This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - UNCOMPETE: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success with Ruchika T. Malhotra | 398

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Somewhere along the way, women were sold a lie: competition is the price of ambition. Be faster. Be louder. Be better. And if someone else wins? You must lose. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil sits down with Ruchika T. Malhotra—founder and CEO of Candour, a global inclusion strategy firm, and author of Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success—to dismantle the zero-sum mindset and replace it with something far more powerful: collaboration, abundance, and shared success. Ruchika, a former business journalist and contributor to Harvard Business Review (including co-author of one of HBR’s most-read articles, Stop Telling Women They Have Impostor Syndrome), brings research, global perspective, and real-world strategy to challenge how we think about workplace competition, women in leadership, and ambition. Together, they unpack: Why competition in real life rewards conformity—not excellence The difference between comparison (human) and competition (optional) How social media fuels constant, low-grade competitive anxiety What “uncompeting” looks like in promotions, leadership, and career growth How to turn envy into data instead of self-destruction Why competing with other women isn’t strategy—it’s conditioning Bottom line: Uncompeting isn’t about lowering ambition. It’s about rejecting scarcity, defining success on your own terms, and building long-game leadership rooted in integrity—not insecurity. Thank you to our sponsors! Shopify has everything all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at shopify.com/tiww  Connect with Ruchika: Website: https://www.ruchika.co/ Book: www.uncompetebook.com LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruchikatm IG: https://www.instagram.com/rtulshyan/ Related Podcast Episodes 137 / Ampliship (Mean Girls Part 2) with Caroline Adams Miller 206 / A Better Way to Define Success with Stella Grizont How To Get What You Want with Jenny Wood | 293 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over 10 generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the ancient world podcast.com. That's the ancient world podcast. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together.

We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. Not by following a script or an outdated playbook, not by winning at someone else's game, but by deciding for ourselves what success actually means and how we want it to feel. Because somewhere along the way, we were sold a story that competition is the price of ambition, that if you want more, more impact, more influence, more fulfillment, you had better be faster, louder, smarter, prettier, and one step ahead of everyone else. In work and in life, we've been taught that progress requires comparison and a scoreboard. Someone wins, someone loses, that's just how it works, right? Except look around. That hyper-competitive

mindset isn't producing more innovation or more joy. It's producing exhaustion, anxiety, burnout, and constant low-grade panic that you're always falling behind. We are measuring our worth against other people's social media posts and calling it motivation. We're mistaking pressure for purpose. We're confusing being driven or growth-oriented with being perpetually dissatisfied. I used to proudly describe myself as competitive, type A, raised in sports and work cultures where winning meant everything. And sure, competition does have its place. If you're an athlete, a gamer, or literally in a competition, I think we can say competitiveness helps. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that much of my competitiveness wasn't rooted in excellence or growth. It was about comparison,

about proving I was worthy by being the best, the most accomplished, the most impressive. And when that way of thinking spills into leadership, teams, and communities, it turns everything into a zero-sum game. Someone has to lose for someone else to win. And friend, that belief might be the very thing that's holding us back. Today's conversation is a radical and, frankly, relieving reframe. What if opting out of constant competition isn't playing small, but playing big on your own terms? What if collaboration, mutuality, and shared success aren't soft concepts, but strategic advantages? And what if the most powerful move we can make right now is to uncompet? Our guest today is Ruchika Malhotra, founder of Kandor, a global inclusion strategy,

firm and author of Uncompete, rejecting competition to unlock success. She's a former business journalist and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review with work featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. She's also co-wrote one of HBR's most read articles of all times, Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. A Thinkers 50 Radar alum, Ruchika brings a global perspective and a bold, timely challenge to the way we think about competition, collaboration, and success at work. Ruchika, I am so glad you're here. I love that your work challenges something so deeply ingrained and how we're working and leading, this idea that competition is good and necessary.

That's how we see it, right? So let's start there. What are some of the biggest myths we've been taught about competition? Thank you so much for having me, Nicole. I would say one of the biggest myths we've been taught about competition is that it brings out the best in us and that it brings out the best in society when actually the more you look at competitions,

especially in situations that are unequal and volatile and unpredictable, which is life, which is the workplace, you know, which is literally any situation in our world today, what it does is it only brings out the person who is the best at conforming to a set standard that someone else put out. And instead, the way to win is by uncompeting. Okay. I love that. And it feels like it's really ingrained in us. And we might not even notice when we're doing it, feeling it, thinking it, are there any examples that you can give where competitiveness might be showing up in our lives and our work without us even noticing?

