The One You Feed - Mini Episode 9- Envy and Comparision

Episode Date: October 6, 2014

This week Eric discusses Envy and ComparisonIn Dante's Inferno the envious had their eyes sewn shut. In our day we have a lot of social media comparison.We discuss some approaches to handling envy and comparison Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Hi, everybody. It's Eric from The One You Feed with another mini episode. And this one, I want to talk about comparing ourselves to others or envy. Teddy Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy. It's the sort of thing that is so poisonous, and it is for me anyway, and I think others feel the same. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins in Dante's Inferno. The envious have their eyes sewn shut. So it's clearly historically been looked at as a really challenging thing. And I think the problem is that it's one of those things that makes us feel bad about ourselves and about another person sort of all simultaneously. It eats at my heart. It starts in the stomach and reaches up for a tight grip on the throat. It devalues all that I've done. It can minimize

all that I have and sometimes feels like it negates all that I am. Comparison is almost always focused on the outside. How do we look? How do others see us? How much of this do we have? How much of that do we have? Comparing ourselves to others is a losing game under the best circumstances, but we tend to stack the deck against ourselves when we start comparing our insides to other people's outsides. People tend to look pretty composed, pretty happy, pretty confident on the outside. We all work to project this. And yet we compare how we feel on the inside with what somebody else is projecting on the outside. And it's always a bad idea.

Everybody has their share of concerns and anxiety and fear. And to think that there are these people running around out there that don't really lands us in a lot of trouble. So what do we do with this? There's surprisingly little written about the best ways to cope with comparison and envy. Nothing that's got any substance to it anyway. Interestingly, I came across something by Danielle Laporte, who I interviewed a little while ago, and we're trying to get the episode done and out to everyone. We're having some audio troubles.

But she has a quote that says, rather than comparing, imagine. Imagine yourself feeling the way you want to feel. Successful, brilliant, free, healthy, connected. That's it. You're not making yourself less than or more than anyone else. You're simply giving yourself permission to want what you want. And what I found interesting about Danielle's interview we did with her, and we also talked about the same thing in the interview that will be coming out Tuesday with Christine Hassler, with Christine Hassler, is this idea of we tend to think that we want this thing, or we want that thing, or we want to look like this. And so we focus very much on that form, instead of focusing

on the feeling that's behind it. So an example would be, what she's suggesting is you focus on how you want to feel first, understand what that is, and then you can make better decisions about what the things are that lead you to that. And so it's the same thing that Christine talks about form the new car versus the essence, I want to feel energized, I want to feel successful, I want to feel important, whatever those things are. And so that's a, that's a powerful way to look at it. But I really like the heart of it being, imagine, don't compare. I think the other thing that comes up relatively often, and again, I'm going to quote Danielle Laporte, because she had good things to say about it, is she basically

says, wish well for people, you know, the rich, skinny, and love, confident, powered people. Quicker than you can say, I wish I had that, say to yourself, or even better to them, way to go. You look great. I admire you. With envy out of the way, you'll have more space for your own greatness to step forward. And I know from past experience, this does tend to work. It's not easy at first, but it does tend to work if I focus on trying to wish well for people I'm envious of. And then the last thing that came up in an article I saw was the idea of opportunity cost. And opportunity cost simply means that when I do something, I can't do something else. And so when we're looking at other people who have certain things, we're not

looking at the opportunity cost that was there. So an example would be if I see somebody who lives in San Francisco, I could feel jealous about that. But they're not getting that I got is the time with my son, the big backyard with the dogs. There's always trade-offs in everything in life. And when we narrow ourselves into very focussly looking at one thing, we almost always end up myopically unhappy. So I know this is one that I wrestle with. I think a lot of other people wrestle with. So hopefully this has been somewhat helpful. And one other thing, I am going to start on October 13th. I'm going to send out four emails, one each week, where I'm going to cover the key points in Stephen Covey's

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that has been read so widely, and it's often dismissed because it seems like it's a business book, and it's really not. He does talk about some business concepts, but so many of the things that have been critical to me in making changes in my life, I learned in that book and so many of the things that get recycled today really have a lot of their origin there. So I'm going to do just the key pieces in there, an email every week for four weeks, and it's free. And all you have to do is sign up to our email list. So if you go to one you feed.net slash email, you can sign up there

or on our front page. Thanks everybody. Have a good evening. Bye. you