Are we too competitive?
This is a guest post from Deanna Weiss. Deanna is a fitness professional in Southern California. She loves writing, taking long walks and spending time with her family. Unlike many others in the fitness business, she won’t be doing any Triathlons anytime soon!
I took a yoga class a few weeks ago during which the instructor talked to the class about finding relative perfection from within and not looking for approval from outside. “There is no perfect” she said calmly as we began our Salutations to the Sun. “You must be at peace with who you are and what you have.” Before plunging into some more advanced poses, I thought about these words and wondered if anyone else in the class was listening. The words sounded so true and so relevant to our lives today. Yet why is it that today people are more competitive with each other than ever before? What are we striving for?
How often do you hear about someone who was just a nice person? Nice as in someone who loves to read to children or volunteer at a homeless shelter. Sounds good, but let’s face it, nice doesn’t have a sexy ring to it. Usually we tend to compare ourselves to people who do so much more. We admire and envy people who make a lot of money, excel at a sport or an artistic endeavor and do everything bigger and better than everyone else. Women secretly or not so secretly long to be beautiful like a film star or super model, believing that beauty is one key to success. It’s almost a given that rich, successful men marry flawlessly beautiful women, giving them a status unattainable by most people.
When I take or teach fitness classes I am often privy to the conversations around me. “I ran six miles this afternoon and then took Jill’s class before coming here” one slender student comments as she waits for the class to begin. “I ran 10 miles and sweated through Hot Yoga last night” says the petite brunette standing next to her. Neither student much cared what the other was doing, just as long as they didn’t fall short. If student A can run 6 miles, take two yoga classes, work a full day and still have time to watch American Idol, then student B has to do more. Even the instructors who are supposed to present a healthy image to their students are in a mad rush to outdo everyone.
I don’t know if people these days are capable of understanding the words of the yoga instructor. The class is much more about doing Downward Facing Dog better than the student on the next yoga mat than it is about soul searching There is too much expected of everyone and the bar has been set too high. I met someone at a cocktail party who told me how he had trained to become a Hot Yoga instructor as a second career. He didn’t seem like much of a Yogi to me. Perhaps it was the fact he made a large 6 figure income in the corporate world, or that he did yoga not so much for the spiritual aspects of it, but to have a more defined 6 pack. I later heard that this same person was a also a competitive tennis player, a tri-athlete and boasted about being a gourmet chef. He wore the right clothes, knew the right people and everything he did was to impress people. How can someone that busy find time for inner peace? Maybe it’s just me, but I found his competitive nature to be disarming. Was Hot Yoga just one more notch in the “Look what I can do” belt?
I find that a small segment of the population falls into this ‘Type A hypercompetitive’ mode. I did too at one time and that’s why I can see it so readily in other people. It was never about getting enjoyment from an early morning run or by taking a ballet class or even studying a new language; it was about how much better did I do than everyone else? It wasn’t about how nice your house is, or how pretty your car or how many shoes you have in your closet; it’s more about having more than anyone else in the neighborhood. The battle never ends. It can’t end because no one ever wins.
As I often tell my clients, it’s okay to not be productive and active 24 hours a day. It’s okay to read a book because you want to read that book and not because someone higher and mightier suggested you do so. It’s okay to take leisurely walks, or sit down and look at a lovely garden that someone else may have created or eat a delicious meal that someone else may have prepared. It’s even okay to do nothing for awhile/; who’s keeping score anyway?
Perhaps now more than ever there is this push to not only be the best that you can be, but to be the best at everything at all costs. This constant striving cannot lead to any sense of fulfillment because there will always be someone better than you at something. Someone will run faster, have a bigger, more expensive house, and be able to play the trombone without a single sour note.
Hopefully the wise words of the instructor hit a chord among some of the people in the class. Perhaps the push to be richer, better looking and more successful than everyone else will become less urgent as people discover that maybe none of this much matters in the long run.
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Un-roast: Today I actually like the way my crooked smile looks.