Social media. I mean, you know what that's like. I can, I speak to this from a lot of authority because I am absolutely a victim of this and someone who self-perpetrates it, right? You spend, you know, you're on social media for five minutes. You're like, I, you know, I just love just to see what my favorite celebrity or my friend is up to an hour and a half later.

Yeah, without even notice. You are. Without even noticing it, obviously, you know, I write in the book, the platforms were very much designed. I'm not the only person by a long shot saying this. Technologists, experts, many who actually helped create some of this technology say this works exactly how, this is exactly how it was designed to be to make you feel like you got to spend all your time on these websites, on these platforms. But the behavior as a result is you're comparing your, you know, your, you're saying, sitting there, you know, thinking about the dishes or picking up your kids from school or the

project or the meeting that you really just don't want to be part of. And you're comparing that feeling off normal life and being human to someone who's like jet setting off to vacation in the Greek islands or, you know, they've suddenly been on Oprah's podcast or whatever it is. And I think that has become very much our norm in our lives. And I, and I want to, and I want to, want to say social media specifically because I think about even 15 years ago, right? Maximum, maybe once a week or something, you gather with your friends, which by the way, social media is taking away from us, those sorts of in-person connections. You'd meet your friends maybe once a week. And, you know, in that one hour or whatever, two-hour party, you would hear

someone say, oh, I'm going to the Greek Islands. I'm going to, you know, I'll be on Oprah's podcast. I, you know, won an award at work. And, you know, you feel pretty, it's. or maybe in that moment you feel icky for maybe that hour or you kind of think to yourself, oh, I wish I was doing all those things. And then you go back to your normal life. That isn't the case anymore. We are spending every single moment bombarded by these ideas that everyone is living this fabulous life and we're just not comparing. And so competition has become very much more pervasive as a result of a lot of the new media technologies we have today. I mean, that makes absolute sense. Comparison has been around since forever, but it's just so much easier to

fall into the trap today than ever before. It's literally at our fingertips, right? So I want to talk about uncompeting and I want to talk about it being tied to comparison, but before I take us down that road, I'd love to ask if there is, based on your expertise, a version of healthy competition, Where is it appropriate to compete and what does it look like when it's healthy? I'm so glad you asked this question because when I was writing the book, there were people who are athletes, sports people, people who love sports, especially who are like, are you taking the Super Bowl and the Olympics away from us? And I said, believe me, I'm not.

In fact, what I love about the examples of organized sports, there are challenges and this is not the place. their time for them. But what I love about organized sports is the rules are very clear. They're very clearly defined what's allowed and what's not. What does success look like and what it doesn't look like. You broadly speaking place people with similar, amazing superhuman almost tendencies together and have them play in a very defined environment towards a very defined outcome. So that's wonderful. It's wonderful as spectators. It's wonderful for the folks who want to engage in that competition.

Hey, I was at a conference a week ago where Simone Biles, the greatest of all time, was on stage. And you could see the joy in what she did, right? She loves being a gymnast. You can see that. That joy is incredible. That is what I want all of us to feel in whatever we choose to do, whatever our purpose is. Now, the problem is that's not how real life works. Right.

And so when we have those competitive norms like, okay, you know, like I watch the Olympics or I watch these, yeah, I watch the Super Bowl rooting for my favorite team and somebody won and somebody lost. And that's how I'm going to approach my real life, right? My job. What that means then is we start elbowing people out of the way. We engage in what's called malicious envy often, which is, you know, we try and sabotage either the other person or sabotage ourselves and feel terrible. about who we are. It really limits our creativity, our innovation, our growth. I mean, what I'm trying to say is in the real world application, competition doesn't really work. It works really well in a very defined narrow setting like sports, like especially professional sports. It doesn't quite work in every other area of our lives. And yet we believe that zero-sum winner take-all approaches is the way to get ahead and be successful in our careers and our lives. That makes so much sense to my brain. Thank you for laying it out that way because you're right, that equal playing field, right? The defined rules that don't change during the game or from game to game. Even that set amount of

players where, you know, I think sometimes competitiveness in the real world has this assumption that there is only a certain amount of people who can win. Like, I need to do this as opposed to, no, we can all be successful. We can all have podcasts. We can all write books. There's no only this certain amount can be on the field winning. And so taking those principles and applying them to our day to day lives no longer makes all that much sense. So that then brings me to the next question.

