Episode Description:
In this episode of What If for Authors, Claire dives into the deeply ingrained habit of comparing ourselves to others—why we do it, how it affects us, and how we can learn to shift from harmful patterns of comparison toward curiosity and growth. Whether you're a writer struggling with self-doubt or simply a human navigating the complexities of social dynamics, this episode is packed with insights and actionable advice.
Key Takeaways
Why We Compare Ourselves to Others
Evolutionary roots of comparison and its role in social survival.How Comparison Impacts Writers
From comparing your books to others in your genre to the challenges of writing to market.The Enneagram and Comparison
How each type’s core fear influences the way we compare and react.Shifting from Judgment to Curiosity
Practical tips for recognizing harmful patterns of comparison and replacing them with curiosity.When to Take a Break
Why stepping back from comp authors or genre-specific reading may help reset your mindset.
Why Listen: If you’ve ever felt bogged down by comparisons and self-doubt, this episode will help you take the first steps toward freeing yourself from the cycle. Tune in and start embracing your unique path as an author.
Support the Show: If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with your fellow authors. Every review helps more writers discover this resource.
Join the Conversation:
Share your thoughts and questions by reaching out to Claire at contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name is Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book for authors, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain.
How about a short episode today, folks? I think we've both earned it. So let's see if I can keep this concise as we jump straight into today's topic, where we ask, what if I can't stop comparing myself to others?
This is a common question, not just from authors, but from humans of all occupations. Comparing ourselves to others is something that our brains have evolved to do for very important reasons. It's also. The number one cause of people being absolutely fucking miserable. Wild How That Works sort of takes the natural fallacy of, if it's natural, it's good, chucks it up into the sky like a piece of skeet and blows it to smithereens with a [00:01:00] shotgun.
Um, apologies to those who have no clue what the hell I just said. The Stygial Texan metaphors aside, let's take a look at why we compare, it makes us miserable, and some steps we can take to be slightly less miserable slightly more frequently. When we look at all nine of the Enneagram core fears, you'll notice that none of them are simply death.
That's kind of strange when it's pointed out, right? Doesn't it make more evolutionary sense for everyone's core fear to be, you die? Wouldn't that encourage us to make decisions that don't get us killed? But instead, the fears are things like being bad, or being without support, or being controlled. All of the fears in the Enneagram are social fears.
They're about our standing within groups. So researchers have performed brain scans on people while activating these sort of social fears and compared [00:02:00] them to activating, like, imagining physical threats. And it turns out that we have evolved to be more scared of these core social fears than death itself.
And the fact that we're more triggered by social fears than by death itself is how things like bravery exist. It's how dying for an ideal exists, how speaking out even though it might get your ass beat exists. Humans have evolved to be a social species, meaning the best way for us to avoid death is to focus on our social standing.
So attention to that is prioritized. in our brains. There are plenty of books on this, so I won't belabor the point. Let's move on. What I will say is that an important part of gauging our safety within the social order is to learn what other people who are safe are doing. So this is comparison.
It serves an important purpose and it is so deeply ingrained in [00:03:00] us that we will never stop doing it completely. Comparison can look like a child watching their parent do something and comparing the movements and accuracy of the parent's efforts to their own to see, you know, am I doing this the same way?
Comparison is an important part of learning. Most of us probably learned to write our letters to handwrite by copying over those dotted lines of letters when we were younger. And we compare what we did versus what was set out for us. And then later on when we became authors, we looked at our sentences, our characters, the plot of our story, and compared it to books that came before us to go, Am I doing this the same way?
Does this kind of resemble that?
Comparison is great for giving us general guides on how things may be done in a socially acceptable way. Knowledge and expertise are a societal effort. And the things that seem like givens to us [00:04:00] today, like even the basic structure of a romance, for instance, those weren't always known. It took a lot of iterations of stories about people falling in love before we settled on some general components that make the story great.
And those iterations can only be done through comparison and imitation with small variants along the way to discover new elements that work well. Comparing Iterating and small variants gave us such hits as Second Chance Romance, Enemies to Lovers, and eventually Billionaire Romance, and you can imagine the ape holding up the first tool here with the 2001 Space Odyssey music behind it. Right? Billionaire romance. So our ability to compare things is hugely useful from an evolutionary point of view. standpoint. What thoughts and feelings we have following the comparison are where we can get into some trouble though.
For instance, we read the book of another author [00:05:00] in our genre and we think, they wrote that breakup scene way different from how I'm writing mine. Okay, solid comparison. You've noticed the similarities and the differences. Useful for separating out the poisonous berries from the edible ones, but what about in the book world?
Depending on the author's core fear, the thought that follows may be something like. Are readers going to hate my book? Or am I doing this wrong? Asking these questions is natural, and beneath them is interesting information. Like, if I make adjustments to my book to be more like this one, will it affect the outcomes I care about?
