360 Holly Worton ~ What to Do When a Friend Seems Much More Accomplished

Holly:  Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 360. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about what to do when a friend seems much more accomplished or successful than you are or you think you are. This week’s topic was sent in by a listener who wanted to know: how to be when a colleague or a friend seems so much more accomplished than oneself?

Now I have done a few episodes that touch on this topic but I think it is always good to have a reminder of how to deal with having a friend, or a colleague, or an acquaintance, who seems to be so much more accomplished or successful than we think we are.

So what are you going to learn today? I am going to talk about: what to do when your friends seem so much more accomplished or successful. How to get back on track. How to stay in your own lane and how to keep your eyes on your own path. Basically, how to take this situation and flip it on its head and use it to your advantage and get out of that crappy place where you are comparing yourself to other people.

Before I get into this week’s episode, I wanted to invite you to check out my new book on Amazon, I have been writing a series of short reads books called the Into the Woods Short Reads, and these are all short eBooks that are intended to be read in about half-an-hour, more or less, and they are based on podcast episodes. So if you are listening to this podcast, as you are, maybe you prefer to get your information by listening, or maybe you like listening to podcasts but you prefer to learn by reading. I am that kind of person, I really enjoy listening to podcasts but I just don’t retain the information. So that is why I have taken some of my podcast episodes and repurposed them into these short actionable ebooks. The very first one was released last month and it was called, How to Add More Adventure to Your Life, and, this month, actually over the weekend on Friday, I released my second one which is called: How to Practice Self Love. It covers practical steps you can take to love yourself more today. Again, you can read it in about half-an-hour it is short, sweet, actionable and I would love for you to check it out. So if you head over to getbook.at/ITWSR2 that will redirect you to your local Amazon store.

Now I am starting to publish my books, particularly my eBooks, wide; which means that I will be publishing them not just on Amazon but all major eBook platforms. I started out publishing wide from the very beginning and my first, I think, six or seven books were like that and then last year my book launch mentor suggested, or highly recommended, that I only publish on Amazon because then I could take advantage of Kindle Unlimited and while that has been an interesting experiment, I have done the math and I think I can, not only make more money by publishing my books wide, but also get my books out there to a wider audience, because not everyone has a Kindle, not everyone buys their books on Amazon and by publishing my books wide it means that people can get the in libraries. I have recently put together a spreadsheet of all of my sources of income and how, and where, people have been buying my books for the last five years, and there have been several requests for my books from libraries and purchases of my books for libraries. So coming soon you can get all of my books in libraries, so if you can’t afford to buy them, please do check your local library and request it there. If they can’t get it for whatever reason know that I will be publishing all of my books to a wide audience, as soon as I can get out of my contract with Kindle Unlimited. That will be happening little by little. Again, that is my new Into The Woods Short Reads Book: How to Practice Self Love.

Getting back on today’s topic. What to do when a friend seems so much more accomplished? Now I think this is a really great topic because I have been on both sides of this situation. I have been in a situation where my friends have said to me that they feel like I have been getting so much done, slow down, what are you doing… you have published so many books, you have done so much stuff. And I have been on the side where I feel bad about myself because some of my friends seem to be so much more accomplished and successful than I am. I think this is a really interesting situation to be in, when talking about this, because I can see both sides of it.

For many years I have had a couple of friends that I have mentioned before on the show, I am sure, who I did my coaching training with. And the vast majority of people I did my training with have gone on to not do much with it, a lot of them tried to make their coaching business work, and ultimately had to go back to a full-time job, or they are coaching on the side, but most of them have not made a full-time business out of it. However, there have been a couple of people that have been really successful with their coaching business and for the longest time I was happy for them, because they are my friends, but I felt not so much envious, not jealous, certainly not resentful, but I used their success, or their perceived success, to feel bad about myself. So that is not very good, it is not very useful, and maybe you are in a situation like that? Maybe you have friends that seem more accomplished, more successful, seem to be doing better in life and that could make you feel a variety of things, it could make you feel jealous, resentful, bad about yourself… whatever.

I think the thing to start with is, to look at the situation. This is something that you might want to explore, just kind of thinking about it, or maybe you want to journal about it. I prefer journalling, as you know, because it gets the stuff out of my head and onto paper where I can see it and it seems to be more objective when I do that, it seems to be less nasty, it seems to be more manageable. So I recommend journalling but not everyone likes that so anyway, get the stuff out of your head and look at it. Look at the situation and try to look at it objectively and try and see: what is it that they have that you want? Do they seem more accomplished, do they seem more successful and why? What is it that they are doing that you want, what is it that they have achieved that you want, what are these specific things that they have in their life that you do not have in your life?

And next, how do you feel about it? Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you depressed? Are you resentful? Are you jealous? How do you feel about their accomplishments and their success?

Next, really get clear on the situation, are you using their success to feel bad about yourself? And again, if so, what flavour of bad is that? Is it sad? Depressed? Hopeless?

