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This podcast is a part of the Maisie Media Network, a community podcast for women, by women. Hey, girl, hey, and thanks for dropping into the Switch, Pivot, or Quit podcast. Candid convo for the girl needing a lifestyle plot twist when she's deciding if it's time to switch, pivot, or quit. I'm Ayana Angel, and I am your host, as well as chief encourager and author.
In order for you to hang out with us in this awesome space, all that's required for you to do is sit back, open your mind, and enjoy the show. Hello, good people. I hope you're doing well. This is another solo episode that I am pretty sure you're going to enjoy.
So some of you follow me on Instagram at Ayana.Angel, and some of you don't. Now, for those of you who don't or don't regularly catch the Instagram lives, I'm going to go ahead and drop into this replay, if you will, of an Instagram live that we did a couple weeks ago, and it started off with me going on because I wanted to share a reading from the Quit Playing Small book just to kind of get people inspired and inspired in a way that lets them know that it's okay to feel however you're feeling or to do whatever you're doing, whether it be a lot or a little bit. And then the conversation progressed as you'll hear, and we talked about comparison and a couple other things. So I hope that you enjoy it, and I hope that you are staying safe and doing well out there, and let's just go ahead and get into it.
Your life isn't a race to the finish line. During the course of your career, the location of your finish line may move, and the length of time that it will take to get to the desired point may also change. People who successfully reach what they wanted to achieve always advise enjoying the journey because you will inevitably get to the finish line, but you can never recreate those fundamental moments. Okay, so this is some things to consider.
For y'all who don't know, I'm just reading from Quit Playing Small. The things to consider, did you take in the sights and sounds when the lessons were learned? Did you allow yourself time to value the skills you developed and experiences that were given to you as a result of your journey? Did you develop unbreakable relationships with colleagues?
Were you present? Through your day-to-day experiences, the journey won't always feel enjoyable. You may feel anxious because you want to reach your goal. You want to be the best, and you want to prove to your peers that you are the best.
You want to be valuing in your industry. It's understandable if you feel that way. If you don't regularly check in on yourself, those feelings allow the comparison game to creep into your psyche. Comparing your accomplishments to your peers.
Comparing your life to those you see only online. You can enjoy the journey more when you remove comparison. You are you for a reason. You are gaining the knowledge meant for you.
You are growing into the individual that you are meant to be. There's no ways to become the best version of you. Nobody can beat you at becoming the best you. Keep looking straight ahead and go at your pace.
All right now, it's crazy because I think we're all like in this space right now where we don't exactly know how to feel. We don't exactly know what to do. This is all uncharted territory. So whatever you're feeling and however you're moving, it's valid.
Period. It's valid. You are a human being and you have emotions. You had life going on before all of this.
Life is still going on in the midst of all of this. Sometimes even more so. It's even more intense right now. So there's no right or wrong way to feel.
There's no right or wrong thing that you should be doing. I just wanted to pop in with that little quick entry from Quick Plan Small because I haven't been knowing how I should or want to feel. I've just been kind of doing, you know, doing a little work here and there. But I haven't been trying to stress myself out and put all this pressure on myself to be achieving great things, you know, during this downtime, if you will.
Because every day is not going to feel like you want to try to achieve great things. You know, sometimes you just need to exist. You just need to be. I don't think that will ever be free of comparison, right?
I don't think that there will ever be a day where you don't come across a person or a situation, mainly a person, and not compare yourself. I don't think that that exists. Because I think comparison is a human trait. But I do think you have to check yourself, right?
You have to check yourself in terms of how deep or how far you go down that comparison rabbit hole, right? You have a choice about how far you go in. So how to avoid it? You may not be able to avoid it, but how to navigate it a little bit better, I would say, number one, beef up your own skills.
Really beef up your skills. That in turn helps you to increase your confidence in yourself, what you do, what you bring to the table, you know, like how you present, right? Because a lot of times when you start doing that comparison game, it's because you think that you don't present as well as somebody else. You don't think that you have as much as somebody else.
You don't think that you're doing as much as somebody else. So when you start beefing up your skills and you know that you are pushing yourself and you're doing all the things that you should be doing, that feeling of comparison sort of lessens, because it's like, how can I beat myself up? I'm over here doing. I'm over here working, I'm over here killing it in my own right.
So at that point, when you feel like that and that confidence is there, you can then look at the next person or the next situation or the next thing and think, oh, that's dope what they're doing. You can appreciate it and respect it for what it is, but you know that what you're doing is dope and amazing in your own right. So that's one thing, beefing up your skills and in turn beefing up your confidence. The other thing that I, from my experience is limiting how much you allow yourself to know about others and what they're doing.
If I am not overly concerned with what my peers are doing, I have no room to compare myself to them, right? And it's not, it's not shade or anything like that. It's just, I don't really have time for them. And that is what helps me, okay?
So when I say that, that means I host a switch paper, a quick podcast. But what I don't do is I don't go around listening to my peers' podcast, people who are in the same vein as me or people who are too close and too similar to me. For me, that's not the people I engage with. Know thyself.
And I feel like I don't because I don't want to be constant. It's a couple of reasons I don't. I don't want to accidentally copy you. I don't want to accidentally be influenced by you.
I also don't want to feel, make myself feel any type of way because I see what you're doing and then I start questioning myself. Am I doing enough just by default? Like I don't want that, right? And then also, I feel like sometimes when you are allowing yourself to consume too much of somebody that's similar to you, you just get in your own head too much and you start, me baby, start overthinking things and all of that.
And it's not even necessary. What you're doing could be fantastic. It's just you're now getting in your own way because you're too privy to what this other person is doing. When you're too consumed with other people, it's hard for you to be present and it's hard for you to appreciate the things that you've done and the things that you're doing because you're so busy reminding yourself, because you're comparing, reminding yourself what you haven't done, what you haven't achieved yet.
And you know, the reality is everything is not for everybody. Just because you and I operate in the same space does not mean that I'm supposed to do that one thing that you did. That might not be for me. And just because you see somebody else doing it, just because you see somebody else achieving it, just because you see somebody else being recognized for it or whatever, it does not mean that that is for you.
Because we don't know what our journey is supposed to be. The best thing that we can do is listen to ourselves and listen to our intuition, but we don't exactly know, we don't even know where we're supposed to be five years from now. People love to ask that question. Where would you like to be five years from now?
Where do you see yourself five years from now? Hell, where I see myself and where I'd like to be might not be where I'm going to be because maybe that's not what's for me, right? So you have to give yourself that grace and that allowance to let things evolve and unfold and uncover themselves the way that they're supposed to. When I quit my job five years ago, did I know that I would be sitting here right now in this moment talking to y'all on Instagram Live?
Hell no! My voice, the way that I presented myself, everything that I did was completely 100% different than it is right now, okay? Completely. I felt voiceless.
But I didn't feel voiceless in the way that I was like, oh my God, I'm so voiceless. I felt voiceless in the way that I didn't even know how to use my voice yet. I know how to use my voice now. I've come into that space in my life.
But guess what? That took time. That took going here. That took going there.
That took making this decision, making that decision. So to think that we're supposed to have something that everybody else has or our trajectory is supposed to look the same is completely unrealistic. And that, I guess you could say, is a third way to stop yourself from the comparison game because you don't even know what your future is supposed to look like, let alone how are you going to measure your success and what you're doing off of what somebody else is doing? You don't know where that's taking them and where that's leading them at all.
You don't even know that you want to go where they're going. So how can you compare yourself? How can you sit up here and say, that should be me or I should be doing this, I should be doing that? No, because you might do it and it might not get you what you actually want, especially if you have to do unsavory things to do it.
How would I differentiate comparison versus inspiration? I think it's sort of simple and straightforward in a way that if I'm inspired by you, I am looking at you and appreciating what you're doing and what you have achieved. If I am comparing myself to you, I'm looking at you and I am then beating myself up and measuring what I've done against what you've done. So I think the measurement is the key in the difference, right?
That's the differentiating factor. If I am appreciating what you've done and I'm looking at you in awe, there's an appreciation factor, right? But if I'm comparing, there's a measuring factor that then does me no good. If you keep up with me on Instagram, then you'll know that I've been having fun cooking during the quarantine.
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We don't know where we're going as much as we try to plan, right? Because we have never lived this life before and I've said that before and I will continue to say it again because it's one of the things I feel very passionate and strong about and this ties into that comparison game too because it's like this. We sit up here and we think that we should be this person. We should have what they have.
We should do this. We should do that and all that stuff. But it's like, who told you that? Who says that, right?
Who says that? Nobody. It's you. It's a game that you're playing with yourself because if you knew the way that your life was supposed to go and the way that everything was supposed to be mapped out, that would be boring.
That wouldn't be living life, right? That would be, you're constantly checking in on that book or whatever it's like, oh, right now I'm supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be there. So it's like, only you can live this life that you have been blessed with, right?
That person over there, they gotta live their life. The next person gotta live their life, whatever. So for you to sit here and think that you should be at certain places or you should be doing certain things, it's just unrealistic because you don't even know what's the story for your future. You can sit up here and you can hope and you can wish and you can pray and you can plan what they say about planning all the time, right?
Sometimes it's just a joke. But you don't even know. We can plan and plan and plan all day and we don't even know how everything's gonna work out. Look at us all right now.
What are we doing? We sitting at home under a damn quarantine. Can't go nowhere. Can't go kiki with friends.
A lot of us can't do business. All of these things. Did we think that that was gonna happen? Was that gonna be a part of our plan?
Probably not. So that's why it's like, you can only plan but so much, right? You can only plan but so much. Where you're really supposed to be, what you're really supposed to be doing, how things are supposed to net out for you.
You don't know. You don't know. So stop being so hard on yourself because sometimes when you sit up here and you try to make things happen too, you end up putting yourself in a worse situation. So it's like sometimes you just have to pay attention to the person that you are, what's happening around you and control the things that you can control, the immediate things.
And you're not living in a reality if you think that you're never gonna compare yourself. The point is you gotta check yourself though. You gotta check yourself at different points because what's meant for that person is meant for that person. What's meant for you is meant for you.
And I also feel like the other thing that we don't really think about is that you don't know people's life story. You don't know what they've been through up until the point where you met them and you got impressed by them or whatever and you don't know what they're going to go through, right? It's a lot of people that go through a lot of things. And I always think about that and I say, I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for my life. I'm grateful for the life that I've lived, the family that I have, the parents that I have, the experiences that I've had, all of that because sometimes, especially on social media, when you see other people and you see where they are and you start comparing yourself and you think you wanna be where they are, sometimes you don't know what they've been through to get to where they are. And that's not even necessarily things that they had to do. Sometimes that's things that happened to them.
You know, like it's some people that's been through some traumatic things and that's what helped develop them into who they are. Damn, like sorry sis, but I don't want that. I don't want it. So you know what that means?
I just gotta be me. And I just have to receive what comes to me in my life and be grateful for the things that are in my life and not sit up here and wonder and wish and hope on how I could be more like you because I can't, I can't. Sometimes there's some fundamental things in a person that makes them who they are because of their experiences. My therapist says that jealousy is actually a healthy emotion.
Uh-huh. It's when we act out of jealousy that it becomes problematic. Exactly. And that's what I was talking about before when you do unsavory things because you think it's gonna get you ahead or whatever, you don't have to jump on this person.
Yes, I agree. That's when it becomes a problem. And that's when you also are not the best version of yourself, right? And the people around you, they may notice it as well because your mindset has shifted and changed where you're kind of like in that fight mode, right?
And in that fight mode, you might do things or say things that you wouldn't otherwise say or do. And so now people are like, I don't even know who I'm dealing with anymore because this beast has come out of this person in a way that's not good, right? So there's a lot to that and we're all human and we all fall to these different emotions at different times. It's just like I said, you just gotta know when to check yourself.
And it's also good to have people around you too that can check you and be like, you know what? I think you're going down a rabbit hole right now or I think you're taking this too far or this might be a bit much and then you can really back in that word pivot has been coming up so much since this whole COVID-19 quarantine and coronavirus everything everybody's talking about pivoting but we had an interesting conversation the other day me and someone else and it was like look though I say pause before you pivot though right because something big happens something bad happens sometimes something um that you couldn't control happens and it's like okay I need to pivot pause for a second think this through really think about all the elements of this because some people I think are in a space of pivoting right now because of the coronavirus and everything but maybe they don't even need to pivot maybe they just need to pause for a second but sometimes the pivot can seem forced sometimes the pivot is you jumping too fast sometimes the pivot is not actually gonna get you any closer to what maybe you actually wanted sometimes you just need to pause and take a beat so I don't even know that the pivot is always the answer when you're in the beginning of something whether it be you're starting a career you're starting a project you're starting a business something like that it is helpful and healthy and it makes sense to let your eyes rove around a little bit and roam because you need to understand the lay of the land you need to know what's out there you need to know what's being done because the last thing that you want to do is think you created the best thing since sliced bread and that sliced bread already exists honey okay that's the last thing that you want to do and I'm not saying that you can't do something because somebody already did it I'm saying that you don't want to be naive and think that you're the only person having done this or doing this and that's actually not the case you know so you should be paying attention to what's going on and everything and then there comes a certain point where you gotta get in you gotta start doing your own work and I think that's where it gets tricky the point where you should be doing your own work that's where it gets tricky when you are steadily being consumed by other people and what they're doing because then it's hard for you to get that momentum and to get out there and do the things that you need to be doing because you keep getting insightful about what are they doing and then you don't want to find yourself in a position where you can't move without looking at what somebody else is doing nah that's not good that's never good right all right that's it for this week it's a lot I hope you enjoyed this conversation getting all into comparison what to do what not to do how to think how not to think I hope we covered a lot for you today and gave you some things to ponder in your days to come as always take care and be good so