New Role Now What?

14 | Q & A: How to deal with competition and comparison in the workplace

• Erin Foley

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In another Q and A episode, Erin dives into some common workplace struggles submitted by listeners.  What do you do if you are feeling competitive with a co-worker and it's making you feel anxious?  How do you deal with the feeling that your teammates are more skilled than you?  How do you get over feeling insecure because your colleagues are much younger than you? Erin offers insights on how to manage competition, comparison and the anxieties this creates.  She breaks down strategies that will  empower you to show up in ways that generate confidence, collaboration and the best possible outcome.

We're also eager to hear from you, so don't hesitate to reach out with your queries or topics you'd like us to cover.  Email us at NewRoleNowWhat@gmail.com

Other related links:
Podcast website with transcripts  ErinMFoley.buzzsprout.com 
Find information on working with Erin at ErinMFoley.com

Speaker 1:

We have another great Q&A episode for you Today. I'm going to answer listeners' questions and I'm going to talk to you about competition, comparison and collaboration. So tune in, hello, hello, welcome back friends. Welcome to my second Q&A episode. So excited, loving doing Q&As. I love hearing from you all. I want to thank you all for reaching out. Many of you have told me how much you're loving the podcast, how helpful you're finding it, and it's just so great to hear from you. If you are tuning in and you are liking this podcast, I would love for you to help me out by rating and reviewing it. It helps other people find the podcast and it makes it possible for me to continue bringing you all great content, so help me out.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so, on today's episode, I'm going to be answering two questions submitted by listeners and we have a theme for today, and that theme is competition and comparison with other coworkers and colleagues. This is a really common topic for my clients. Two of y'all gave me great questions around this that I know will be helpful for so many of you who are listening. So what I'm going to talk about today is why it can be problematic to be in a state of scarcity scarcity competition, specifically how to ease comparison, how to shift into a mindset that allows competition to work for you, not against you, and how to shift into a productive, collaborative mindset, and when that might make more sense. So let's dive in to listener one. I always love saying that Listener one. You wrote in and said I'm in a job that I love and I'm finding myself in competition with a new hire. We're stepping over each other to get to the work. How do I handle this? And listener one also gave me a little bit of context before this question about having dealt with a similar situation in a previous job, and so I'm sure that that, on top of it happening again, is creating a lot more of that fear and fight or flight reaction.

Speaker 1:

So I want to start by saying this the feeling that you're having of being threatened, feeling competition, it's very natural. It's always important to me on here that I start off by really eliminating any self judgment that might be going on that I see people bring to me all the time in my sessions this feeling that like I should be above competition or I should know better than doing this, and I just want to offer you that you are designed for competition. Your brain's designed for competition. You're designed for a lot of comparison. Your brain is designed to look at the group, to measure, look at how you measure, to look at if you're going to be able to survive or be seen as someone who can contribute in this group. It's all very instinctive, and so it makes total sense that this is creating this feeling of panic for you and creating this competition feeling and this maybe tension between you and your coworker. But I also want to say this that you are also designed for collaboration and connection. So just because one part of the brain is getting really triggered doesn't mean it's the most useful part, and we can tap into other parts of your natural instincts that will work more for you in this situation.

Speaker 1:

So ease any self judgment that you may be having. If you are, or if any of you who are listening that are feeling this are in a state of self judgment, do not judge yourself for this. Okay, it's really natural. But it can be problematic to be in this state of competition for a couple of reasons, and here's the reasons that I'm going to talk to you about why I think you need to be weary if you feel yourself in a ton of competition and especially if the competition has a feeling of scarcity around it. For you right, there's like a feeling of productive competition where you feel motivated and engaged and excited, and then there's a feeling of scarce competition where you feel a lot of fear and anxiety and like their success is going to mean your failure, et cetera. So what I find is that sometimes the state of competition can really reinforce that scarcity and it will shift you out of competing with yourself or competing with your own goals and into really focusing on the other person.

Speaker 1:

And this can be extremely exhausting for people and it can be really unfulfilling, like it's. It's kind of like you can light the flame with this at first, but it's really hard to sustain it. So people might feel this like big dopamine hit and this big intense drive of like I need to compete with this person, I need to be better, I need to show up, kind of lights the flame and gets us all fired up, but then trying to sustain that becomes really exhausting and it feels sort of isolating and it can start to feel anxiety producing. So I see this work against my clients all the time. I also think it can create conflict and mistrust with your coworkers in in ways that it doesn't need to and it can really keep feeding that, create tension, which makes your job more exhausting, which makes you feel icky about going into work.