And then, as always, flip it on its head: how can you use their success to motivate yourself? How can you look at what they have done and apply that to your own life? And look at what would you rather have instead? Do you want exactly what they have or do you want something else? Because when I think about these friends who have their successful coaching businesses, I don’t want what they have. I have now realised that I don’t want to be filling up my calendar with coaching calls. I want to be writing books, that is my thing, I love writing, it fills me with joy. Yes I also love client calls but they are also really draining of my energy and I can’t do a lot of them. So I don’t want to fill up my calendar with coaching calls at all because it is just not manageable for me energy-wise, so I don’t want what they have, I want something else. I do want to be successful, I do want to be making a full-time living from my writing, and I don’t want a calendar full of coaching calls.

So remember that your metric of success should not be your friend’s success, you need to set your own metric. So say again, my friends have a full calendar of coaching clients, I don’t want that, what do I want instead? I want to be making a certain amount of money from my books, I want to be making a certain amount of profit from my books, I want to eventually get to the point where I can be making a full-time living from my books and writing full-time, whatever that means for me. Obviously part of being a full-time writer is marketing and building my platform and advertising and also writing. But eventually I do want that to be my full time situation. So set your own metric, what does success look like to you? What would make you feel successful? What would make you feel accomplished?

And remember you don’t know the whole story. With one of my friends, who has got this successful coaching business, I know her well enough to know the whole story. She was making multiple six-figures for a while, but was really stressed and anxious on the back end. Since then things have changed, she has restructured her business, but I know that it was difficult for her, she was making great money but the back end of things was really difficult. She had a team that was really challenging to work with and she was just overwhelmed with work. So it would be easy for someone, who didn’t know the whole story, to look at her and think: wow, I want what she has got, when maybe you don’t want the whole package of what that person has. So remember, in most cases, you don’t know the whole story. If this person that seems much more accomplished and successful than you is a good enough friend that you know the whole story, or you think you know the whole story, take that into consideration. Not everything is what it seems.

So what to do? Stay in your own lane. Now I have talked before about quitting the comparison game, comparing yourself to other people is not a good thing unless you are doing it to learn something from the situation. Oftentimes we compare ourselves to other people to feel bad about ourselves, I have done that a lot. My advice, as always, is to stay in your own lane. How do you do that? Start by reevaluating your year’s plan and your goals. Now I recently looked at my 2020 calendar for this year and re-evaluated everything because Coronavirus, while it hasn’t disrupted my life as much as other people’s lives, it has changed things a lot. So let’s look at the changes so you can see how these can apply to your own plan.

So far I have been on track with my business mindset books, I have published the second edition of Business Beliefs and Business Blocks in ebook, paperback and audio. I have just published the audio books, I am super-excited about that and I am really excited about having more audio books available. And once those have been published and they have gone live I will be sharing snippets of those here on the podcast. So I am really excited about that, super on-track with that.

South Downs Way, I have released the second edition of that book in print and eBook, I have not yet recorded the audio book because recording audio books is exhausting and I needed a break after doing the first two business books, I will be doing that this year, but I haven’t completed the audio yet. My Into The Woods Short Reads books, that is something new that I added to my publishing calendar after the year started and I have completed the first five of those which was my goal for this year. Two of them are live, and available to purchase, and the other three are set up as pre-orders online, super excited about that. I have pushed the deadline for my second two business mindset books, Business Visibility and Business Intuition, I have pushed those back a couple of months, because I wasn’t able to do workcations for two months and that is when I get the bulk of my writing done, so this is the first thing that I re-evaluated, I pushed those back a couple of months, I have restructured when I am going to work on those and when I am going to publish those and I am really happy with that.

I was going to walk the Camino Portuguese this year, I was going to walk the Camino Ingles this year, that is obviously not going to happen and it is also not going to happen next year, because next year is a holy year and the trails are going to be crazy busy, so those two books aren’t going to get written until 2022, I am not crazy about that but you know I have made peace with it. So that is a change.

I have added two other things to my publishing calendar for this year, I have got a 2021 planner based on my annual planning, how I set my own goals, and how I create my own plans for each year. That is going to be coming out in October and I haven’t started work on that yet but it is very simple and I have got more than enough time to do that. So that’s new. I also have some Plant Spirit Short Reads books, so kind of like my Into The Woods Short Reads books but I am going to be channeling a message from a plant spirit and then adding some practical information to that. So I have got five of those that I want to release by the end of the year, probably they are going to go live in the last five months of the year and I am super-excited about that and I am on track for that. So I have got that all under control.

As you can see, some things have been cancelled, not cancelled but greatly postponed, and some things have been mildly postponed, but that is the plan. Other things have changed a lot more, so kickboxing, I haven’t had classes in two months, so I obviously won’t be attending the summer course at the end of this month, because there isn’t going to be one, and I don’t even know if there is going to be a winter course, so I am probably not going to be getting my black belt this year, I am probably not going to be doing my grading until next year. At this point I have kind of mentally prepared myself for the summer course of next year but maybe it is going to be winter of next year, I don’t know. Hopefully sooner rather than later, because I am not getting any younger and it is going to be really challenging, but I have made peace with that, because I have seen that it is definitely not going to happen this year. One thing that I am behind on working on, I have been working through my Druid OBOD grade training, I haven’t done much of that in the last few months and so I am definitely behind on that and that is something that I miss and I want to pick up.

