FAL Team 
Introduction
Recently a member from one of my WhatsApp Groups posted the above kernel of wisdom and I decided to create a meme and write a blog post about it.
Yes! As content creators, we always have to be alert to and on the lookout for the next idea.
First I expressed my gratitude to God and whispered a prayer for these friends who help to build me. This quote also reminded me of my plan to write a series on Valuable Life Lessons from My Mom. I would always get positive responses whenever I shared these life lessons and I promised a colleague that I would write them down but alas life happened and procrastination set in…
Since this is my year of Focus and ACTION I’d be a hypocrite for putting it off any longer so here we go.
I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of putting unnecessary pressure and stress on ourselves by looking at other people’s lives and feeling badly about ours. It’s funny because I’ve come to realise that other people are looking on from the outside and wishing they had YOUR life! So I’m here to remind you that your journey is your journey and yes the grass always looks greener on the other side.
Growing up, she always told my siblings and I to never compare ourselves with others but only with our previous selves aiming always to be better today than we were yesterday. She believed that comparison would lead to unhappiness if we were “worse” or arrogance if we were “better”; whatever that means. I put those two adjectives in quotation marks because better or worse when used to compare yourself with others are just perceptions of a particular reality of others you see being displayed and rarely a correct indicator of what actually is.
It’s better if you compare yourself with your previous self, aiming always to be better today than you were yesterday. After all, that’s the only way to ensure YOUR growth and development! Comparing yourself with a moving target can give you skewed results because you have no control over what other people are doing or not doing to develop themselves.
In this series you will get to know my [late] Mom; I’ll call her MG and learn how she lived a fulfilled abundant life – one way she did this was by not comparing herself with others. A peaceful soul, soft-spoken but with a strong inner core of resilience; she was always happy with who she was and never jealous of the success of others. I credit her with starting me on this path towards fulfillment and abundance through excellence and potential realised – a fact I only belatedly realised after her passing
Whether through the books she bought us, stories she told us, poems she taught us, responses like “can’t is a bother” when we said we couldn’t get something done or sayings like “if something is worth doing then it’s worth doing well or not at all”; she was someone who insisted on excellence in all endeavours.
My mother, MG was a woman of integrity and asked nothing of others that she didn’t herself give. She was my first model of seeing excellence PRACTISED. As a child I was quite annoyed at what I thought was her being “picky”, but today I am extremely grateful for those lessons and was grateful I matured enough to express my gratitude before she left us.
So how does comparison stop you from Creating A Fulfilled Abundant Life?
Comparison Steals Your Joy
A Fulfilled Abundant Life can’t happen if joy is absent and comparison is one of the greatest killers of joy. It leads to negative emotions such as dissatisfaction, unhappiness or arrogance. Some people think that joy and happiness are the same but they are different.
Happiness is a short term term, fickle emotion which depends on current circumstances while joy is a long term enduring emotion which does not depend on current circumstances but acceptance of a present situation.. Happiness arises from the external while joy comes from within, your centre, your core and how you choose to BE no matter what is happening around you.
Joy can only be present where positive emotions such as acceptance is practised.
Yes, you read that right – positive emotions can and must be practised because life happens and you need to be able to properly navigate the stormy waters and destructive fires of life.
Please know that acceptance is not choosing to stay with or in a less than an ideal situation. Rather, it is an honest acknowledgement of where you are right now but understanding that your present situation is not your final destination. Having an expectation of a better tomorrow gives you the tools to handle the unhappy storms and adverse seasons of life and one way to do this is to stop comparing where you are with where someone else is.
Trust me, no matter what it looks like from the outside, everybody is going through something; there is no perfect anything. Even if everything in your life is hunky dory right now it’s just a matter of time before life happens so you cannot allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the storms of life – understand that they are temporary.
Stay centred knowing that, this too, shall pass!
Comparison Causes Arrogance
When comparison causes you to think that you are better than someone else it will lead to arrogance. Arrogance destroys relationships and inhibits learning which are sure-fire ways to stop you from having a fulfilled abundant life.
