A human brain comes pre-programmed with a comparison mindset. Judgment and comparing is our brain's default thinking. It is part of our survival package. Think of it like an app that comes pre-installed on your phone.
The danger to keeping this default thinking is that it uses your energy. Our energy is a limited resource. When we waste our energy on comparison we are not left with enough energy to create the results that we actual want in our lives.
This mindset makes you feel like whatever you are doing is not enough. That your life is lacking. It causes us to grade our happiness and even our value against the lives of others.
Comparison makes happiness a moving target.
A perfect example of this happened in a recent client session. The client came to the session with great feelings of disappointment and sadness. She was feeling these emotions because she had recently listened to one of her favorite podcast and the host had described her marriage as "magical".
She then started comparing her own marriage to the host's marriage and felt sad that she felt her marriage wasn't as "magical" as how the host described her marriage.
The irony of the story was that the previous day, unbeknownst to my client, this podcast host announced that her marriage was ending. So my client was judging her marriage as lacking to a marriage that wasn't even in existance anymore.
She actual said that she really did like her marriage but when she heard how this host had described her marriage as "magical" it made her start questioning the value of her own marriage.
This is why comparison is the theif of joy - when we compare we ususally don't have all the facts of see the whole picture. We know the dangers of this especially with consumption of social media. We have to constantly remind our brain that we see and hear filter versions of people's lives and rarely the whole picture.
Because my client used her energy to compare it put her out of alignment with her own life.
How do you know when your car needs an alignment? Your car will start driving crooked, tires squealing or noisy vibrations. All of these are signs that your car is telling you that you need a repair. Do you know that even a small misalignment will shorten your tires life by thousands of miles, and a major misalignment will wear tires out in a few hundred miles.
Comparison mindset is like your tires not being aligned. It makes a lot of noise in your life and will rob you of energy and focus that you need to achieve your purpose. It takes your focus off your dreams and life and you start focusing on other peoples lives, not your onw.
How do you know when your life is out of alignment?
When you find yourself listening to the noise of comparison. When you start questioning your choices by other people's choices you are using someone else's standards, timelines and goals to judge your life - this is when you know you are out of alignment.
For example, if my client had been focused on her own goals in her marriage, the noise of someone describing their marriage as magical wouldn't have caused her any negative emotion. All of her energy would have been focused on her purpose in her marriage.
So how do you stay in alignment and stay above the noise of comparison? State your purpose. Decide what you want, write it down and repeat it often. It is that simple!
Once you think about it, and say it out loud, writing it down makes it real and you gain ownership. This helps you live above the chaos of the noise of other people's choices.
If you find yourself out of alignment, or feel like you have never found the right aligment for your life, this is where a coach can change your life. A coach helps you get to your higher self.
Our life will always be filled with chaos, distraction, and noise of how other people are living their lives. A coach helps you focus on your higher self and gain the skill of focus on your life. This keeps you in your truer self where seeing how other's are living their life won't cause you pain.