But the objective curiosity is couched in fear, so we get this language like hate and wrong thrown in there. And that really exposes the emotions that these questions are bringing out in us about who we are and our place in the world. in society. So this is where comparison starts to trip us up. It can lead us to making knee [00:06:00] jerk changes, put us into a doubt spiral, or just stir up all these old insecurities we've developed about ourselves as humans and artists.
Nothing invites us to make comparisons between our books and those of our contemporaries quite like the idea of Right to market. The central tenet of it is to see what other people who are selling a lot of books are doing and then do that. Can I add some of myself into the book and still have it written to market?
We ask to the right to market gurus. Of course, they say. Then, with a little wink, they'll add, As long as the part of you isn't too weird or different. So this is not to shit on writing to market. If you can do it well, it is a way to increase your odds that your book will sell more copies. It doesn't guarantee sales, but it is a positioning that will help you be ready if the lottery pulls your numbers.
So, I'm not discouraging anyone from doing it, but what I will say is [00:07:00] that if you choose this path, your opportunities for comparison skyrocket. So, learning to recognize when you're comparing yourself with others so that you do it at appropriate and useful times, and don't do it all day, every day, to your misery, becomes an Especially important skill.
Going deeper into fear, when our core fear is triggered, it's common to turn to comparison to reassure ourselves that at least we're relatively safe in our social standing. So this may look like, if you're a type 1, the reformer. Maybe you're afraid that you're not good, and rather than addressing that fear directly, and some, with some of the techniques that I talk about all the time, maybe you simply find someone who you think is less good,
do an easy comparison of, at least I'm not that bad, and then you just call it a day. The underlying issue of your fear of being bad is not [00:08:00] addressed. Instead, as long as someone is worse of a person than we believe ourselves to be, we can feel good in comparison, and our brain senses that we may not be the first one cast out of society for being bad.
It's kind of that you don't have to run faster than the bear, you just can't be the slowest of the group. So sometimes this comparison turns into a action of pointing out others badness or corruption as a balm for the fear rather than for another reason like, you know, corruption on a large scale rots societal bonds and so forth.
So it stops being about protecting the group and starts being about protecting our ego. And that's where we run into trouble. So that's for the example of the one. Let's take another example. Let's say eight. If you're an eight, a challenger,, you're going to be scared of being harmed or controlled. So as long as the eight can compare their power position favorably to [00:09:00] someone else, they can tell themselves that they have power and are not powerless, or at least not the most powerless.
So this can start to look like needing power over others so that the eight always has someone with less social power to look at for reassurance. Now, this is a precarious position to take because what happens when the comparisons aren't favorable? What happens when a 1 compares herself to someone who seems to be an even better person than she is?
And what happens when the 8 encounters someone who he perceives to have power over him? If your sense of goodness, power, or any of the other desires of the types is dependent on who you are comparing yourself to, from moment to moment, Then your sense of self will be precarious at best.
You can't enjoy the high of feeling superior without the bottoming out lows of feeling inferior. [00:10:00] And an inferiority complex are two sides of the same coin that you're flipping constantly when you allow your pattern of comparison to continue uninterrupted.
There's a common bit of advice for authors, especially those who are trying to write to market, and that's to read a bunch of books in your genre. But if you can see that comparison. is a big part of your life, it's almost a compulsion that you can't control, and you don't yet possess the necessary box of tools to redirect your attention away from it with any sort of regularity, then reading a bunch of books from authors in your genre will, for lack of a better term, fuck you over.
Your assessments may fall into two categories. Better than and worse than. I have better characterization than this author. I have worse pacing than that author.
Now, if you're able to pull the data in objectively, like, Ooh, I like that thing. I would like to try [00:11:00] to capture some of that magic in my own work without it feeling like a judgment on you or a threat to the quality of work you do, then that's a very healthy approach, right? That's how new and interesting things can come about.
But if you find that reading the works of other authors in your genre leads to thoughts of giving up, or thoughts of everything in my genre is garbage and I'm the only good writer, then you're not really in a place to be reading your comp authors yet. I say this having found myself in that place before.
And the reason I hone in on reading in your particular genre is because the more similarities we perceive between ourselves, and another person, the more likely we are to compare in a way that leads to superiority or inferiority. So envy passes more easily between people in the same profession, of the same gender, of the same age, nationality, and of course, gender.
genre. We're much less likely to compare say our achievements to the [00:12:00] achievements of someone 50 years older than us or 50 years younger than us. So the similarity that we perceive between us and another person is what opens the gates for that comparison. So just an important thing to keep in mind. If you find your attention flowing constantly toward comparison, but you'd like to keep learning to be a better writer by reading books, You can try reading in genres you never plan on writing in.
You'll still pick up storytelling tips if you do that. And let's say you write urban fantasy, but you're reading a historical cozy mystery. You're more likely to be unfamiliar with the tropes and expected beats than if you were reading urban fantasy and because of that you might find the comparison so difficult that your brain stops trying and instead just finds things it delights in and goes, Ooh, I wonder if I could bring that into my writing in some interesting and fresh way.
And now we're in the healthy land of curiosity rather than the draining land of [00:13:00] self judgment. So yes, to be clear, if you default toward comparison. Don't beat yourself up because you evolved this way, but you have my full blessing to not read in your genre. In fact, it may be helpful to not even read that much fiction for a while and branch into nonfiction for your ideas.
Unhealthy comparison is a conclusion we're drawing about ourselves in relation to others. Curiosity doesn't really draw conclusions, though. Its only job is to ask questions and seek more information. So staying curious is a great way to keep ourselves from falling prey to the unintended negative consequences of comparison.
If you'd like to do less unfair comparison of yourself to others, or at least make it hurt a little less each time it happens, the first step is simple. Notice that you're doing it. A lot of people struggle with this step, and so [00:14:00] it can be helpful to let the people you interact with most frequently know that you're trying to notice this more often, because then they can notice it for you. They can say, Hey, you're comparing yourself again, that sort of thing. Noticing our patterns is always more successful as a group effort.
Now noticing our tendency for comparison can be a long project and one without an end, but it's an important first step. You might even start to be a little baffled as you notice how much you compare. Like, damn, is all I do compare myself to other people? Yeah, that might be a lot of it, and now that you see it, you might be curious what else there is.
So just follow that curiosity.
And then once you notice that you're comparing yourself to others, or someone has kindly pointed that out to you, you can start to ask yourself, what triggered your core fear that made you start comparing? There's so much interesting information we can gain from asking these types of questions. Apply [00:15:00] curiosity liberally here.
Why did that thing trigger your core fear? When do you first remember associating that fear with that thing? Whose voice do you hear talking to you in those situations? What would happen if you ignored what that other person was doing? What would you do if you had no idea what other people were doing?
What are you afraid will happen if you don't measure up?
This is the gift we unwrap when we start to bring mindfulness, that is, noticing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, rather than simply repeating familiar patterns of them, when we bring that mindfulness to our lives. We get a foot in the door, and then we can start to ask the important questions that introduce the necessary metacognition to the equation, where we see those nonsensical thoughts, those draining emotions, and those unproductive actions for what they are.
And then the impulse to have or do them starts to evaporate. We release our grasp on them. We just sort of let them go [00:16:00] over time. Letting go of constricting thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that no longer serve us the way we hoped. The ability to take off the armor, now that we're no longer in battle, that is liberation.
So to liberate ourselves from the confines of comparison, we start by noticing all of the times when we're doing it. And as I said, be honest with yourself about how big of a part comparison is currently playing in your life. If it's still a constant, it's okay to not put yourself in situations that trigger that.
There's no, but I shouldn't be comparing myself to others this much, so I'm going to keep reading books in my genre.
If reading books in your genre triggers feelings of inferiority or superiority, then that's where you're at. Take a break from it, practice the noticing, and maybe somewhere down the line you'll be able to read a book and stay mindful about when the comparison is happening so that you can manage it and [00:17:00] untrain some of those patterns.
We really don't want to approach the world in a particular way because we think we should be able to approach it in that way. We want to approach the world and our author career, obviously, in the way that makes sense for where we are in our process. If you want to work on a skill, that will bring you to a new place later.
Absolutely go for it. Of course, I'm going to encourage that. But, if you wouldn't throw a 14 year old who can't swim into the deep end of a pool because you think they should be able to swim by that age, then don't do the same thing to yourself and call it anything other than orchestrating your own traumatic experience.
We want to push ourselves slowly, not hurl ourself over the cliff. Whatever
you are ready for right now is enough. So don't compare your growth and tools to others. The comparison doesn't make [00:18:00] sense at the end of the day. It's just fear calling for you to reassure yourself with a shortcut that doesn't address the deeper development. If you're wondering, what if I can't stop comparing myself to others, I'll say that first, Of course you can't.
All of us compare a little bit, and it's not the worst thing we could do. But if you can practice noticing when you're doing it, staying away from judgments on the comparison and instead pursuing curiosity about the situation, you'll start to see the need for comparison less and over time, and your attention will start to flow more regularly toward I'm already the thing I seek to be.
And isn't that a nice thing to share with the world?
That's it for this episode of What If for Authors. I am Claire Taylor, and thanks for listening. I hope you'll join me again next time. Happy writing.