Ashok Gupta explains how comparing yourself to others feeds anxiety and self-judgment. He uses a 100m-race metaphor to show why staying in your own lane matters, and offers antidotes like praising others and cultivating a sense of belonging instead.
It's the achiever often together with the inner critic that goes into that mode of comparing yourself. And you know, one of the most important messages from this program should be, please don't compare yourself to anyone else. Because all that happens is the inner critic says, I'm not as good as everybody else. Look at how well they're doing. The achiever then gets pushed even harder. So you see pushing yourself mentally, emotionally, physically. And then the victim kicks in where, when you don't feel you've lived up to the ridiculous expectations you have of yourself and the victim says, poor me, I'm no good. So you can see how these parts all work together. And the way to think about this is, let's say you have some runners. It's a hundred meter race and people who are professional athletes will talk about this. You got the hundred meter race. Now when you are there right at the beginning of the race, the starting gun goes and you start running. All you should focus on is your path. The moment you start looking left and right at the people on the side of you, you've wasted your precious energy. You've lost those vital few seconds. And not even a few seconds, a few milliseconds by looking left and right. It's about you and your path. There is no comparing yourself to anyone else's path. And why is that? Because each of us comes to our own path. It's not about other people around us. It's irrelevant. Yeah. Are you living your own potential? Not other people's potential, not other people's lives. You are not here to live somebody else's life. You're not here to perform as well as somebody else's. Because there will always be someone who you compare yourself against that's bigger and better in some shape or form, some particular characteristic. That is not what we're here to do. We're here to take our own journey, our own path, and perform it to the best of our abilities in a calm, relaxed, contented way. There's no competition. And people say, well, hang on, I've got. I'm in competition with myself. That's what achievers say, I'm in competition with myself. If you look at it as a competition, you're looking at it in the state of winners and losers. That's what competition is, the state of winners and losers. I'm winning, I'm losing. But your path is your path and you feel contented at any step of your path while at the same time committing to the best of your abilities. Right? So how can that Be imbalanced. They sound like two opposite things. Talked about this idea of setting a vision, the direction that you choose to go, moving positively and with determination towards your vision, but accepting whatever comes up. And by accepting whatever comes up, including not feeling you're as good as others, by accepting whatever comes up, you then reserve your energy. You're able to save your energy and your mind rather than all the anxiety and worry that comes with comparison. Yours is to live your own life well, nobody else's life. And I know that the modern way of education, the modern way of social media, these all contribute to this idea that I need to compare myself to others. Yeah, the biggest fallacy, just want to let go of. And if you do see someone doing well, how do you handle that? How do you stop the jealousy from arising within you? First thing, when you see yourself comparing yourself to someone who's doing good work, great work, doing so well, oh, look how amazing they are, right? But poor me, I'm nothing like that. Which once again is putting ourselves into the victim mode. Again, the first thing that we can do is to be aware of that act of comparing ourselves to others and remind myself, remind yourself of what we've just talked about today. So number one, you're not here to live anyone else's life. It is your own life. Focus on your own lane, nobody else's lane. Secondly, when someone is doing some great work, some positive contribution to society or just doing things well, praise them, be thankful for the contribution that they're making to the world or the improvements that they're making on our planet in some shape or form. And thirdly, feel part of that. The reason we feel a sense of I'm no good, they're amazing. Which is what happens when we scroll endlessly through social media and all people's beautiful pictures and holidays. We think, oh, look how amazing their life is. What we're doing is creating a sense of separation. The ego loves comparison and the ego loves a sense of look at them and how different I am. And we say the ego expresses itself in inferiority complex or superiority complex. The inferiority complex is I'm no good and they're much better. The superiority complex is I'm much better than them. And that turns into a slight layer of arrogance. But even the arrogance is a lack of self confidence at the root. The ego is insecure. And in previous generations we used to compare ourselves to just the local farmer or the people in our village. That's all we had awareness of and therefore it wasn't so magnified. Because we felt a sense of belongingness in that tribe or that community. So someone else doing well in our tribe helped contribute to the tribe. So we felt a sense of family. But now we're exposed to social media, where we compare ourselves to every millionaire and billionaire and every artist and singer, and we feel a sense of separation, a sense of ego. And the way to offset that is to feel joy in other people's success, because you and I are one. We talk more about this in the Meaning of Life Experiment. But when you feel a sense of camaraderie, a sense of belongingness, a sense of oneness with not just your own family, not only your own community, but every single person on this planet, then you no longer feel a sense of separation or jealousy. It's like your own body. Can your hand be jealous of your foot? Why not? The hand can say, I'm brilliant, I'm amazing. Look at that foot is all the way down there where I'm up here doing all the exciting stuff and pressing buttons on the keyboard. Does the hand ever say that? Why not? Because the hand perceives the foot and the leg and the whole body as part of itself, as part of one unit, one body. And so when we're able to feel a sense of belongingness with everyone and praise and feel grateful for all the good work other people are doing, then it enables us to dissolve that jealousy and that anger within us. And people asking, which day of the Meaning of Life experiment do you talk about this? So you can watch day 18 of the meaning of Life Experiment, where we talk about the ego and our sense of separation. Now, the other thing I wanted to add to this is this is how we. These things happen within families, that in our family, a mother doesn't feel jealous, obviously, can be occasional, except situations where that may happen. But a mother doesn't feel jealous of a child because they've done well at school. They feel praised and they feel pride because there is a sense of belongingness and oneness in that family unit. So the antidote to that jealousy, as we said, is to stick to your own lane in the race. Don't worry about anyone else's lane. In fact, it's not even a race, but your own lane, and really feel that sense of belongingness to the people around you.
