Welcome again to my series of blogs relating to the single most powerful book that I have ever read: “Beyond Success and Failure” by Willard and Marguerite Beecher.
I will put them into the context of a struggling marriage or a life that
seems to be spinning out of control.
Now for the fourth idea and how it can be applied to you.
Concept #4:
"Initiative is the opposite of competition, and one is the death of the other. Initiative is a natural quality of a free mind. It is wholly spontaneous and intuitive in its response to confronting
situations as they arise, like the thrusts of a swordsman. The free mind allows one to be an inner-directed person whose responses in action are automatic. Competition, on the contrary, is merely an imitative response that lags behind while it waits for its direction from someone whose head appears to us to be taller and who has been chosen by us to set the pace and direction of our activity. In short, initiative produces spontaneous action, whereas competition produces only delayed reaction to stimuli from a pacemaker!"
Are you a man who:
Looks at others with envy?
Can never seem to get enough of anything?
Can't stop thinking about the guy your wife had an affair with?
Doesn't want to get divorced for fear of never meeting someone as "good" as your wife?
A habit of comparison is a sign that you are not living from your own initiative nor making choices based on your values.
You constantly watch others to see what they are doing and what they have and then judge your own success by how you compare to them.
This incessant focus on what others do creates a dependence on them and leads to only being able to REACT and not taking action according to your own values.
Living from a reactionary stance relies on others to make the first move so that you can then make a counter move and so on. When no one makes a move you sit idle waiting, watching and plotting.
It is a slow and disconnected way of being that makes you a follower waiting for your master’s command and NOT a man of decisive action.
This is how insecure men live!
You don’t need others to decide whether YOU are good or not.
Being reactionary is tiring and relies on constantly taking note of what other people are doing to be able to decide what you will do.
When we are insecure about our own value as a man, we look UP to others who we assume have it all.
This idea of looking "up" places us BELOW them.
We do this to avoid taking responsibly for OUR actions.
If things don't go to plan, then we can simply say "Well, that's because they did (_____________)!"
The opposite extreme of this is when we place ourselves ABOVE others.
This often happens when men discover their wives have had an affair.
They immediately take the moral high-ground and say things like:
"I would NEVER cheat on her!"
Or when referring to her affair partner: "What sort of scum would you have to be to date a married woman!"
What they don't realise is that whether you sit yourself above or below someone else you are binding yourself to them.
You make them your locus of control and you a satellite that orbits around them.
This leads to feeling disempowered and controlled by your circumstances and living in the shadow of others.
Thankfully there is an alternative which is to begin living from your values and start CREATING what you want from life.
4 Steps to breaking your cycle of competition and comparison:
1. Bring your focus back to you.
When you are comparing yourself to others you are directing your focus to things OUTSIDE of you.
As you have no control over these things and can only observe them, its easy to become obsessed about what others are doing while not doing anything yourself!
As we are not doing anything to create change, we get frustrated that we are not progressing and look to blame others for where we are in life.
The next time you find yourself stuck in a thinking cycle I want you to bring your full attention and focus to how you are feeling and where in your body the feelings arise.
NOTE: This works for ANY uncomfortable thoughts that come up.
Take note of:
How your head feels
Where are you hot/cold?
Where is there tension?
Where are you relaxed?
Now I want you to deliberately slow your breathing down.
Take 5 deep breathes where you take just as long to exhale as you did to inhale. Breath DEEP into your belly and keep your attention only on you.
We cannot be stuck in our heads when we are breathing into our bellies.
Next go into depth and consider:
Its shape
Its texture
Would it have a smell/taste?
Would it have a sound?
What you are doing is separating yourself from your feelings.
2. Take control over your imagination
Depending on how you experience your thoughts of comparison you can use one of two options.
If you HEAR an inner voice, imagine it's playing on the radio and begin to manipulate it:
Speed it up or slow it right down.
Change it to a cartoon character (Elmer Fudd and Eric Cartman from South Park work well).
Change the accent
Now notice how you feel when you hear the same the thoughts!
If you SEE things, imagine you're watching it on a TV and begin to manipulate it:
Change it to a black and white film
Play with the genre (Musicals and Kung Fu films work well)
Imagine pressing fast forward and rewind
Now, whenever you find yourself being sucked into competition with someone via your thoughts you can simply OBSERVE what is happening inside you, disconnect from it and continue moving forward in your own way.
3. Find your humanity
This may be the hardest things to do but it's also the most powerful.
Whoever you are placing yourself either above OR below, they are human like you!
They are no better nor worse. They just are.
We are all made up of the same stuff and all of us have the same capacity for good and evil.
There are more commonalities than differences between us. The moment you connect to that, you take back control over your own choices and actions and stop seeing others as your leader.
You begin seeing them as just like you - doing the best that they can.
You EMPATHIZE with them.
Their journey starts to look much less interesting as you begin planning and travelling your own.
When you can take responsibility and lead yourself, then you can lead others as well.
4. Always live from your values
To live from YOUR values is to make decisions for yourself!
The actions of other people don't have the power to determine how YOU show up in life.
When my life was spinning out of control, I realised that it wasn't the things that were happening around me. It mas me constantly REACTING to those things that took away my confidence and
strength.
I never felt like I got a choice.
Everything I did was AFTER someone else had made their move. It felt like I was always dealing with problems instead of making strides towards creating something different and new. Every decision felt like it was a countermove instead of a conscious choice.
I constantly watched others to see what they were doing and what they had and then judged my own success by how I compared to them.
In other words, I judged how I felt on the inside based on what I saw on the outside.
This is a common human form of “dis-ease”. The authors claim that 90% of the population lives in "competition" mode and only 10% manage to escape.
*****
Good News - You're a Ten Percenter!
How do I know this?
Only "Ten Percenters" read articles like this all the way to the end!
Ten percenters recognize the importance of connecting with people that they can learn from and see that competition keeps you looking to others for direction and validation.
If this article gave you a wake-up call I would love to have a long, deep conversation with you about what YOUR next steps are going to be.
I know because this is how I became a Ten Percenter!
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