Have you ever been exposed to people who think that they are better than you and everyone else around them? They think that they are smarter, stronger, richer, even better looking than anyone else? Do you realise that those people have very few friends and people generally try to avoid them?
And what about those people whose arrogance causes them to look down upon and dismiss other people? They are never happy for other people when they succeed or do well. They must always hog the show, be in the spotlight and or steal your thunder. They criticise everybody and everything because they are always trying to make others feel less. Everything must be about them and the world must cater to them because they are so much greater than everybody else
You know them – nothing you do or have accomplished is ever deserving of any praise or commendation. They haven’t seen you for a while and know something has changed. You’ve probably been on a diet and lost some weight, but they look you up and down and say – you put on weight or you are too fat and you need to lose some weight. Yet another time they see you and it’s obvious that you’ve lost weight and they say – you are too skinny and you need to put on some weight!
Don’t worry – you will never win with those kinds of people; you cannot let them steal your joy and your chance at creating a Fulfilled Abundant Life.
Don’t be that kind of person and don’t let those toxic people in your life.
I mean, if you think about it – it isn’t surprising. Yes it’s true that no man is an island and we are social creatures meant to live together but who really wants to be around anyone who constantly puts you down or make you feel less than or badly about yourself? Most of us will be unable to take this kind of abuse without eventually fighting back or removing ourselves from the situation.
If your attitude towards other people are chasing them away or destroying your relationships then that will reduce the quality of your life because we were meant to live in community and not silos.
Healthy relationships enhance the quality and length of your life – take care of them!
Conclusion – Take Action
After spending many wasted years just being aware and not taking action, I made a commitment to start utilising the benefits of my knowledge. I committed to start taking action on anything I have learnt as long as I know it would help me with my personal development goals.
I believe that far too many of us have lived our lives far below what we are capable of doing and the main reason is that we fail to take action. I am challenging you to let 2019 be the last year you fail to take action on the things that matter and that you will commit to improving yourself in 2020.
Start taking steps today, no matter how small; to be better tomorrow than you are today. So in order to help you with this and get the ball rolling I am going to end all my blog posts with a call to action (CTA).
Call To Action (CTA)
Comparison is actually an indicator of low self-esteem.
People who are strong and mentally secure accept and love themselves even if they are not exactly where they want to be in their journey. They understand that the power of change is a choice and is all in their hands so it makes no sense beating up on others because we are unhappy with our lives. As a result, they keep working on themselves knowing that what is theirs is theirs and will come to them at the divinely appointed time and appropriate stage of their development. They do so happily because they have grown to understand the difference and value in knowing the two types of time – chronos and kairos.
Unhappy people focus on chronos – which is chronological or sequential time. They are the ones who think they should have done something by a certain age and beat up on themselves and others if they are behind some arbitrary schedule they have set. It is even worse if someone close to them has achieved by that age and they haven’t. Fulfilled Abundant people understand that everybody’s journey is different and so they focus on kairos which is the opportune or fitting time for something to happen. They don’t look at the chronological time but honestly ask themselves if they are ready to handle what they want. They understand why most people who get overnight success or win the lottery end up spiritually, emotionally and financially bankrupt! Your vessel has to be able to manage the magnitude of your blessing or it will break. So today, January 1, 2020 (which is the first day of a new Decade, a new Year 2020 and a new Month) let us all commit to spend 2020 focused on building our mindsets to handle our Divine Purpose so we will not break when it is manifested.
Having accepted that the power to do and be is all in their hands they never find it necessary to compare. They are wholly focussed on improving themselves and getting ready for the next level opportunity and all that comes with it – the good and bad, failures and successes paying special attention to the lessons learnt during the process.
Now that you understand how damaging unhealthy comparison can be to your life, relationships, personal growth and development – are you ready to take a new path towards self-acceptance and self-love?
Are you willing to stop looking at the journey of other people and commit to enjoying YOUR journey as you learn the lessons YOU need to learn from YOUR process?
If you said yes to any of the above questions, I invite you to join us in our FAL Tribe as we hold each other accountable on this journey towards “Your Best Life Journey” (YBLJ). And as we always say “hey, don’t be selfish…take along a friend or two!”
I am,
Your Sister in Fulfilled Abundance
