The educational, work, and societal systems are full of decoy that propose interacting through a paradigm of competition. Career paths, “innocent” games that seek a winner, are all based on the same. Those are designed to activate our primitive survival-based reactions. Once they are activated, our way of operating is based on comparison with others.
When this happens, our personal evolution journey pauses, our mind narrows its focus to a person, market, or business, losing sight of the big picture, and we become immersed in someone else’s evolution process. We mirror ourselves and move according to how the other person moves. Our movement comes second, others’ movements come first.
The world is perceived as a source of scarce resources, where there are no opportunities for everyone, activating our survival mechanism where unconsciously something is threatening our survival. In the short term, competing may seem to bring some apparently satisfying results, but in the long term, the risk of experiencing deep frustration is exponentially high.
Competing means handing over our evolution to someone else’s process.
A way to transcend this paradigm is to develop a creator mindset, to generate a deep connection with our evolutionary process and focus on navigating the reactivity of competition, primarily respecting our life journey. Here are 3 points to not get distracted from your own process:
Comparing ourselves to others we consider better than us is our limit
We all have people who inspire us with their development process, from whom we can gain certain perspectives and possible actions to experiment with. However, we need to be cautious because it is very easy to fall into comparison. Subtly, we stop looking at our own experience and keep our eyes gleaming at someone else’s process, assuming that their experience can be ours, when in reality it is not even remotely close or possible.
Comparing ourselves to other people we empathize with or like can end up being the most harmful to our lives if we are not alert. Even when we perceive that a person is in a place that we also aim for, we are limiting ourselves by considering that the other person’s current potential is our same future potential. Who knows what our own potential is?.
What we can argue is that the limit is definitely not ouside, therefore it is not in someone else but in ourselves.
Having a purpose
If you have not developed your purpose or made it conscious, then it has been assigned to you, either by society, family, or school. The purpose is the simplicity of being connected with what makes you the protagonist of your own unique and unrepeatable life, it is the constant awareness of taking what is useful for your purpose and discarding what is not.
Think of yourself metaphorically as an operating system, you open the browser, search for information, and you download the information. When you do this, what you download becomes part of your system, they coexist together, and whatever that contains will be there until the day you want to delete it. Being aware of this allows you to select what you want to keep in you, whether it is dialogue with a person, reading articles, or watching videos.
Define your own rules for you; in any interaction you download paradigms, problems or external processes that serve or do not serve your purpose, you have the freedom to eliminate what you want from your life.
Comparing yourself is also a war
Competing with ourselves is to activate an internal war in us. It’s the false belief that some part of us is not accepted and needs to be changed. If we consider ourselves as creative and expansive beings, instead of competing with ourselves, we understand that every day we are a different version that has nothing to do with the previous one; we learn to transcend our old self.
Like an onion, we peel off layers and layers every day to find our greatest potential. We take action and expand our consciousness to remove what is not useful, with the certainty that tomorrow we will also let go of what we keep today to transcend to a new version of ourselves.
See you in the next letter.
Julian.-