As. We. Know. Them.

I’m no stranger to the art of comparisonitis - if I have met you, I have compared myself against you. And usually, I come out on bottom.

It’s something I recall doing in my teen years - teenage girls can be emotionally brutal to others, and themselves. My 16 year old niece tells me stories about her friends and their relationships and I shudder with my own memories.

Comparing is when we contrast our life to those of others, AS WE KNOW THEM. Now that second part gets lost in a lot of how we compare - because we believe we know someone from a snapshot of who they are - possibly on social media, possibly during a brief meeting at an event or party or in the school yard. We compare with others as we know them.

You’d like to think that because we’re intelligent and worldly wise people that “as we know them” is a great buffer in comparisonitis.

It’s not.

Comparison can be a good habit, it can encourage us, it can motivate us, and it can show us what is possible. I often show the things I do on social media with a clear message of - if I can do it then YOU can.

But comparison can lead to bad feelings - it can leave us feeling anxious, full of self doubt and feeling less than…

The beauty is, it’s normal. We all do it.

So, what is the Social Comparison Theory?

• Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory 1954 –This theory focuses on a belief that individuals want to gain accurate self-evaluations.  The theory hypothesizes that people have greater tendency to compare themselves to someone who is quite similar.  He argues that we are driven to assess our abilities and opinions to determine whether we are good enough and set a level of aspiration or benchmark. Source: Festinger's Social Comparison Theory 1954

That’s quite a lot of information to chew on - in layman’s terms we compare ourselves to people who we believe are similar to us. And the assessment of comparison leads us to question if we are good enough - or not.

Above all, if you take one thing away from this, please let it be those four words…

AS WE KNOW THEM.

Until next time…

L xx