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Turn envy into inspiration

When we use comparison in the correct way, we can take advantage of its power to influence how we feel and behave. Let’s say you’re working to improve your skills in your favourite sport and you know that you have a specific weakness that holds you back. In this scenario, some upward comparison with a player who has managed to master that skill offers you a huge opportunity to learn from them and improve your own skills in the process. But for that to happen successfully, your comparison needs to get these three elements right:

1. Keep a clear focus on the specific skill you envy in their performance. Be laser-focused on specifics and do not be tempted to make a global comparison between your whole self and theirs. You don’t want to be that person, but there is something in the way they do things that you want to take on board and benefit from in your own life.

2. Prime yourself with a growth mindset. This means keeping in mind that you have agency in your own life and can learn and improve at most things with effort. This mindset will lead to positive action towards your own goals, as opposed to a more fixed mindset that assumes your abilities are unchangeable and some people are just lucky. That mindset will likely lead to more destructive comparisons, bitterness and fractured relationships.

3. Your self-worth remains non-negotiable at all times. It should never be on the line. This is absolutely essential. If your estimation of yourself as worthwhile is measured by others, this is the rogue ingredient that will turn everything sour. Turning envy into inspiration is no problem at all as long as you are not measuring your self-worth by how other people seem to be doing. We can all find someone who is doing better than us at something. But that says nothing about your fundamental worthiness as a human being. If that is never in question, then that gives you a core stability that renders you strong enough to use comparison to your advantage. When the slightest indication of not being the best yet is used as justification in your mind for the belief that you are worthless and doomed to inadequacy, it becomes impossible to work on yourself. The prospect of looking into the eyes of your own imperfections becomes too threatening and too painful. So performance is always workable, but worthiness is a constant. Do not mistake it for self-indulgence. In fact, it demands a complete lack of entitlement. The tendency to assume that good fortune has been simply gifted to others by the universe and the world owes you the same because you are worthy too is more likely to lead to bitterness and resentment rather than the action required to get you there.

To keep this work constructive and not let it dissolve into global criticisms of the self, it requires that we ask questions like:

• What do I feel envious of specifically?
• What specific skills do they have that I would like to have also?
• Would learning those skills help me with achieving my own goals?
• How did they get there?
• Can I imitate any of that process to help me get closer to my personal goals?

This process turns envy into inspiration rather than a tool to hit yourself over the head with. Then comparison becomes a valuable part of the learning process.