How do we uncompet? How do we develop this skill? Because many of us, myself included, have spent a lifetime learning the competition. side. How do we learn the uncompet? B-2, by the way. I really, I want to say that up front, especially for people who haven't read the book or aren't familiar with me in my work. I was born and brought up in Singapore, which is one of the most competitive, like self-confessed, self-marketed, most competitive countries in the world that has talked about going from, like, literally marketed itself as going from third world to first world, their words, not mine,

in a matter of decades because they worked harder than everyone else. They were more competitive than any other country in the region, in Asia, et cetera, et cetera. So that is the, it is, it feels very much like in my bones that competition was was baked in as the idea to succeed. What is interesting is competition is we're not hardwired to compete as humans. We are hardwired to compare as humans. And that's very normal. It is normal to look at your neighbor.

I mean, not from our hunt or gather days. Like, is this person predator or should we be, you know, are we part of the same tribe and we should operate together? That, like, early human tendency continues today. And it is normal to look at someone else and be like, hey, where do I compare? What do I kind of rank? But how do we channel that and harness that for good is one of the questions that I ask and try and answer in this book? Broadly speaking, when we talk about uncompeting, we're talking. talking about a very deliberate rejection of the idea that competition has to always be the default,

the modus operandi in every situation. We reject the idea that there are winners and losers in every scenario. And then we also reject the idea that there's a scarcity of opportunities. So that is the sort of big picture of philosophy. How that practically shows up is choosing to collaborate instead of compete with people that you are taught are your rivals. So that can be you and your colleague who have been great friends throughout the time you were at Organization A are suddenly up for promotion at the same time. And in that moment, a couple of things need to happen, right? So I'm using a very practical example. One is the self-inquiry, do I really want this promotion? I think many of us don't ask, right? We're like, of course we do, because that's what

competition is that's what ambition is. Of course, we want the next thing. So one is that self-inquiry, being very like really asking yourself, do I want this? Is this what my career goals are? Is this what I have bandwidth for? Is this where I think I'll succeed? Right. So there's that. And then once you've made that decision, if the answer is yes, I still want to go for the promotion, it is not engaging in it with a lot of the sort of dirty tactics we're taught you need to do, right? Because one of the challenges off a winner take-all zero-sum win-or-lose sort of scenario is we feel that the ends justifies the means. So that means bad-mouthing our colleague, putting them down, deliberately taking away

opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. I think choosing not to engage in that. And some of the ways I've seen this be successful, like successful practices of uncompeting are two quote-unquote rivals up for the same promotion. and we'll go to their manager and say, we actually both want the promotion. Is there a way to make this work, right? Is there a way that we could possibly both be considered? Or is there a way that we could maybe share this in some way?

Or if someone else, if my colleague gets this promotion, is there a way that I could be considered in six months or nine months? Or what are the ways that I can also be part of sort of this success? And I don't think we do that enough. We very much run on autopilot. I'm embarrassed to say that didn't even occur to me. Like I was thinking in the collaborative spirit of like, how do we support each other at the very least not badmouth each other?

Or how do we acknowledge each of our unique strengths and abilities? And then regardless of which one of us gets the job, how do we support each other in that transition or not tear each other down type thing? That's where my brain went. The idea of even positioning that we could both get it didn't even occur to me. So I love that. Keep going. No, and you're right, Nicole, I think there is, and that is very much the case sometimes. Like, we'll be told, no, there isn't. There's only room for one. So how are you going to play this? And again, it's thinking of it. And especially because of your, you know, your community is largely made up of women. I have to say how much we lose as women when we engage in a lot of these winner take all tactics in our workplace. We get that reputation of being the queen be. of being someone who doesn't play well with others, we anyway end up losing because of bias

and because of other patriarchal norms in our society. So rather than play into that, I think it's a very strong and very intentional form of resistance to say, like, actually, I'm not going to do that. I'm thinking of my career in the long term, right? For me, it really is, and I try not to fall into platitudes,

but really it is a marathon. on. If you want to be successful, it's not just the next win and the next win and the next win. It is in 30 years, who is a community I have, what is the influence that I have accumulated? Who are the people who are going to say, yeah, Ruchika should totally be the chief financial officer, chief executive officer of this organization? Or I really love the business. You know, for me as an entrepreneur, I really love the business. She runs. I highly recommend her, because she operates with so much of integrity, that requires you to make decisions every day

that is about how you want to kind of accumulate your social capital over the long term. So many good things in there. I want to go back to just asking that initial question. Do I even want this? Again, I'm surprised because when you said it, I was like, yeah, how often we default to somebody just dangle the carrot in front of us.

Of course we want it, right? as opposed to really asking. And then kind of bring it home to what you were talking about at the end there, thinking about what it is we really want, what success or, and I put in air quotes, winning looks like for us over the course of our life, what do we want our legacy to be, who do we want to be known for, and then playing that long game. So any tips about how we do that for ourselves?

How do we define success in winning for ourselves? how do we take a longer, broader perspective, any good questions or things that we can do so that we don't react when that carrot is dangled and we actually can answer the question. Do I want this or not? Absolutely. So, Nicole, what I'm going to say is more philosophical than tactical, which is hard. And I want to say that this is hard, especially in a world where we have chores to do and a life to live and very, like thousands of things going on at the same time. the most powerful people have taken space in their lives to ask, what do I really want?

There's this fabulous, like, clip of Oprah, which comes up on my social platforms every few years of her being like, what do I really want in her Oprah voice being like, you know, that is the key to success. And most people don't know. And that's exactly right. I think being able to make space in your life to ask, like, when I remove all the outside noise, when I take away the conditioning of my parents and the other adults in my life and my teachers. And then as I came up into the workforce, you know, my managers and my leaders and the people I was around my spouse, you know, people in my community. If I take away all of those voices and I define for myself what does a life well lived look like, I think it would really be transformational for so many people.

And I have to say, I wasn't great at this myself. I have been really lucky to work with a transformational executive coach. I write about her in the book, Lakita Williams, who very candidly shared with me her story of what it was like to be very ambitious and have worked at like Fortune 10 companies, be very ambitious and then be diagnosed with a disease, with a chronic illness that really had to have her redefined. ambition and think about what does success look like for her? And in hearing her story and especially in interviewing her for uncompet, I was like, that is the aha moment for me that I needed to understand, like, you have to sit down and ask for yourself, what does ambition look like for me?

What does success look like for me? If I take away everything else, what does it really look like, all other voices? And I think the more of us who get to define that for ourselves, it becomes less about competing and comparing with others because you become so clear in your own head about this is what success looks like for me. The good news is then it allows you to cheer other people on. I can cheer you on for having a fabulous podcast because I know in my mind like that's not that's for me. That's for you. I'm so glad. And I don't think we do that enough. I think I think the way that we've been conditioned is very much about like shiny object here, shiny object there. This person got this. oh, now I want that rather than sitting in that's uncomfortable state of like for a long time,

not even being able to speak it out loud. Like this is what my true ambition is. Yeah. It feels like really good advice. I don't know many of us are giving ourselves the time and space we deserve. And it kind of ties back a little to this default competitiveness where we think there's a clock and everything feels really urgent and has to be done. And I wonder if part of this uncompeted, way of living is about creating that time and space and asking the questions. I'm curious, Ruchika, do you think if we look back? So I don't know about you. I struggle a little bit with vision and looking forward and blank slate, but what often helps me is when I look back and go, you know, where did I feel my best? What felt true and real and right for me? What didn't? I think,

I'm sure we've all done things or said yes to. to things because we thought we were supposed to want it or we thought we wanted it. And then, like, looking back in the experience going, oh, God, that didn't feel good. That wasn't what I, the experience I was looking for. Does looking back over our history give us some clues into what success might look like, what winning in our life might look like for those of us who struggle looking forward? A hundred percent. And especially because, you know, you and I are having this conversation at the end of the year. It is so important to be able to look back to give you clues on how to move forward. I'll give you an example. You know, the book Uncompete is very much

dedicated to my mother and her philosophy off again, us growing up as children of immigrants in a very competitive society and her choosing a different way, which, you know, in some ways really was the formative idea of uncompet. What really stands out to me is when I was 18 or 17, when I was applying for college, and for my undergrad, actually, I went to the UK where you can study law as an undergrad, right? You don't do pre-law like you do here in the United States.

