Competing and comparing are part of everyday life. From when we are young, and agonise over what everyone else got in the times tables test, or who came first in the running race, we’re conditioned to look around us, to see how others are doing, and strive to do better than them.
Life Coach and NLP Practitioner, trainer andfacilitator, Kazuhiro Hosoya, believes that trying to compete can actually send our business backwards, and should be avoided as a strategy in your business, and personal life.
“I was always trying to grow my NLP business by looking at what others were doing and trying to do it better. I was stressed out and actually really not growing that fast,” said Kazuhiro.
Kazuhiro realised that looking around at others actually restricts business growth instead of increasing it; “When I decided to stop competing and worrying about what everyone was doing, my business actually ended up tripling in size, with no huge effort. The right clients came to me, and it was so much less stressful.”
If you’re obsessed with what your business competitors or work colleagues are doing and causing you to feel inner conflict, stress or anxiety, here’s some advice from Kazuhiro:
- Focus on yourself – People need to realise that by comparing with other businesses and people, and trying to do a better version of what they’re doing, actually cuts you off to so many other creative possibilities. You become so focused on doing what they’re doing, you don’t see all the other opportunities to do things better in a totally different, original, and maybe more profitable way.
- Affirm what your values are, and reflect this in your work or business – When you compete with someone, in business – or life – you can end up mimicking them by trying to emulate their strategies and ideas. This can create a business that’s not really aligned to your own values, or lead you to become someone you’re not, which (in my observation of all these years working in personal development) never ends well.
- Trust your own gut-feeling – Experiment with your intuition. Comparing with others over your own understanding of yourself, can feel heavy and difficult. By just going your own way, and following your own inspiration, this feels so much better, and creates less inner conflict, anxiety and internal stress. It takes a lot of energy to always be comparing how this person, or that business is tracking, and then worrying that you’re not doing as well. Free up that headspace to drive yourself forward.
While competition can kill your business spirit, it can also affect you on a personal level. If you let the projections of the business, social media and digital world inform you to believe you need to compete to be as happy, beautiful, wealthy, successful as how everyone else appears, this will create problems. Be you, be uniquely you, trust yourself, and see how much easier and more abundant that makes every aspect of your life.
Kazuhiro Hosoya is a business and speaking coach, counselor and hypnotherapist. Growing up in a small town in Tochigi, Japan, he became fascinated with self expression, communication and the human mind. For the last 11 years Kazuhiro has been a certified trainer for the American NLP Association, coaching people in business and communication.
