It’s true that other people’s success can sometimes bring out some not so positive feelings in us.

I’ve certainly got stuck for far too long in anxiety and low self-confidence after comparing myself to others.

And even with the support of friends who remind us we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, and that we are doing great, it can be hard to snap out of these feelings.

BUT what if other people’s results didn’t impact how we feel about ourselves? And what if they actually helped us to achieve greater things too?

I wanted to tell you about my own experience of really getting stuck in comparison. If we wind back the clock to when I first took my business online and I launched my membership, The Modern Marketing Collective.

As I’ve said before, I’m a pretty quick action taker. I came across the idea of a membership and a couple of weeks later I opened the doors to mine. I had a pretty big goal for the number of students that I wanted to enrol.

But the thing was, this goal didn’t come from the number of people that I currently had on my email list, or the people that I had in my audience, or the price point of my membership.

The number that I set was purely based on a number that I saw someone else had in their membership. Not to mention, they had a different price for me. They’d had totally different steps to get to where they were compared to me. Or that they’d had their membership for much longer than me too.

And so I went ahead, I launched my membership, and I didn’t get close to the number of people that I had my goal set at.

The thing was the goal I had set for myself wasn’t based on data. It was only based on what I saw someone else having achieved just from the outside.

And for a while after this, it wasn’t too healthy. I felt triggered by a lot of different things. If I saw other people’s posts on social media who I felt were more successful than me, I felt that reflected on me. I felt like I was really crappy. I felt anxious, I felt like such a failure.

But I realised – after way too long feeling like this – that I wasn’t going to be able to move forward and that this wasn’t going to get me to where I wanted to be if I kept on comparing myself to other people.

So what did I do?

Well, I started taking control and taking ownership of my own results. I’d spent enough time wallowing. So I started focusing on my numbers and on my data. I understood my conversion rates in my business and I began to understand what the levers were that I needed to pull to get the results that I wanted in my business.

No longer was I just hoping that my business would grow and that I would get to the levels that I saw these other people at. Instead, I actually began to understand how I could grow my business, how I was in control, and what actions I needed to take. And with these little wins that came, I began to feel more confident. These are the wins that I was having for myself and the wins that my students were having too and I started to believe in myself again.

I began to realise that I was enough and my energy, that was unique to me, that was enough too, and that would attract people to me. I didn’t need to be like anyone else.

In fact, I had someone just the other day say to me, “Emily, this person’s doing this. She’s your competition.” Nowadays, I don’t really feel like someone else is my competition. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people that you could say might be my competition, because they market to a similar audience, and they have similar products that they sell.

But the thing is the truth that I know is that we all have our own energy, and people will be attracted to me that aren’t necessarily attracted to someone else. And people will certainly not be attracted to me and my energy and what I share and how I show up when they will be so attracted to other people.

There’s really no point trying to be like anyone else, and there is certainly no point in comparing our results to someone else’s. They’ve had a totally different journey to get to where they are. We don’t know their numbers behind the scenes.

So instead of feeling like someone else’s success reflected somehow on me, I actually now use it as inspiration to show me what is possible.

Now, you might have heard of the term before. It’s called an abundance mindset, which is actually the flip side or the opposite of having a scarcity mindset, which is the belief that there’s never going to be enough, whether it’s food or money or business or something else. As a result, when you live in this space, your actions and thoughts stem from a place of lack instead of believing there is plenty to go around. This scarcity mindset leads to jealousy, and as I can attest, feelings of inadequacy and competition when others have success.

Now, you might have heard of the author Stephen Covey. He wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In his words, he says,

“Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the scarcity mentality. They see life as having only so much as though there was only one piece of pie. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everyone else.”

But as entrepreneurs, we have total control over our results. But what gets in the way is what we tell ourselves and what we make things mean.

In fact, I’ve had a couple of people just recently in the last few days or so say to me, “Look, everyone else is taking their business online right now. There’s not going to be any space for me.” Or, “Everyone else is doing this.”

That’s a sign to me that it’s probably a bit of scarcity mindset. That if other people are doing something, it means there’s less for you.

I want you to ask yourself first of all, is that true? How accurate is that? I also suggest that you be selective about who you surround yourself with. And this is something that I’ve done over time too because some people are pretty negative and don’t have the best mindset and can live in that place of lack and scarcity. They can bring your own energy down and actually make your dreams smaller and think that you can achieve less.

Remind yourself that you actually just cannot compare yourself to anyone else. You just can’t. Their steps to where they are, are totally different from yours. Remember, you’re in total control of your results. Take ownership, focus on your numbers, focus on your data, understand the levers to grow your business and then use this to inform where your results should be. Compare yourself to yourself last month.

Remember, there’s enough for everyone. Another’s success doesn’t mean there’s any less for us. In fact, it shows us what’s possible. And lean into the fact that your unique energy attracts your own people.

So how can you use comparison and competition to actually move you forward?

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