we're looking for from competition a different way without alienating ourselves and others. So If you have any relationships in which you feel like there's a little bit of a spark of competition or a lot, stick around because I will help you reduce or eliminate this destructive element of relationships. But first, I want to remind you that I am such a crafty naveen. I talk on this podcast a lot about overthinking, trying to quiet that busy mind.
I talk a lot about how to regulate our nervous systems and calm down, and I try to help you guys figure out how the heck to find a little peace, you know, in your lives. And me too. And I am such a visual person. That I made an awesome visual guide to doing all these things, finding peace, quieting the busy mind, calming that nervous system. All you have to do is jump over to takeouttherapy dot com, and you can download this awesome visual guide that I made for you, bright persnickety.
I don't know. Just go get it if it interests you. I love visuals. Like, when I'm working on something, I put up a visual that has to do with that thing. You know?
So let's get back to competition. Shall we? Like, I wanna talk about this because I think that people, first of all, have no idea that they're engaging in competitive stuff within their relationships And more importantly, we don't really understand how it impacts our relationships because it's if something's hiding under the surface of things, then we're not gonna really bring it to the surface and talk about it. Right? So competitions, one of those funny things within person to person relationships that kinda hides underneath the the covers.
Right? And so whether you're sort of thinking about, oh, yeah, this person in my life is always trying to compete with me or you're thinking like, yeah, I have a tendency to be, you know, kind of comparison or competition with people, and I don't love that. I'll tell you that it's really important to understand that this big yardstick by which we measure ourselves and others is completely self fabricated. We don't have to compare ourselves to others. I know.
It's so weird. But as a culture, we totally do this. And actually, we're taught to do this. From the time we're really really young. Right?
Like, our culture just celebrates whoever's kinda at the top. And so and and also this happens a lot in families. Right? Why can't you be more like your brother? Would be one example.
Yeah. Right? So there's a lot of kind of origin story for each of us behind this idea of competition or comparison. But basically, the way you can identify it is when you do find yourself holding up this kind of weird, vague, yardstick. And usually, we're not excelling at that point.
Right? Like, usually when we hold up the yardstick, you know, we're just humans. And so we identify what's not good as opposed to, yeah, what we kinda wanna work on, which is, like, trying to see what is good. So we tend to hold up the yardstick when we feel like we need to measure ourselves against other people. But that is so silly that we do that because we're all so unique.
An individual, and we have different skills and talents and perceptions and upbringings and holy moly. It's just not a good idea. To ever compare ourselves to each other, to measure our behavior or our appearance or whatever against other people or against a standard. And yet, welcome friends. This is how culture works.
Right? Of course, it's it's origin story is survival. Survival of the fittest. Right? Because back in the day when we weren't in this absolute shit show that we're currently living in, it was a little more simpler time.
And it was all about survival. And so it was important that we not fall behind our tribe in so many ways. And so this has, like, really deep origin story. Competition among human beings comparison among I mean, among friends, really. Right?
We compare our kids in our homes, in our activities, in our shirts, in our boob size. We discuss other people's missteps first, before we discuss our own so many times. And I think it's really a missed opportunity. Of course, I think that. Because if we were to sort of notice when competition or comparison is happening for us, whether it's coming to us or it's coming from us, there's such an opportunity to see oneself, but we tend to focus on the other person, which is like, you know, an awesome distraction from answering a really hard question, which is like, what's going on here?
What's happening and how do you feel about it? So yeah, we kind of take the shortcut sometimes. We take the shortcut to try to feel better about ourselves when we hold ourselves up against other people or A lot of people do the opposite, which is we take this shortcut to making ourselves feel terrible and not good enough, sometimes don't we? We compete with other people and it kinda sometimes seems like we never really come out on top, doesn't it? And we have to stop doing this, and I will tell you why.
Because it's incredibly destructive to our relationships, to our ability to be in a relationship with ourself, which actually requires some like kindness and validation. Just not being so rude to ourselves. Right? So here is some quick kind of here's what to do about this issue. If this feels like something like, yeah, Rebecca, you're right.
I feel like there's too much of this crap in my life, and I'm gonna try to figure out how to change the script. Whether it's coming from you or it's coming from somebody else. Just start to notice and I will tell you always are three rules that take out therapy is be kind to yourself. Always, when you're doing personal growth work, you're kind of doing the work that requires you to look at your dysfunction. And so, like, you can't be mean.
That's completely it like ruins the whole thing. So we have to be kind. That's the rules. We have to be just kind about what we start to notice. If you start to notice, Oh, friend.
Right? Your yardstick is always out of your pocket. What is up with that? Be kind. Just be curious.
Understand that you got here honestly and you'll get out honestly too. Right? It's just personal growth work. Like, we're all soup we all have things. And if this is one of yours just be kind, that's the rules.
Okay? And then the second rule is be open. To what you find out. Just be open, which requires you to be curious and ask deeper questions. And so I'll give you some questions that you can ask.
So the three rules are be kind be open, be curious. And then you can journal these or you can just kind of think your way through, but honestly, it helps to either journal it or talk about it. Right? So just start to notice like in your life where this idea, this theme of competition comes in. And then ask yourself, what is the situation?
