When Comparisonitis Strikes

When comparisonitis strikes, every other entrepreneur seems to be doing it better (and doing better) than you. How to keep taking action and why you need to, more than ever in that moment!

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross. You can also subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes.

Some of the insights shared in this week’s Vzine…

Today I’m going to talk to you about comparisonitis. We might have touched on it before, but this week it’s come home to me with a bang because I’ve been fighting it, and also my daughter Phoebe’s been fighting it. So let’s get on with the show, shall we?

Comparisonitis is the condition that you get when you spend a lot of time on social media, and who can help that when they actually work on social media like I do?

It’s something, apparently, that affects the young, younger people, teenagers and early 20s very much because all they see is carefully curated visions of their friends and family in their best moments, and people who are the same age as them who are apparently much more successful, and living life to the full, and it just makes you generally feel a bit ugh about yourself.

I’ve been fighting it this week because one of my people that I look up to, Bernadette Doyle, has been doing her second series of five live videos, and she is so good at them. You know, it’s just Facebook Live videos where she’s talking about great topics like Product Pricing, and she gets lots of engagement. And, you know, I could really be doing the comparisonitis thing if I thought about that for too long, because she’s great at it, and she gets so much more engagement than I do.

But then, I have to remind myself, she’s been working at this for 10 years longer than I have. You know, I’ve been online for 20 years, but I’ve been a little bit more sporadic. I’ve changed what I’ve been doing, and Bernadette has just stuck to one thing, the one thing she’s great at, and she has built an enormous following online.

There’s someone else I respect enormously, Sarah Staar, and Sarah has been, again, doing exactly the same thing, teaching affiliate marketing, for the last 10 years or so, and she’s built up a mailing list of a million and a half people. I mean, that is astonishing. Could you imagine what you could do with a million and a half people on your mailing list?

Anyway, the point is that both of these people I respect enormously. They’re both way ahead of me, and I could make myself feel really bad if I compared myself to those people.

Another person I admire immensely is Denise Duffield Thomas. Now, Denise told me when I interviewed her on my podcast that she had come to see me and Judith in London, when we had the Money Gym, and she looked up to US then. And since then, she’s gone on to do amazing things. She lives in Australia, she’s written the Lucky Bitch book, she’s written the Get Rich, Lucky Bitch, and she’s written an amazing series of books, and she has a huge, huge presence online.

Again, I could be comparing myself. I could be saying, why have I not done as well as these people?

Well, it’s because I haven’t been consistent. I’ve kept chopping and changing what I’m doing.

It was really brought home to me, this whole comparisonitis thing, because my daughter, Phoebe, is 22 years old, and she’ll be editing this, in fact, so this is a message straight to you, my darling.

She’s just getting started. She’s done amazing things. She’s taught herself how to edit videos. She edits my Vzine for me. And she is just doing so, so well, but, you know, she looks through Instagram, she looks through Facebook, she looks through Snapchat, and she sees all these amazing people doing incredible things.

You can’t help compare yourself. You just can’t help it. But what you’ve got to do is try and catch yourself at it, and instead of lying there and wallowing and thinking, why am I not doing very well, the only cure for this, the only cure for this, is to take some action, is to create something.

You know, if you’re not feeling great about yourself, if you start creating stuff, the very fact that you’ve created something, no matter what it is, will give you a sense of achievement, and it will make you feel better about yourself, and everything you create online and put it out there, it creates one more person, two more people, 10 more people who might know who you are, what you do, and what you can do for them.

And just to round off this thing, we are turning the Vzine into a video podcast this week. It’s going live on iTunes this week.

Audio On iTunes | Video On iTunes

I’m stripping out the audio part of it and editing it down a little bit, and making it into an audio podcast.

And so, I won’t just be on YouTube with these great little Vzines, I won’t just be on my Facebook page, I’ll be on the iTunes store as well, and that will bring a different audience of people to me, and I’m not gonna change what I do now. I’m not gonna swap, and start, and stop.

I’m just gonna keep being consistently there to help people who want to get started online, specifically people who want to “Be Everywhere Online”, and I’m not gonna compare myself to Bernadette Doyle, I’m not gonna compare myself to Denise Duffield Thomas, I’m not gonna compare myself to Sarah Star, I’m just gonna be 100% me, Nicola Cairncross, helping people to get started online.

And Phoebe, you’re just gonna keep on doing my video editing until you attract other people who want to create Vzines like this, and I have every confidence that’s gonna happen for you, but you just have to pick yourself up, get out of bed in the morning, and just get making something. It’ll make you feel so much better. I love you.