And I was extremely inspired by like TV shows like Ali McBeal and the practice. And I had a couple of older friends who were studying law. and I told my mom, I was like, I want to be a lawyer. And she really discouraged me, which is interesting from an immigrant parent perspective. But she was like, I really don't think you should be a lawyer. And I said, of course I should. Like, look at how cool it is.

Look at those suits that all these people on television wear when they're lawyers. And she said to me, she was like, Richiega, but from the age of like five or six, you used to write stories and you would illustrate them and you would bind them into books. and you would, like, this was your passion. You would read all the time. You would want to write these stories all the time. This was your passion. I just don't see you being a lawyer.

I can just see you being completely burnt out and exhausted and just unhappy as a lawyer. And, you know, at that time, it was really hard for me to take that advice and then not apply for law and not study law. And, you know, our bargain was like I could go on and study it later on in my life. if I really wanted to. But she was so right because she brought me back to, like, what was my happiest place, not just, not at five and six, but like throughout my life. And I think this clue is really important for us to stop and ask ourselves,

like, when have we felt the most ourselves? When has our body given us the clues of like, that deep breath? Like, I feel safe. I'm doing something that really inspires me and excites me. I think it's extremely important. There's also a tool that I heard off from an amazing, another executive coach, Tara Robertson, called the Year Compass. It's free.

It's an online guide, essentially, that you can download or fill out also on your computer. And it allows you, it's it, what it does is it gives you an opportunity. The first half of it is for you to reflect on the entire year that went by, which is obviously wonderful as a new year's exercise, but honestly, you can do it at any. time. Many people choose the spring to do it. So you reflect on the entire year that just went by whatever that means like year to date. And then you sort of set goals and vision for what's in the year ahead. And part of it, including one of the exercises, which I loved, is you actually go into your calendar and you go back and you list everything in that last one year that was significant or made

you happy. And that gives you clues, right? So it could be, I had lunch with my best friend that was on my calendar. I'm so glad I did that, right? That was really exciting. How do I build more of that into my life? So having a more holistic and integrated life is very much part of what the uncompeted philosophy is like in practice. I want to quickly point out how often you've exempled uncompeting in this conversation. You've mentioned so many other people's great work and their impact. So love that you're exempling that for us. I want to hone in. So you've talked about some really, I think, big, important, impactful ways. Are there any small, I don't know if easy is the right word, but ways that we can opt out of competing in our day-to-day lives, like you mentioned social media earlier, or when we find ourselves falling into this comparison trap, it seems big to think of this as an entire mindset shift and, like, creating a whole new habit. I'm maybe just looking for some of those smaller, more obvious day-to-day things that we can pay attention to to help pull us out of defaulting into comparison and competitiveness. Yeah. My favorite thing, which is small, but by no means easy, is noticing how envy shows up in your

life, in your day-to-day. I think envy is a very powerful motivator. And of course, you know, it's supposed to be one of those seven deadly sins. I disagree. I don't think it is. Well, there's nuance there. So broadly speaking, the experts I spoke to for Uncompete said that there are two types of envy again, broadly speaking. There's malicious envy, which I talked about earlier. And there's benign envy. So malicious envy is that sabotaging type where you look at someone, you think they had an unfair advantage. They must have cheated. You know, I want to bring them down. Or it's making me feel so terrible about myself. I want to bring myself down. Malicious envy. And then there's, there's. There's benign envy where you look at someone and you use it as a motivator or like a signal of like, what do I really want in my life? You see that through line in our conversation. So I look at someone who is doing something amazing or has something, even in my day to day, right?

I see someone looking wonderful. Like, wow, they look so cool. They're wearing a cool dress. That's great. There's a little bit of that feeling of like maybe envy in my body. Like maybe I'm feeling a little anxious or there's these. these clues I'm getting about how I'm feeling. What benign envy motivates us to do is essentially we use it as motivational fuel to make changes in our own lives or at least think about what are the

clues this situation is giving me, right? So maybe that means I go out and I, maybe I need to start changing my wardrobe or maybe this is telling me I really actually care deeply about like, you know, what dress I wear, whatever it is. Like use that as a signal to motivate us to do. better and understand and appreciate the process it takes to get there. I think so much of the envy competitive winner take-all mindset is like, oh, I'll never get there or they must have cheated to get ahead versus what did they actually do? And can I actually do those things? Is that what I really want to do that? So I think envy is a very powerful tool of uncompeting learning to manage it and harness it is a very powerful tool in this work as well.