Speaker 1:

And the other thing that I see that I find really important, and something that I really look out for when I'm working with people, is that when people get in this really scarce competitive mindset, it can create so much fear for you that you actually show up less powerfully that you're. You're in like a state that's kind of needy and you're moving between, like Trying to fight for being worth it to questioning yourself. It can disconnect you from like your best thinking and your best performing. It like takes you out of the part of your brain where you are going to be functioning at your highest potential and highest capabilities. So this I feel like is likely happening with you, listener one the fact that you wrote this in your feeling some negativity around it. It's not feeling like it's motivating you, are making you excited. It's feeling like it's working against you.

Speaker 1:

So I want to offer you three key takeaways to help you shift out of this. The first is I would just want to point out that collaboration is also very instinctive, very natural for us and it's an easy part of the brain that we can tap into, because we have such a desire for belonging, connection, that sense of shared success that we feel when we've accomplished something with you, when we've accomplished something with someone. It really is a fulfilling emotion as humans to be in that space of collaboration. So I want you to start tapping into your collaborative mindset, and what helps me tap into that is just reminding myself that we are on the same team and you literally are on the same team in this space because you're both working for the same company, you're both working under the same supervisor. So, overall, your department has specific outcomes that it's trying to reach and both of you are a part of bringing the department to those outcomes.

Speaker 1:

So one of the things that I like to offer is just really dropping into this idea that her success is my success and my success is her success. So I want you to really look at the fact that you're both working towards the same overall outcome and if it's true that you both produce great work with great outcomes, how will it be beneficial to the success of your department, the success of the company and then your overall success or job security. I want you to like zoom back a little bit and look at it from a larger lens. Right that, if we're both really crushing it and we both produce insanely good outcomes, it's going to serve everything. It's going to make our department more successful, it's going to make our jobs more successful, all of it. So what's happening is that your brain is offering you that her presence is diminishing your value, and I want you to play with the idea that her bringing, being brought into this role and her being there is actually increasing your value, and I want you to think about how that might be true and in what ways is that true?

Speaker 1:

So there are specifics to your job that I don't know there are. You know circumstances and logistics that are unique to you, but a few things that I'll offer you are this you might have more time to work on the work that you have and produce higher quality work, because it's all not being thrown at you. She's going to have some of it, you're going to have some of it. You both control upon each other's strengths, so it's likely that you all are going to have some uniqueness in terms of your knowledge and your skills, and she may be better at one thing, you may be better at something else, so how can you draw on each other's strengths to make your job easier, to make her job easier and to make it more successful for both of you? And you can think about it as having an ally that if you have a situation where you know you need to bring something to your supervisor that's really affecting you and your work At the level that you're working, having someone else in the pool with you, so to speak, means that you all can be allies for each other. So I want you to really drop into this.

Speaker 1:

We are on the same team mentality and it really is a mental shift that you can make yourself. It's like flipping a switch, like I can be in a conflict with my partner and remind myself that we're on the same team and something in my head flips and I start to communicate with him as if we're on the same team, and I can feel the shift in the entire dynamic of what's happening. Right, it becomes less about when versus losing, and more about like how do we both win in this situation? What are we trying to get to? The second thing I want to offer you that I know some of you are possibly like saying aloud right now, as you're listening to this, some of you are thinking, yep, like I have a co-worker, but like they're going to still be competing with me even if I try to shift into this. They don't want to collaborate, they're not receptive, all of it.

Speaker 1:

Right, it's really common to for me to hear this and it's really common to feel like maybe the tensions coming from both ways, or both ways we're both competing with each other and I've tried to not compete, but she's still competing. So here's what I want you to know you don't need her to change for you to feel differently, and this is key and freeing and so helpful. This has helped me in my life in so many ways. She can compete with you without you competing with her, and this sounds crazy and it is something that I did not really understand at a cellular level until I put this into practice in my own life. That I had I've had many times, but in one particular instance, I had someone who I could feel this competition tension with. Maybe I was projecting it all, maybe we were both doing it, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

But what I know is that I wanted to test out this idea of me stopping the competition on my side, and so I thought about it like dropping the rope, like both of you are holding onto this rope and you're kind of pulling back and forth, and I decided I'm gonna drop the rope on my end, I'm gonna stop competing, I'm gonna start engaging with her from a space of being on her team, rooting for her success and noticing how I feel and what shifts in the dynamic. And there's a couple of things that I've learned from this that I think are really important. One is that oftentimes the dynamic does shift just when you shift your end. That by me dropping the rope, it actually forces the other person to ease their grip. Frequently Maybe they don't drop it completely, maybe they're still competing at some level, but there's just less tension because I'm not engaging the tension at all. I'm staying in the space that we're on the same team. I want you to succeed, I don't need to be in a scarcity mindset with you, and so I drop that and often I notice that it does ease it, if not completely shift it with the other person, when it doesn't shift it with the other person.

