The Comparison Game, with Liz Fosslien

(wind hisses) (mouse clicks) (soft dreamy music) Headspace Studio. (soft dreamy music) (calm music) Hi, my name is Liz, your guest host this week, and welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Tuesday. I don't know about you, but it is so easy for me to think about how green the grass is on the other side, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. Whether it's comparing your career success to a colleague's, or your personal milestones with a friend, comparison can be a deflating and vicious cycle, especially with social media. So today we're going to break it down. We'll discuss where this need to compare comes from, how it affects our work, and how we can begin to measure success in a healthier way. So comparison, unfortunately, it's inevitable, because it's central to figuring out who we are. And historically it was really useful for us to understand kind of where we were in relation to others, because that helped us survive. You know, you might challenge someone to a fight if you could kind of assess that you were bigger than them and could probably take them on. So again, we're really hardwired to compare ourselves to others. And I think it's actually important to remember this because there's a pervasive myth that if you delete all your social media, you will be free of comparison. And we can get into that more. There's certainly an element of truth to that, but you actually are gonna keep comparing yourself. So it's really important to learn the fundamentals of how to kind of keep that comparison in check. And again, comparison is not necessarily bad. Molly and I are really big about things aren't good or bad, they just are. And so how can we navigate them successfully? I think it becomes unhealthy when we become obsessed with it and when we don't know how to compare accurately. So I have a friend who is very artistic and has chosen an artistic career path for herself. And she got a LinkedIn a couple years ago, and I just remember her coming to me after a couple weeks and saying, "Everyone is a vice president except for me." She just felt like she was inundated every single day with people getting promoted. And then she would think about how much money they were probably making, and the house they could buy, and all the things they could afford that she was not able to afford at that point in time. And so that turned into a really negative experience for her because instead of feeling good about this career path that she had so intentionally chosen for herself, she just was like, "Why am I not a VP at a big bank?" I think this illustrates a really common thing that people do that's very negative, which is you just have these surface-level comparisons and then you sort of lean into how bad you feel about it, versus actually comparing the nitty...