I recently asked the question: how often do you compare yourself to other people?
The answer, for most of us, is more than we’d like to admit. Scrolling social media and quietly measuring our progress against someone else’s highlight reel. Sitting in a meeting and wondering why they seem so much surer of themselves than we feel. Looking at another leader’s team, their results, how calm and in control they are, and feeling like we’re somehow behind.
The thing about comparison is that it isn’t really about the other person at all. It’s a coping strategy. When we’re uncertain about our own worth or direction, comparison gives us something to measure ourselves against, which feels safer than sitting with the uncertainty itself. The trouble is, it never actually resolves the uncertainty. It just adds a second problem on top of the first: now you’re anxious, and you feel inadequate!
Why it doesn’t work
Comparison relies on information you don’t actually have. You’re comparing your internal experience the doubt, the effort, the lack of control to someone else’s external output. You never see their doubt. You never see their effort. You only see the result. So the comparison was never fair to begin with; you’re grading yourself against a version of them that isn’t real.
It also causes you to begin to measure your sense of worth to someone else’s timeline. If your progress is only meaningful relative to theirs, you’ve made your own growth dependent on watching them.
What to do instead
The shift isn’t to stop noticing other people; that’s not realistic, and it’s not the goal. The shift is to change what you do with the noticing.
When you catch yourself comparing, pause and ask: what does this tell me I actually want? Comparison often points at a genuine desire hiding underneath the discomfort. That’s useful information; it’s just been dressed up as inadequacy.
- Compare yourself to you, six months ago. That’s the only comparison with a complete data set, because you actually know the stage you were at then.
- Notice the story you’re adding. “They’re more confident than me” is an interpretation, not a fact. What you actually observed was someone speaking fluently in a meeting. The rest is a story your mind supplied.
Comparison will keep showing up; it’s a very human habit. But you get to decide whether it’s a signal worth listening to, or a story you quietly stop believing.
Using NLP to find out what you actually want
Comparison is rarely random. If you find yourself repeatedly drawn to compare around a particular theme confidence, visibility, income, how someone runs their team that’s not just noise. It’s your attention telling you where something unresolved is sitting. NLP gives you a way to get underneath that noise and find the real want, rather than staying stuck reacting to someone else’s version of it.
A few ways this works in practice:
Outcome thinking. NLP places a lot of weight on moving from an away-from state (I don’t want to feel behind) to a towards state (what do I actually want to be true instead). When you catch yourself comparing, ask: if I wasn’t thinking about them at all, what would I want here? The answer is often smaller, clearer, and much more specific than “I want to be like them.”
Clean questions. Rather than immediately interpreting what you’re feeling, a technique borrowed from clean language asks: what kind of confidence, or success, is that when you imagine having it? This slows down the jump to a story about someone else and takes you back to your own imagery, your own definition, which is rarely identical to theirs once you actually look at it.
Values elicitation. Comparison often flags a values clash rather than a shortfall. If you’re comparing yourself to someone highly visible online, the itch might not be about visibility at all; it might be that you value contribution, and you’re not currently expressing it anywhere anyone can see. NLP’s values work helps you separate “I want what they have” from “I want to honour what matters to me, and right now I’m not.”
Anchoring your own reference points. Part of NLP is deliberately building strong internal states you can access on demand, rather than depending on external comparison to tell you how you’re doing. When you have a felt sense of your own competence, calm, or progress that you can call up yourself, you need other people’s timelines a lot less to know where you stand.
Turning the lens back to you
The real shift isn’t becoming someone who never notices other people — it’s becoming someone whose attention defaults back to their own experience first. Practically, that might look like:
- Keeping a short record of your own wins and stretches, so you have real evidence to compare against instead of a feeling.
- When you notice comparison rising, treating it as a prompt: what do I want here rather than a verdict.
- Getting curious about your own values before you get curious about someone else’s results.
Comparison will always be available to you. The work is building a stronger relationship with your own internal reference points, so it stops being the loudest voice in the room.
Want to go deeper into this?
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