Speaker 1:

What I have learned that I think is really important is that it doesn't matter that for me, being in the headspace of we're on the same team, collaboration feels so much better. It's more motivating, it's more engaging, it has less anxiety for me, which means I show up performing better. I actually show up feeling more clear and focused and able to do the work. So when I am in the space of we're on the same team and I'm not competing with you, I experience the emotions of that, regardless of what the other person is doing. So even if they're still in a headspace of competing with me, I don't have to experience that because my headspace is I got you, we're on the same team, totally want you to succeed. It's fine, I'm gonna keep doing my work and showing up and looking at the larger goals and bringing the value that I bring to the table. And a lot of you will feel like this sounds crazy until you put it into practice, okay. So I would love for you to try this concept that you don't actually need her to change, but that you are going to now engage in this relationship with her from a space of collaboration, being on the same team, working towards the same goals, and you're gonna see that her presence is a benefit to you and your presence is a benefit to her.

Speaker 1:

The third thing that I wanna offer you is this One of the things that I like to play with that has worked out really well for me and a lot of my clients is to assume that creating value will bring you the right opportunities. No matter what that. As long as you show up in your highest self and you're focused, performing to the best of your ability not perfectionism, just feeling like you are bringing your best self to work and creating value around what you bring to the table, the right opportunities will be available to you. Now here's the thing that I think is important to say about this. It doesn't matter to me if that's true or not. What matters to me is how I show up when I am in that headspace, and for many of my clients, when they are in that headspace, it eases the scarcity and they show up as their most powerful workers. And so, of course, we want you showing up always as your most powerful worker. We want you showing up in your skills, in your professionalism, in your ability to connect with people.

Speaker 1:

So when I'm in the headspace that like, as long as I bring my value to the table, the right opportunities are always gonna show up for me, no matter what. I'm literally showing up in the best way possible for me to get the best possible outcome. So it's really shifting your brain into like an enoughness space. So like one of the perspectives I could offer you in this is just to really challenge the assumption that there's not quote enough work. Right, because if you think there's not enough work, then the two of you are like fighting for it. If you think there's enough work for everyone, it shifts you out of that. But I find that like that can be hard to challenge because your brain might go into like a total argumentative space. It might start calculating all the work. It might be like but there's technically not.

Speaker 1:

So I'm just bypassing that by offering to you that you will be in your highest thinking if you just focus on bringing the value that you bring and knowing that the right opportunities will come from that. So that means if she gets something that you didn't get, you just assume that that was better for her in that moment, and when you get something it's better for you in that moment, you're gonna find likely, as you both move through this role more, that there will be certain things that make more sense for her to do other things that make more sense for you to do. Like I said, she'll have strengths that are a little bit different than yours, and so it allows you to kind of stay in your lane. It doesn't mean that you're not going for what you want. So, for example, maybe there's only one promotion, and so someone listening to this might be like, yeah, but I am competing because there's only one promotion and only one of us is gonna get it For me.

Speaker 1:

I still offer that as long as I stay in creating my value, I know that the right opportunities will be available for me. And what that allows me to do is to not focus so much on the other person and pushing them out, but instead on trusting that the person who's choosing that promotion is going to be able to assess who brings the most value. And I wanna show up in my highest value. I wanna show up my most empowered self, showing them what I'm capable of, talking about my skills, et cetera, and I'm going to assume that the right outcome is gonna come from that. And that always allows me to show up outside of that scarcity, outside of that competition and outside of thinking like there's only one opportunity for me, there's only one piece of work, there's only one promotion. That always creates such a deep sense of scarcity and it really makes me show up less powerfully.

Speaker 1:

So for you, listener one, as a review, I want you to remember we are on the same team and shift into that collaboration space. Right that her presence is not diminishing your value. It's actually increasing your value. You don't need her to change for you to feel differently and show up differently. You can drop the rope. You don't need her to drop the rope. And I want you to really see, try on the idea that if you show up and offer the value that you bring, the right opportunities will be available to you. And I want you to notice if that feels good to you, if that feels motivating for you and if that helps you really focus on your own work and not feel such a sense of scarcity around that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, listener two, you wrote in and said how do you deal with moving into a new career and shifting from being more senior in your previous career to starting at a more entry level in your newer career and being surrounded by individuals on your team who are 10 to 20 years younger yet seemingly, are actually superior in their skills. Okay, listener two, so I noticed that you said seemingly more skilled, or actually more skilled, in your question, which I love because it's showing me that you're aware that you may have a skewed perception of your skills and what you're bringing to the table. I love that awareness. I like that you're questioning it, but for the sake of this question, I'm actually going to let it be true that they are more skilled and I'm gonna work you through that, because I can see that you're in a comparison loop that you it's making you feel bad about yourself. It's likely provoking that sort of natural fear of in-group, out-group. Do I have a place? Can I contribute?

Speaker 1:

And I think it's most helpful for us to offer you some resilience when you are in a space where some people have more advanced skills than you do, and help you be okay with that. So you're not using that against yourself, but you're using that for yourself. So the first thing I wanna ask is what if their increased skills are a benefit to you? Okay, what if it's true that their increased skills are a benefit to you? And I'm going to focus first on their skills, I'm going to drop the age piece and then I'm going to bring the age piece back in, because there's two things I see that are happening here. One is this like I'm newer and all these people in the room have more experience and skills than me. And then the second piece, like the cherry on top of the insecurity, is plus, they're all significantly younger than me, which comes with its own set of assumptions and insecurities. So let's take them as two separate entities. Let's let it be true that they have increased skills in this new career space and more experience. And what if that is a benefit to you?

Speaker 1:

For me, I love being around people who are more skilled than me, more successful than me, more knowledgeable than me. I really do believe and I'm not going to say this was always true for me in my career, but this is definitely how I feel now I believe 100% that it makes me better. It increases my business value, my coaching value, much faster. So the fastest way for me to get better and like up level my coaching is to be around coaches who are better than me. The fastest way for me to up level my marketing, my sales, my business acumen, whatever it is. I often hear the expression. I don't know where it first started. So if you all want to email me and tell me, you can.

Speaker 1:

But if you are the smartest, most skilled person in the room, you want to get into a different room, and I really believe that to be true is, if you want to be growing, if you want to be plateauing where you are and you're comfortable, it's fine. It doesn't matter, right? We don't have an obligation to evolve, but for me, I want to be evolving in my career. For many of you listening, you want to be evolving in your career and your skills. It gives you more freedom, it gives you more capability to move around and try different things. It gives you more buying power, so to speak, in the marketplace. Like, you literally become more valuable, and so you have to be in a room that has people that are more skilled than you for you to grow. So I want you to look at the room that you're in, and there's a couple of things that I want to walk you through. One is how does it benefit you to be surrounded by young, smart, skilled, successful co-workers? Young, smart, skilled, successful co-workers? How does it make you better? How is it going to help you in learning this role? So, when I'm surrounded by people who are quote further along than me.

Speaker 1:

There's two things that I focus on. One is why I'm in the room. There's like a reason you're in this room. There's a reason you were hired from your previous career and a reason they felt like what you brought to the table in your previous career was transferrable into this career. So, no matter the room, if I'm in the room and I've been invited to have a seat at that table, I always connect myself back to what is the reason and I allow it to be true that I have something to offer. And then I offer my insights when I think it's helpful or relevant.

Speaker 1:

Because if I don't get back into my own lane of why I'm in the room, I will get super sidetracked by all the other people, their expertise, what they're bringing to the table, and suddenly I'm like, oh no, I don't know this and I don't know that, but I'm out of my lane. I want to be really clear on why I'm in this room. I want to always assume I have an insight to offer and I will offer it when it's relevant, if it's relevant. And the second thing that I always assume is I'm going to learn so much in this room that I'm going to become significantly better from it. So I don't believe being in the room makes me smaller. I believe being in the room makes me bigger and I'm excited to be in that room and what it does for me is it stops that comparison and it gets me more into curiosity, learning, growing, taking in that information that I don't need to make them my competitors. I need to make them the contributors in the room. I'm contributing, they're contributing and I'm around all of these insanely successful contributors who are going to bring so much value to me and my growth.

Speaker 1:

So the second piece, the question I want to explore, is this discomfort that you feel around them being younger, which is very common and it's likely coming from the belief that you should be more skilled or successful than them because you're older. Okay, they're like oh, I had this whole career. I was senior in my previous one and now I'm in this newer one and I don't want to underestimate that. That's hard to do. It is hard to do. It's hard to leave anything where we feel like we've mastered it. We have a sense of seniority and respect.

Speaker 1:

When I left being a professor and then a speaker and I moved into being a business owner. It was incredibly jarring. It was like I knew what I was doing in one space. I felt like I had mastered it. I felt respected in that space and suddenly I was like, how do you build a business? I was a student of selling, a student of marketing. I was a student of running a business. There was so much stuff that I didn't know that. It was unbelievably jarring to go from feeling like this really competent, capable, skilled adult who was successful to asking the most basic questions to coaches and teachers because I was like I don't know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:

It's jarring, it takes courage and there's a reason why you chose to shift from one career into the other one. It's important that you stay connected to that. So I don't want to diminish it all why it feels so alarming, but I do want to challenge the assumption that just because you're older, you should be further along in some way. Your progress is really only relative to your career journey. It's only relative to that. So there are entrepreneurs who I know who are far more successful and more skilled at various business pieces than I am, who are much younger than me and I learned from them all the time and I'm more skilled than some entrepreneurs who are more older than me, who maybe are newer in the industry or whatever. The reason is right. So I know that it can feel jarring and you're in a culture that has this sort of sense of advancement attached to certain ages, but all of that is kind of irrelevant. People change careers so much now. People shift around so literally I could die tomorrow and so my career ends. I could live to be a hundred and have a career that's 20 years longer than someone else. It's all relative. I want you to challenge the assumption that that you should know more simply because of your age, or you should be further along simply because of your age, and I want you to get back into your own lane. So we need to get you back to looking at your personal career trajectory.

Speaker 1:

What skills and experience did you develop in your previous career? Which pieces are being built on that you're taking with you into this new one? What new skills are you developing now in this new career? So you have it sounds like cheesy coach speak, but you literally have a Career journey that is specific to you. You have like a smorgasbord of things that come that are on your career journey and they really do feed into your own strengths. It's like my career journey of my PhD in organizational communication and then teaching for so many years and then speaking for several years and then getting trained and coaching, like it all blends together to truly be like my unique way of showing up in this industry. And so, even though I started much later than some people in terms of Learning how to run a business, learning how to do one-on-one coaching, I Still bring to the table some very specific things that came from my PhD in organizational communication my ability to teach and break down concepts and explain things. Some of those pieces really served me in moving into this career. And then there were tons of things that I was starting like a baby brand new act. So it's only helpful for me to really be paying close attention to my career trajectory. What skills and experience am I bringing in from my previous career that are serving me, that have gotten me to this point? What am I building on? What am I taking with me? What are the new skills that I'm developing?

Speaker 1:

You're in comparison with your not with yourself, but with your teammates and we want to get you back into comparison with yourself, because if you keep looking at your teammates journey, you're gonna get confused about what you're building off of and what strengths you're bringing in and Even what makes sense for you to develop. I see this happen all the time with people. When people get into intense comparison, they're like, oh, all these people are younger and they have all these skills. They will start to grab at trying to learn all these things because they see it around them in the room and sometimes it's not even relevant to the role that they're in. It doesn't make the most sense for their role, their strengths, their unique career trajectory and sort of what that smorgasbord looks like and how they're gonna utilize that in that role. Right, there's many roles that we can take on, where it can be approached from multiple angles, and we always want to be approaching it from the angle that best suits our own individual strengths. So there's many ways that people can build a business. There's many ways that people can do marketing. There's many ways that people can do sales.

Speaker 1:

For me, I Am staying in my lane in terms of being good at breaking down content, being good at doing podcast interviewing, the way that I communicate. Somebody else can get to the same outcome through a totally different journey by applying different skills. So I want you to get back in your lane. I Want you to get back into what you bring to the table right now, based on your very specific Previous career trajectory. I want you to get back into what skills will most benefit you in developing this role. Get real specific about that so you don't start pairing yourself to all these skills in the room, many of which will not make sense for your role. And then, when you're clear about what skills will most benefit you in developing into this role, then I want you to drop back into how it's true that having these young, skilled, smart co-workers will benefit you in getting those specific skills. Okay, drop back into that. Look specifically at who's in that room. Look specifically at the skills that they're offering and which of those skills Are going to be helpful for you to be around, to be learning from, to be engaging with.

Speaker 1:

Okay, friends, thank you so much to my two listeners for writing in your questions. Those were great, great questions to bring to the table and I know they're going to benefit so many people who are listening. If you have a question or a topic that you'd like me to cover on the podcast. You can email me at new role now what? At gmailcom, or you can message me through my contact page on my website. As always, if you want to learn more about working with me, hop on over to Aaron M as in mindset, fully calm, grab a consultation session. I'll be back with more great content for you. In the meantime, I hope you all have an amazing rest of your week. You.