Today, I am inviting you to dismiss any comparison that generates negative feelings for you.

If looking at your friend’s progress or some actor’s muscles makes you feel good, if it is inspiring for you or if it motivates you to do things that increase your feeling of well-being, that’s great. Forge ahead!

But if noticing a friend’s progress or comparing yourself to someone in an Instagram post or an actor in a TV show makes you feel deflated or opens the door to self-criticism?

I vote no!

You deserve better things than that.

You deserve kindness, from the world and from yourself.

You are working on a habit that will increase your well-being in one way or another. Some days will be easy and some will be hard. Your results make be visible or they may not. You may move quickly through your plan or you may turtle your way along. Your changes may be huge or they may be small.

You may follow a similar trajectory as someone else did and get similar results or you may get wildly different ones.

The thing is this is about *you* and how you feel and about the things you want to do or learn to do.

What other people do (or have done) and their results have absolutely nothing to do with you.

They aren’t living in your body with your mind in your life with your schedule, your resources, and your challenges. You have no idea what they would/would not accomplish in your situation or what you would/would not accomplish in theirs.

If you can coax yourself into avoiding comparison and into using your own metrics to measure your progress, you will get where you want to go. And you will get there at your own pace and enjoy your own victories.

By daring to NOT compare you are bringing the forces of self-compassion and kindness into the equation and doing that always makes things easier.

Your magical gold star wand for today’s efforts is below.

I wish you ease, my dear Team members. 💚

PS – Speaking of comparisons, don’t even get me started on the fitness and wellness industry! Sure, there are lots of good intentioned and helpful instructors out there but the industry itself? That can be a bit of a racket.

A lot of these companies are making money by making you feel badly about yourself. Cheat them out of that money and beat them at their own game by stubbornly refusing to compare yourself with the people they offer up as examples.

When you are in the middle of making changes in your life – whether those changes are positive or challenging, you are going to churn up some feelings.

You might be excited and hopeful, you might be sad and frustrated, you might be annoyed, you might be scared.

Your feelings might make perfect sense to you or they might seem utterly bizarre.

You don’t actually have to come up with explanations for your feelings, you don’t have to justify them, and you definitely don’t have to dive into them and swim around.

Usually, it’s better to just let yourself feel your feelings, to accept them as a reaction to the thing that is changing, and to try not to suppress them or push them away.

I don’t mean to suggest that feeling your feelings and accepting them is an easy process – most of us don’t have a lot of training or experience in doing that – but I think it is a worthwhile practice to ease our way into.

Note: I am not a trained mental health professional so my advice is this area is limited. I just want to be clear that I am not suggesting that you start acting out your every feeling. There is a big difference between feeling something and taking action on it and it is important to learn to discern when to share our feelings (and with whom) and what feelings-related actions are appropriate to take. Many times, feelings are something for us to feel and accept – perhaps with trained support – but we can’t automatically assume that everyone around us needs to be involved in accommodating our feelings.

Ok, back to the feelings that pop up when we make changes.

It’s really important to realize that churning up feelings is just part of the process of change. Those feelings aren’t necessarily signs that we are doing the wrong thing (or the right thing), they might have useful information for us or they might be related to an old story or situation we are still carrying around in our heads. And they might only have the tiniest sliver of connection to the changes we are making, feelings get churned up about all kinds of things.

If our feelings are prolonged and overwhelming and creating challenges for us, we will need some sort of professional assistance to meet the needs connected to them.

If they are regular, garden variety feelings, then we need to give ourselves room to feel them and, once the intensity of the feelings have waned a bit, we can figure out if they have any useful information for us.

Maybe you will realize that you have some fear surrounding the changes you are making and you’ll need to find a way to increase your feelings of safety as you move forward.

Perhaps you’ll realize how excited you are about the changes and you want to take things up a notch.

Maybe you find sitting in meditation overwhelming and upsetting but you still feel drawn to the practice – that might mean you would find more ease in walking meditation or in meditative drawing.

Obviously, I can’t guess every possible feeling you might be having and advise you how to proceed but I can suggest, as I always do, that you can be kind to yourself throughout the process.

You are doing the best you can with the resources you have and it is ok to feel any of the feelings you are having related to these changes.

Having feelings, even weird and inexplicable ones, churn up in the process of building a habit is perfectly normal and makes perfect sense.

When you stir something up – your soup, your garden, the stuff in your junk drawer – things get rearranged and you automatically bring new stuff to the surface. The same thing happens when you stir your life up a bit. Please try to be kind to yourself about what arises and get whatever help you need to help you address it.

Here are your gold stars for your efforts today: