Comparisons

Do you have a tendency to compare yourself to others, to their abilities, to their successes, and perhaps even your business to their business? Then I invite you to ponder this quick analogy on comparisons and apply it to both your personal life and to your business life.

While we were walking at the beach the other day, we passed two women walking. They caught my attention because one woman was quite tall with very long legs. The other woman was much shorter and had short legs. It was not their height difference that stood out to me, but rather the obvious difference in the amount of work it took for each woman to accomplish the same result. It was clearly evident that the shorter woman had to exert a much larger effort to achieve the same distance and speed as her taller counterpart.

Why do I share this? Because we each have our own unique strengths. Just because something is easy for someone else, it does not mean it will be easy – or depending on your limitations – even possible for you. And that is okay! Because for every thing you can’t do, or that isn’t worth doing because of the impact to your health (will it cause a flare-up that results in lost work?), there are plenty of other things you can do and that you can do well.

The beauty in this is that we are all different and all have our own strengths.

While sometimes it might be worth the extra effort and hard work to achieve the same goal that comes so easily to others, I challenge you to primarily focus on your strengths. Just as the tall women was blessed with long legs for easy, long strides, the shorter woman had a stability about her, a strength in her stance. Each was given her own unique strengths.

Ponderings: What are your strengths and how can you play to them? How can you benefit from focusing on these strengths rather than trying to do the same things the same way as others? What is one action you keep trying to do because you think you should be able to, that simply is not serving you well? What would happen if you let this action go? Can you think of another way to accomplish the same end result?

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