And when people journal, I always give them this journal prompt. What's the situation? What's going on? What's happening? Right?
We gotta know kinda like set the stage for this situation. So you always set the stage. Right? I'm noticing that at work, I am always holding this yardstick up to myself. Like, maybe that's the situation.
Right? Just your objective scene that you wanna set for yourself? What's happening? And then the next question is like, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about the fact that you went hunting for this theme of competition and you found it?
And here it is in your life, and it lives, and it breathes every day, and you are part of that. Right? Yeah. How how does that feel? It's okay if it's difficult, by the way.
Like, personal growth work is kind of difficult. And then the other question is like, okay. So once you sort of express how you feel about what's happening, What is there for you there, my friend? And I know some of you guys just roll your eyes at this question. Like, damn it.
She always says out. Like, what can you learn from this situation. And if you just ask that question, I'm telling you, like, right now, it seems like a silly obscure vague question. But when you get into a situation, when you examine your emotional standpoint, right, like your emotional climate, you're gonna start to learn some stuff about yourself, about your relationships. Maybe you'll pick up on some patterns.
Maybe you'll learn something about your friend. Right? One thing I want to remind you or maybe even just teach you, which I could probably do a whole I think maybe I already have. I could do another episode on judgment. But, like, it doesn't really pay to judge.
Right? So if you realize like, gosh, I've got all these people in my life that are really compare themselves to others and they compare themselves to me or they try to compete with me and I never feel like I'm really measuring up. Right? Like, what's up with that? Like, how is it for me?
What can I learn about myself? Right? There's a pattern there. Like, okay. So for whatever reason, like, you like competitive people or maybe you don't anymore, but maybe used to.
Right? There isn't any judgment that needs to happen there we can just kind of have this objective statement, like, oh, this is something that happens. Okay? And then I'll just say, like, Let go of it if you can. And if it's you that's doing that, what I what I would recommend is for you to just catch it, pause, Maybe, apologize to yourself if you're not being kind, which is just a great way to build that neural pathway.
I'm just like, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be unkind. I know it's kinda silly, but that's kinda the brain works. And if you wanna be nice to yourself, you gotta teach your brain that you wanna be nice to yourself. You know what I'm saying? So you just want to notice what's happening and tell yourself something different.
You just want to apologize, pivot. Right? Like, either just, like, let that train of thought go or think about, say, mantra. I love mantra work, which is, like, just create a little statement of, like, I'm not I'm not doing competition right now. I'm taking a break from from competitive thinking.
Yeah. And then, you know, just just like kind of forgive yourself and move on. It's kind of what I'm trying to get at. It's like it's you don't have to do anything major. Here's the thing.
You're gonna you're gonna still do the same stuff. But what happens after you do it? Is how you start to make change. And so people always think like, oh, I I was trying not to compare, but then I did, so I gave up on that. I'm like, no.
No. No. It's about what you do after the thing. So it's about that pause and that I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.
Right? Like, It's about that little process. It's about asking yourself those questions so that you can know what's just like what's happening for you. Gain understanding of yourself, and you'll be in a deeper relationship with yourself. Yeah.
Competition in relationships will kill connection, period, game over. So whether it's friends or coworkers or lovers, making lists, doing tit for tats, scorekeeping of any kind. Oh my gosh. If you can get out of it, forgive yourself and conduct your relationship some other way because it just doesn't help. It just doesn't help.
Like, communication's just way better. Right?asking for what you need is, like, way better. It's so much less stressful sometimes too. Accepting and loving yourself, it's much easier. Than all of the math required for the list making of tit for tat and the scorekeeping.
Believe me, years ago, I was going through some crap in my upstairs. And I found a list that I had made very early on in my marriage and I laugh right now because I've been married for twenty five years and it's hilarious because I had a whole list of all the things that I did around the house And then I had this really short list of the things that my partner did. And I was holy list making. I also had some grievances. There were some grievances.
One, two, three, you know, like, numbered. That's real bad. Anyways, we all do this. I think it's hilarious because it's silly to think that were the same as people were in relationships with. Of course, we're different.
It's human instincts to compare and to, you know, kinda see what's going on with other people to compete. But we don't have to follow human instinct we can follow our values and we can hold ourselves in high regard and know that, like, you actually don't have to compare yourself to anyone because it's a it's a it's a perceived yardstick. And I say, let's ditch the yardstick. Shall we? Okay.
I'm throwing mine out. That list, I did save it because it was so funny. Maybe I'll get it back out and show it to my partner sometime. We'll see. I don't know that you would find the humor in that.
What do you think? Alright. I'll catch up with you again soon. Until then, ditch the yardstick. Because you're good enough.
We're all good enough. Just for being ourselves, just for being really flawed humans. Okay. See you soon. I'm so glad you joined me today, and I hope it was helpful always make sure to get the appropriate level of help for your unique situation.
Check out the resources at takeout therapy dot com, and hopefully you can find something there. As always, thanks so much for showing up and doing your work, which in a way changes the level of emotional development in your community, in your town, even in the world, yeah, it's kind of a big deal. This podcast is intended as education and prevention, not medical goal or mental health treatment. See you next time.