Kate on May 5th 2011 in Uncategorized
zoe (and the beatles) responded on 05 May 2011 at 1:33 pm #
“…it’s okay to not be productive and active 24 hours a day.”
it IS okay. yet, some how, we’ve all been tricked into thinking sitting around is wasting time. a friend and i have been talking about this lately, this need to constantly be preforming when, deep down, all we want to do is sit down and do nothing. doing nothing is a lost art. if we’re not occupied, we’re thinking of something to occupy us because we’ve got to be productive and go-go-going like everyone else. competitiveness pops up everywhere, from how many miles we run to how many yoga classes we take a week to how little sleep we got the night before. i wonder what the world would be like if we did what we wanted to do instead of what we thought we should be doing. hmm…
Mandy responded on 05 May 2011 at 1:54 pm #
I have a magnet on my refridgerator, I forget where I got it.
It says “progress, not perfection.”
Thank you for the reminder that the only person I have to impress i myself.
Angela @ MyPinkyToes responded on 05 May 2011 at 2:22 pm #
Thank you for this post. I know that I can be too competitive with a lot of things. I think competition is good and healthy, and I like to compete with myself in a lot of things, like setting new PRs. However, I also LOVE that I have down time…time to myself when I can simply just BE.
Tiffany responded on 05 May 2011 at 6:59 pm #
Thank you, Deanna, for taking time to right such an insightful post. We are constantly being hit with what society deems as perfection, and we lose track of what it’s like to be just a normal human being. There is way too much pressure on women to “do it all” and do it all extremely well. We constantly focus on our appearance on the outside and don’t pay attention to what we are on the inside. I personally enjoy my down time and, even though I also work out regularly, I also don’t fret over the fact that I am not perfect, nor would I want to be!
Relatable Style responded on 05 May 2011 at 7:04 pm #
You are right. And now something totally unrelated… I guess it was a typo, but this one here ” /; ” might just be the most miserable-looking smiley I ever saw 🙂 I think it will go into my repertoire of smileys. Maybe it will soon run rampant in every chat and discussion board. Sometimes we can’t choose what we become famous for…
Relatable Style
San D responded on 06 May 2011 at 10:14 am #
Competition is not always a bad thing IMHO. Goals, quality, inventiveness, problem solving, and creativity can be byproducts. I know I describe myself as very competitive without any talents per se. I will never be the best artist or puppeteer for example, but in my head I am in the “running” and am always learning new ways to one up myself! Sometimes living and enjoying the “moment” is part and parcel of the “aha” moment when you have met a goal born of competition.
Deanna Weiss responded on 08 May 2011 at 8:05 pm #
I agree that competition has its purpose. It would be a dull world if no one competed at anything. However, my definition on competition was different: I am more concerned with the people who compete just to be better, richer, thinner, busier than everyone else. It’s more about being ‘better’ than just being good. Does that make sense??
San D responded on 09 May 2011 at 11:07 am #
I think the “being better” than anyone else is part and parcel of “humaness” in our capitalistic society. Perhaps it is learned? Perhaps it is in our DNA? I do agree that obsessive comparisons with yourself and others is not healthy in so much as those comparisons become about the “race” and not about the “journey”. Very early on I realized that no one was like me, and therefore comparisons were futile. (apples vs. oranges). When I taught high school, I would watch young woman jockey their lives around others, and if they would say something like “so and so is so beautiful” I would always counter with “yes they are, but can they throw the potter’s wheel?” as a metaphor for “depth” and “range”.
Bronwyn Coyne responded on 12 May 2011 at 12:44 pm #
Love this post. It’s so true. As a student in a fairly small and competitive program, I can find myself getting sucked into the race to just GET THE GRADE, rather than sit, listen, and really enjoy the learning experience. It makes me heart sick because I LOVE learning, but the school environment has robbed me of it.
I always find I do my best when I ignore the rest of the “rat race” and just go at my own pace in any aspect of my life. If I’m going to prove anything to anyone, it will be to prove it to myself, for myself.
Deanna responded on 12 May 2011 at 3:26 pm #
I remember those days. When I was in college people couldn’t wait to ask me what grade I got on a test or paper. I, too, was competitive at that time but as I’ve gotten older, I let it go. I find that highly competitive people are never happy unless they are better than everyone else. I take more pleasure these days in small victories.
I was away for a week and when I returned to my studio several clients told me how much they missed me. I was so happy…brutally mean to them on their workout, but happy too!