How to Deal with Comparison in Our Creative Businesses
You know the feeling when you’re scrolling through Instagram and suddenly you realise your self-confidence has dropped through the floor?
It’s usually also combined with a mixture of feelings like envy, disappointment, a sense of being not good enough, and also panic that you need to get off your butt and go do all the things to keep up.
That’s what comparison does to you, and it can not only be detrimental to your work (because you’re a lot more at risk of trying to imitate someone else or do things that aren’t a good fit for your business or target audience if you’re constantly comparing and trying to keep up with others), but it can also be detrimental to your own mental health and self worth.
Now, I’m definitely no expert in dealing with this - it’s basically impossible to avoid, especially if you have an online business and therefore need to spend all day every day online and on social media. But I thought I would share some of my best tips for dealing with it when it does come up…
Prefer to watch? Check out my YouTube video instead…
Be mindful of who you’re following
It’s very easy to accrue a feed of hundreds of people over time, whose businesses, values and the way they do things don’t even align with our own. I’d always recommend trying to be selective of whose advice you’re listening to, but the same also goes for whose business you’re comparing yourself to. If you see someone more successful than you, but who has done certain things or tried strategies to achieve this that simply don’t fit with your values, then there’s no point in looking to them for inspiration.
Also stop every now and then to consider that they may be much further ahead than you in terms of timescales and journeys in their business. Don’t compare your Step 2 to their Step 10; they’ve probably been where you are and so don’t get frustrated that you’re not like them yet.
Remember you only get the highlights reel
You never truly know what’s going on behind the scenes of someone else’s ‘success’, because people can easily curate their social media feeds to look a certain way or only share the highlights of how their business is going. They might have loads of clients or had a successful launch but they might also be intensely stressed out, overwhelmed and miserable. They might have lost friends or damaged relationships in sacrifice of achieving success, which you don’t really want - right?
Also you don’t know what it has taken for that person to achieve those things. They may have had a helping hand through a personal connection, or financial backing from family for example.
And it’s important to always remember that when someone shares a revenue achievement (eg. “I made 6 figures last month” or “I had a £70,000 launch!”), that they’re usually not referring to profit. They might have made £70k but it could have required them to spend £50k to get to that, so unless they’re being completely transparent about expenses, never listen to numbers.
Check yourself before you go into ‘market research’ mode
Competitor analysis and market research is definitely important when running a business, but before you sit down to do an activity like this, spend a moment with yourself to check that you’re in the right headspace.
If you’re feeling low, having a ‘down day’ (on your period maybe!!), or struggling with confidence in that moment, that is NOT the right time to go on a deep dive into your competitors’ businesses. If it helps you could sit with someone else outside of your business to do market research activities, to keep perspective and have a cheerleader for yourself (when we all know it’s hard to be a cheerleader for ourselves sometimes!).
Don’t be afraid to Mute / unfollow
If you keep finding yourself left with negative feelings after seeing someone’s posts online, it’s perfectly okay to unfollow them. Chances are they’ll never notice, and if they do, you can explain that seeing their content was steering you off track.
Or if you really can’t unfollow them, you can always temporarily mute them instead until you’re feeling in a better headspace.
A great tip is to head over to the list of people you’re following on Instagram, and you should see a ‘Most Shown In Feed’ section. This is a list of all the accounts that get shown to you regularly (sometimes you just end up with accounts being shown to you all the time simply because they keep being shown to you all the time and you keep engaging with the post either deliberately or not deliberately - it’s a vicious circle!), so gives you the opportunity to curate this and mute/unfollow anyone who’s distracting you.
Keep your eyes on your own goals & values
Comparison truly is just a form of distraction. You’re distracting yourself by wondering what other people are doing and how they got to where they are, rather than focusing on your own goals and values, and coming up with unique solutions on how to get there.
As I say, research is important, but if you’re getting distracted with ‘shiny object syndrome’ (eg. “Oh, this person’s doing that so I should do that too!”) or losing sight of what’s important to YOU, then this can be damaging to your business.
Further reading: Goal setting and quarterly planning (+ free workbook) to help you stay focused
Celebrate your small wins
If you’re constantly comparing yourself to others, your successes will never feel like enough. EVER. Because (and I know this isn’t nice to hear, but it’s true) there will ALWAYS be someone out there who is bigger / more skilled / richer than you.
But lucky for you, life is not a competition, and so you don’t need to compete with other peoples’ achievements. Stay focused and celebrate when you hit YOUR goals that you’ve set for yourself, because otherwise you’ll never be celebrating (and we all love celebrating)!
Practice personal development
Sometimes you can find yourself stuck in a comparison rut when you feel like you’re going too slowly. Maybe learning a new skill is taking too long, or your business growth just isn’t what you expected.
But what a lot of people don’t realise is that those business owners who have seemingly achieved great successes and growth, will ALL have spent time and money investing in themselves and their business development. They will be spending money to make more money, and getting help to learn and improve on skills effectively.
This is why you see so many successful business owners talk about hiring coaches, joining programmes, or taking courses to help with the growth and get them to the next level. I’m not saying it’s a necessity, but if you really look behind the scenes at a lot of the businesses you admire, it’s highly likely they’ve had help through one of these mediums and have invested heavily in themselves to get to where they are.
Take a look at the online courses I offer if you need help with anything marketing related.
Adopt an ‘abundance mindset’
This sounds like some woo-woo buzzword fluff, I get it. But in basic terms it just means believing and knowing that there is enough work to go around. The antithesis is having a ‘scarcity mindset’, where you believe there’s a limited amount of opportunities and so you end up looking at other people as competition and like you’re all fighting for the same opportunities.
Coming at everything from a sense of lack or scarcity can make you appear unstable, negative, or even graspy - your audience can sense this! Meanwhile approaching your business from a place of abundance can help to free you of comparison and make you feel and come across as more confident and relaxed.
Remember, you are not your work
As freelancers and business owners, it’s natural to feel some of your identity is tied around the success of your business or the quality of your work. It’s easy to take criticisms and failures personally, but my biggest tip is to try and remember that you are not your work.
We are humans with complex and uniquely different lives, personal circumstances and passions, and we cannot tie our self worth with the output of our businesses, because we are all so much more than that.
If you start to lose confidence when you see what others are doing, try any take yourself out of your work headspace for a moment. Take a walk, see friends and family, or work on a hobby for a while, to help you get a sense of perspective and remind yourself that work / business isn’t everything. It might feel like it sometimes but it’s not. You are you.