Yeah, and a very powerful distinction, malicious envy versus benign envy. And I'm with you. That's something I try to practice too is when that green-eyed monster shows up. It's asking myself, like, what is this telling me about me, about my desires, about what's important, about what maybe might feel like is missing for me without making them or whatever it is that bad? It's challenging for sure because it's much easier to default, I think, into malicious envy. Or maybe we've just had more practice. I don't know. But I really, really think that's a powerful distinction. My last question is around gender and competition. I think when we think of competitiveness,

we often think of it as more masculine. And I don't know if that's fair or not fair or true or not true. In your research and your work, does gender play a part in competitiveness? or does it play a role in the nuances or the differences in how it plays out? Obviously, we're mostly women tuning in. Anything we need to know as women about competition? So this is a great question, and I'm going to try not to make this a long answer, but the reality is it is very complicated. I'm sure.

There's research on both ends. There's research to say women are more competitive in the workplace. There's also research to say we're not as competitive in the workplace as men. And I think the short answer to this is the type of ways that women have to practice competition can be very negative and very, very challenging to sort of change the status quo for us to succeed, especially for us to succeed as a group. And so what I would say is very much gender plays a part in this. And I think many of us feel that scarcity, that stress and comes from a good place, of a true place, certain. of why we feel like we have to engage in competition in the workplace as women, specifically if you work in male-dominated industries or you work in industries

where you're shown that there's very little room for women to succeed and especially get to the top. So then it's sharp elbows out. But again, long-term success. And I, you know, I talk about different tools of collaboration and how collaboration really can show up in your workplace and how you can leverage it to make your career more successful. it's all about cheering other people on. It's about sharing credit. It's about collaborating. It's working together. So I would say for women who want to get ahead and make sure that they're not the only ones, you don't want to be the one who gets to the top and pulls the ladder up behind you,

you have to uncompet. And what that means is you have to reject the idea that you have to compete with each other to get ahead. And again, this is hard. I want to say it is hard. It is not the default. And we have seen people, I have worked with people who haven't done, you know, the work and the healing and the, you know, standing back and really thinking, like, do I need to engage in competition here or not? I have worked with people who will always have competitive norms front and center. And I have to say in those moments, I've had to go back to like, what do I really want? How do I really want to operate? What does success look like for me? The stress of constantly competing, just not part of my definition of success.

Ruchika, I could talk to you all day. I have one million more questions that we just don't have time for. So for you, the listener, who like me, wants way more of this content and information, the website is uncompeatbook.com. And the book, again, is titled Uncompete.

You can buy it on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Let's keep our local bookstores in business. And Richieca, thank you for being here for doing this incredibly important work. and for offering all of us a much healthier option for living a good life. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Nicole. So great to be here. It's absolutely my pleasure. All right, friend, as we wrap up, here's what I hope sticks with you. Uncompeting isn't about

opting out of ambition or lowering the bar. It's about opting out of the constant comparison that keeps moving the goalposts and calling it growth. It's about recognizing how much energy we've been spending trying to win games we never signed up to play. You don't need to be the fastest, smartest, most put together or most impressive person in the room to be effective, influential, or fulfilled. You don't need to measure your success against somebody else's timeline, title, or highlight reel. And you don't need a rival to prove your worth. And let me be clear, competing with other women is not a strategy. It's conditioning. It's tired. It's tired. it's ugly, and at this point, it's just plain sad.

You have to ask yourself, who is it that actually benefits from having us sizing each other up instead of standing together? So what if success didn't require someone else to lose? What if collaboration wasn't a nice to have but the actual advantage? And what if choosing to uncompeat gave you back time, creativity, and a sense of enough without costing you your edge? because defining success on your own terms and refusing to chase validation through comparison isn't weakness. It's clarity. It's leadership. It's confidence. And of course, it's woman's work.

Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada.