How do you compare with your peer group in the success stakes?
Imagine having no one to compare yourself with, except yourself.
What a sense of relief this would bring. We wouldn’t have to beat ourselves up about not performing as well as our colleagues at work. We wouldn’t have to worry about not looking like the alpha male/female with the smartest mind, the most important job role and the biggest pay packet. We wouldn’t have to worry about our bodies not being the youngest, most beautiful and most sexy.
All we would have to think is: did I do this activity better than I did it last week? Have I moved forward in my own definition of “success”? Am I feeling peaceful, doing my best for my health and relaxed? Do I have an attractive mind and healthy interactions with other people?
Many of us would never admit to making comparisons with other people – to do so smacks of jealously and small-mindedness. However everyone has undoubtedly taken a “measure” of themselves at some point by reference to someone else – even if only subconsciously. We may have moved on from caveman (or rather cave people!) times of comparing brute strength and hunting skills but the “alpha caveman” has simply been replaced by the “alpha executive”. Now our strengths are measured by whether we can outsmart colleagues, our status amongst peers and the cars we drive. It is telling, for example, that research has shown that people are happier if they are at least slightly richer than their friends.
But what if we didn’t have friends and colleagues to compare ourselves to? What if our only frame of reference was our personal best? In NLP, broad distinctions are made between predominantly “internally-referenced” people who are generally better at using their own referencing to measure their “success” and those who are more “externally-referenced” who look for reassurance and confirmation of their abilities from others. Externally-referenced people are more likely to make comparisons with other people as a kind of self affirmation but no one lives in a vacuum and everyone has some kind of referencing system to people outside of themselves. To put it another way, we all have an actual or imagined “audience” to our lives that gives our actions meaning.
A quality personal development programme should be an enjoyable journey of self discovery as we learn to identify which thinking and behaviour patterns work successfully for us and which patterns get in the way of achieving positive outcomes. One of the first steps is to learn where we currently position ourselves on the line of continuum between being “internally referenced” and “externally referenced”. Nobody is entirely one type or the other – different patterns will play out with different people at different times. In the workplace, for example, the quality and nature of the relationships we have with colleagues will be coloured by the degree to which we are externally referenced and the number and strength of comparisons we make in relation to job roles, personality types and status. Our behaviour will be determined by these perceptions and a conversation with a team member might be very different from a conversation with a line manager, for example. The outcome of the interaction cannot be viewed in isolation from our perceptions of who we are, the boundaries of our role, who our colleague is, the boundaries of their role and the value of our role compared to our colleague’s role.
In addition, the perceptions we have and comparisons we make will be based on what we see and hear. But we see and hear only a small range of other people’s behaviour and we need to take this into account when we examine our perceptions. To pull this altogether, we are making assessments based on a small chunk of information that is internally processed through a system coloured by our own perceptions of self, role, status and personality type! It is no wonder that many people find “success” a difficult concept to grapple with and find it easier to use other people’s measures of success than find their own! The most powerful place on the continuum is in the middle – to be a confident, internally-referenced person who is flexible enough to assess the value of external evidence to support you in making decisions.
But in addition to recognising our referencing systems, to fully understand “success” we have to look deep into the essence of our beings and see what it is that makes us who we are. Are we referencing the right stuff? What qualities make us feel good about ourselves? What can we offer to our communities and the planet? What is our personal success gage? And then we need to accept that our definition of “success” might look completely different from everyone else’s. And the more clarity we have around our definition, the more we have demonstrated personal honesty and the creative imagination to think outside of other people’s referencing systems. Once we have grabbed this insight and stuffed it tight into our hearts, we can enjoy friendships and colleagues and celebrate their achievements of their own definitions of “success”.
Kate Agha – Quadrant 1
