Break the Comparison Habit

Welcome to Palm Tree Talks, a podcast dedicated to creating a stress free life. My name is Astrid and I’m the founder of palmtreemoments. com. I invite you to join me as I dive into the personal development system called human design. Let’s talk about travel, business, mindset, self love, and stress reduction.

And how to translate the insights of the human design system into your travel and work life.

Personal development is well, personal. But one of the biggest lessons I learned when I embarked my journey to a stress free life is that I am not comparing myself to others anymore. Or at least, not all the time anymore. 

And I would strongly advice you to stop with that habit as well. And here is why.

First of all, you are a unique cosmic event. No one has the combination of your DNA with your environment that you’re grown up in, in combination with the historic time you have grown up in.

I am a kid of the eighties and yes, kids growing up in today’s day and age have a very different childhood. I got to hang out with my friends playing on the streets or in the forest that was around the corner in a small village in the southern part of the Netherlands and returning home just before dinner. There where no cell phones yet and life was just a whole lot different if you compare it to how kids are growing up these days.

And energetically, if you look at your human Design chart, you can say that you are truly unique as well. Body and soul captured into a graphic display of your energetic definition.

A chart that is measured by your birth time, the exact time that you entered this world and came in touch with the tiny neutrino particles, or dark matter how scientist like to call this most abundant little particle in the universe.

Your definition is measured by a combination of the position of the moon and the planets from our solar center. In addition to that the astronomical measure points of the north node and the south node and they are used as well.

And then you get a graphic that is called your human design chart with it’s centers, it’s 26 gate activation, the lines, the colors, the bases and the tones. And with that many layers in the Human Design system there are so many different variations. It is a number that I am not even going to try to speak out loud because honestly I don’t even know how to pronounce a number with 54 numbers. Let that sink in. 

The chances of you encounter someone with the exact same charts is not very likely. Unless you are a twin. Then there still will be differences in your chart, but on a visual level your charts might look quite a like. But if you go to the deeper layers or color, base and tone you will see different charts there. And even as twins it’s not say that you have similar life experiences, especially when you reach the adult stage and are no longer living in the same house anymore.

But let’s get back to the point that I wanted to make here.
 Stop comparing yourself to others. 

You truly are a unique cosmic event. Life your live. That is so much better that to copy others because you mentally think that’s the smart thing to do. Or compare yourself to others to measure up your self worth. It really only gives power to your mental ego that wants you to feel better about yourself from a place of “haves” and have not’s instead of using compassion to distinguish your situation with someone else. And it also feeds into your inner critic and then not in a nice way because often when you compare yourself you feel pretty lousy afterwards. You might feel jealousy or you might feel that you’re not enough. Because you see this perfect life displayed on Instagram or within your family or in your neighborhood or at school or at work. It doesn’t really matter where you go it is often that that place of comparison triggers a thought and that thought can make you feel pretty crappy for the rest of that day. So it only feeds into your inner critic or the “shitty committee” as somebody else, that I know, calls it. 

So no, stop comparing yourself to others! 

So why do we do that in the first place? Why do we compare ourselves with others? Often is it about a lack of self esteem, it is a lack of self love o r self worth. It is easier to measure yourself up to others then to truly look in the mirror and accept what is there or isn’t there.

It is also our conditioning because since early childhood we have been learned to look up to others and measure our own succes with comparing ourselves with others.

First it is brotherly or sisterly comparisons and phrases from your parents like “look at how well your brother is doing this. Look at how good your brother is cleaning his room, why can’t you get the hang of that”   .

And later in life, in the school system,  there is a level of performance added to that mix as well. The whole basis of testing is just one big comparison to others. How well did you do on the test compared to everybody else in your class. 

And we compare ourselves to others based on looks, clothes and other things that we wear or we bring to the school yard that we can show off with. I mean many childhood trauma’s find their root in this stage of life and the constant pressure of living up to the expectations of our parents, our teachers and other influential adult in our lives. It is a constant game of comparison. 

And when you reach adulthood then there is another comparison level that is added to the mix. The level of money and status. Hello money mindset issues and limiting beliefs about consumption and money.

And speaking of money, I was just reading the book the psychology of money by the author Morgan Housel. Interesting stuff. I was triggered by the chapter in the book about risk vs luck. Both are concepts that are have a little bit control over, but also is very intangible concept. In the book there is a story of how Bill Gates got a lucky start in life and especially with his computer skills because in his elementary school in 1968 there was a computer available. Quite a rare object in that time in history. There he laid the basis of working with this machine and I don’t have to tell you how incredibly successful Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft is in this day and age. But the book also tells of his friend who got to go to the same school and actually was a friend of Bill Gates and was in the little computer club with him. But unfortunately this friend past away before he turned 18 because of a mountaineering accident. What a bad luck, right? 

In the Human Design system we have the themes of luck and risk also displayed in the gates. Gate 46, in the G-Center, is the gate of serendipity. Being at the right place at the right time. And in the splenic center gate 28,  the gate of the game player and this is where the theme of risk is found.

It is important to note that everybody has these two qualities in their chart and therefor in their life. Perhaps in your chart these gates are defined?

That means that in your chart there is a purple color around the number and a red, black or red/black striped line emerging from that gate number.

I myself have indeed gate 46. And yes, there where many times in my life that I was just in the right time and in the right place. When I was traveling on my world trip and I encountered a series of natural disasters in Australia I seemed to have missed the worst situations by just being there one day early of a few days later. Lucky, right!

But if you don’t have these gates defined, it is still present in your life and in your chart. You still have that gate. Because just as you have 64 codons of your DNA, all the 64 themes of the gates from the Chinese Iching are present in you. Weather there is a red, a black, striped line or it’s a white line, it’s still there.

The only difference is that if you have a gate defined you can rely on this energy as it is always present in you. It is your inner truth.

If the gate is not defined then that theme is not consistent and you are subconsciously influenced by others around these themes. And this is where you find your lessons in life. This is where your gold is because this is where you will have experiences and life bumps into you. And that is how you learn and grow. So there is no right or wrong way here I mean it just is what it is. There is no judgement in your chart. You either have it or don’t have it defined but is is still within you. Those themes of risk and luck are still very present in your life, it just shows up differently.   

Anyway, going back to the habit of comparing yourself with some one else. If you counter in the concepts of luck and risk. How likely is it that you made the same decisions as them? Or that you have the same perspectives as this person? Not very likely, not? Did you encounter the same kind of luck in your life as they have? Did you take as much risk as they did or not? It is not very likely that you can measure that, right? 

So why compare yourself to some one else when there can never ever be a true comparison? You with you different body, a different environment that you grew up in. You have a different lens on this world, that is created by your values and by your believes. You had different opportunities and there is the concepts of luck and risk. Why compare when you are so different?

The Human Design system is called the science of differentiation for good reason, w e are truly unique.

What you could do though, in your personal development journey, is to reflect back on where you are standing now compared to a PAST version of yourself. Present you versus Past You. There can be some really valuable lessons there for sure. It is a good journaling exercise as well. So stop comparing yourself with somebody else and start comparing yourself with your past version of you. And see what lessons you can draw from that. 

So  dear unique human being. Have a little bit more compassion for yourself and be grateful for where you are in your personal development journey that is called life.

And I wish you a happy happy day!

Thank you so much for sharing a piece of you’re day with me while listening to the Palmtree Talks Podcast. Did you find it interesting and want to learn more about stress reduction, mindset and Human Design? Be sure to check out the free resources at palmtreemoments.com.

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Have a happy morning, evening or afternoon, where ever you are listening from and until next time