You go onto social media and see reels, posts and ads of other entrepreneur’s wins, techniques and results. You read stories and testimony of all the ways someone else in your same business is crushing it. Your heart falls and your mind spins.
“Why aren’t I doing that?”
“How can she be doing so well?”
“Look at her business, it’s so much better than mine.”
You spiral down a path that has you reeling. You want to rewrite your planned posts, download quick tips and do a program to boost your growth. You second-guess all of your plans and strategies. You’re flailing, so start consuming more and more content until you completely lose yourself.
STOP.
Seriously stop.
Take a deep breath. Drop your phone. Walk away from your computer.
If there’s one thing I know from being in business for more than 30+ years, it’s this: Comparing yourself to others NEVER works out for you.
NEVER.
You are unique. Your offerings are unique. Your ability to work with others is unique. Period.
Your irresistible power play is to be uniquely you. When you do, you create a loyal follower base, draw those followers into your world and attract your soul mate clients.
Therefore, your growth is only limited by your ability to remember you are YOU.
Once you remember YOU, you realize there’s no true competition from others.
Without competition from others, you have a lane in the marketplace that’s untouchable.
Without competition from others, you make connections without having to worry about them trending into your lane.
Without competition from others, you generously share your value beyond your followers to create more impact for a wider audience.
Competition
However, there are actually advantageous ways to compete. Let’s explore competition a bit more to see if there’s a way it can help propel you in business and life.
When competition is all about yourself and all about striving, reaching and achieving, it’s good, healthy and all about self-improvement. It may be an advantage to pace yourself against something to ensure you’re staying on track. If desired, pace yourself against your strategies, plans and targets. Pace yourself against milestones such as; seasons, quarters or holidays. Healthy competition doesn’t involve comparison to anyone else. Everyone is too unique to have a comparison that makes any sense anyway.
The disadvantage of competition that involves comparing yourself to others and this leads to two things:
1) Self-doubt. You merely have to read the beginning of the article to see how this plays out.
2) Lack. Perhaps you judge another person and try to rationalize why they've gotten what they've gotten. Once you begin to judge, you rationalize your position and it may not be where you want it to be. This creates a force to hold you back. Also, from an energetic perspective, you’re creating a lack by sheering off your ability to expand.
Instead, you want to be reaching out to others, connecting and generously collaborating. This one act propels your business exponentially.
Collaboration
In recognizing your strengths and the strengths of others and then combining them, there’s exponential growth that happens because there's exponential opportunity.
You connect your gifts to those of another and do things together, formally or informally. It lifts you up, lifts your collaborator up and lifts both of your audiences.
Have you noticed how inspired you are when you meet someone else and decide to do something together?
It’s intoxicating.
When you relieve the competitive edge and enter collaboration from a truly generous standpoint, you shine more brightly to become a magnet to the marketplace. Ensure it’s a win-win scenario for those you’re collaborating with and you have the formula for sustained outreach and growth.
This does not mean you should not do an executive assessment of those you work with occasionally. Whether the team consists of two people or more, there needs to be quality assessment occasionally. This helps to maintain the quality of the collaboration. Assessment gives everyone an opportunity to understand their strengths and weaknesses, so they can make changes or get appropriate training.
Do you feel inspired to create more collaborations over competition? Join the upcoming women empowerment event the Women Thrive Summit happening in March where women are rising and thriving together.
Kim Woods, Author & Intuitive Business Strategist, teaches high-performing entrepreneurs to Know, Like and Trust themselves, creating radical levels of satisfaction in every aspect of their lives.
Kim’s a highly sought-after business leader with countless master-level intuitive certifications paired with 25+ years of C- suite business experience. She’s led 150+ corporate executives, overseen $65M+ in sales and influenced 300,000+ team members. Kim has an incredibly solid depth of field for combining business with intuition, creating shockingly transformative results. Her clients range from Fortune 500 companies & $MM CEO’s to solopreneurs and creatives.
Her website: www.kimwoods.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimwoodschannel/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimewoods/
WRITTEN BY
Raimonda Jankunaite