Comparing Yourself To Others

How ironic that I haven't had time to update you on the book I barely have time to read called The Worn Out Woman by Dr. Steve Stephens and Alice Gray.

Of course, now the baby's starting to fuss. Let's see what I can accomplish between consoling an infant with hiccups and trying to skim previous chapters.

....yeah, she's sleeping! You know how ten people can read the same paragraph and come up with at least 5 different things that seemed most meaningful? I figure each of us could read this book and different parts would speak to each of us, so I'm just going to tell you what stood out to me as interesting. I'll type direct quotes that I underlined. Hopefully it will make some kind of sense and save me from having to paraphrase.

Quotes from Ch. 3

Most worn out women struggle with expectations...the shoulds and oughts don't stop.

Comparison:

Comparing yourself to others is dangerous, especially when you are on the verge of being worn out. As your stress increases, you tend to become more self-critical. Whoever you are, someone will always be better or brighter than you, and comparisons can cause envy, competitiveness, and dissatisfaction.

When you compare yourself to others, you actually stop seeing yourself. All you see is how you measure up to your perception of someone else. Comparisons accomplish nothing except to increase expectations. This saps your energy and kills your morale. It is one more standard to live up to and one more burden to bear.

Then the book went into some depth on the "6 As" of comparison which I'll just list here. We're most likely to compare ourselves with other people's:

appearance
articulation
attitude
accomplishments
acquisition
ability

In these areas of comparison, most of us tend to exaggerate the other person's qualities while minimizing our own...the best antidote is a healthy dose of reality...Each of us has areas where we can grow and improve, but in God's eyes, comparisons between people are like comparisons between roses and lilies--both are beautiful...More important, we are each infinitely precious to our heavenly Father. He sees us as we are and still loves us.

Spend some time thinking about your positive characteristics. Then resolve to start accepting yourself, respecting yourself, loving yourself, and thanking God for how He made you. We all need to spend less time looking around and more time looking up.

This section on comparison ends with a list of 100 positive characteristics that you're supposed to go through and select things you see as positive about yourself. VERY hard!

Okay, quoting is done on this section. This is Me! I am a comparison freak. And I just spent an hour of my life providing an example of how I'm a comparison freak only to delete it all. It's one thing to think the thoughts I think, another to verbalize them to people I hope will somehow remain my friend, and another to write them out word for word so I can see just how ridiculous I am.

Now I have a baby starting to fuss and 3 children interrupting every other word I type, so this is it for the moment. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can cover some things written on perfectionism and people pleasing.