That’s kind of how I went through my calendar of my goals and plans for this year, and I have figured out how I need to rearrange things to still feel that I am happy with my year, even though there are some things that I just cannot control and there is still a lot of uncertainty this year and I don’t know what is going to be happening. So that’s me.

Go back to your goals, go back to your plans, and reevaluate your year’s goals and plans. See what you need to do, see how you need to adjust deadlines perhaps, see what you might need to do differently, see what you need to take different actions on and keep your eyes on your own path. The timing is different for everyone, some people seem to have overnight success, even though obviously there is no such thing, we don’t now what work we have been putting into it in the background. Some people just have different timing and sometimes the timing of our lives doesn’t coincide with what we want it to be. It just means that we have to try more things, we need to try different things, we need to take new actions, we need to take different actions, we need to do something different and we need to take action towards our goals. That is the practical action bit.

There is also mindset work that you can do to make you feel better about where you are in your path, gratitude work is really, really, good for this. Just make a list of things that you are grateful for. I know a lot of people resist this, I know a lot of people hate this. As I have said before it is not work I do on a constant basis, I just do it on an as-needed basis, if I am not feeling well, if I am feeling bad about myself, if I am feeling bad about my life, I get out my journal and I write a list of ten things that I am grateful for. I don’t do it every day, you can do it every day, do what works for you. But gratitude work is really good for getting me to kind of shift my perspective and get into an attitude of gratitude and get me into a better mind place for taking the right actions. So you might want to do the gratitude work before you reevaluate your plans and your goals this year, because it might get you in a different place.

Also, forgiveness work, I have been doing a lot of forgiveness work lately. It is something that I have resisted in the past and I have kind of done it sporadically but I have been doing it every day and I feel like it is really helping. So what I do is Ho’oponopono, I say the statements, either just I repeat them as a mantra, or I will sit in the whole brain posture and do them, and you can Google what that is and see videos, so that is a really, really, good way of doing it. I have been falling asleep at night repeating the words from the Ho’oponopono prayer as a mantra. There are different versions of that, the one that I do is: I forgive you, please forgive me, I am sorry, I love you, thank you. And I just repeat that over and over in my mind until I fall asleep. During the day when I get upset with myself about something, or if I am feeling bad about myself about something, I do the forgiveness work for me, whenever I think about someone that I am using to feel bad about myself, I do the forgiveness work for them. If I have negative thoughts about someone throughout the day, I stop and I do forgiveness work for them. What I do during the day is I basically repeat that prayer over and over until I feel relaxed and that really seems to help and it gets me in a good mindset place.

So again, you might want to do some gratitude work and/or forgiveness work before reevaluating your plan and your goals, but all of this stuff will help you get back on track. You might need to take new different actions, you might need to do something different, if you are feeling stuck on your path get support, hire a coach, or mentor, get support from a friend, get support from your mastermind group. My master-gut group, we used to meet every other Wednesday, now we are meeting every single Wednesday since lockdown started just to stay on track and support each other during these weird times. So do what you need and get help, get support when you need it.

So that is about all for today. To recap, look at the situation, look at what they have that you want, what is it that they have that you want? How do you feel about that? What would you rather have instead? Are you using their success to feel bad about yourself and if so, how can you use their success to motivate yourself. And look at what it is that they have, do you want exactly that or do you want something else? And remember use that information to re-evaluate your year’s plan, your goals and do some gratitude work, do the forgiveness work, if you need help to get back on track and also get support from someone else so that you can get unstuck.

Finally I have got some related episodes that might help with this, episode 349 Joanna Hennon and I talk about social media, and we ask the question: is social media actually bad fo your self esteem? Episode 348, I talk about how to stop taking things personally. Episode 347, I talk about how to stop beating yourself up and start forgiving yourself. Episode 343, I talk about what do to when you feel like you are not good enough. And finally, episode 239, I talk about how to quit the comparison game for good, and that is a super-relevant episode to this topic.

So I hope you found this interesting and useful. Please let me know what you thought about this, you can drop me a line at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there.

You can also send me ideas for future episodes, I find it really, really, useful to know what you want to know and what you want me to talk about, those are really interesting topics for me.

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Finally, remember to visit: https://hollyworton.com/360 for the show notes on this episode.

Next week I will be back with Cara Wilde who has been a guest on this show several times, we are going to be talking about values. I had this really, really, good session with her a couple of weeks ago where she helped me work through my values. She helped me look at what are the values that have been guiding my actions for the last up until now; and what are my true values deep down at the soul level? It was so super-useful and we are going to talk through values, what they mean and why they are so important. She has a really different way of working with values than I have ever worked with them before. So I expect you are going to find that episode super-interesting.

Thank you again for listening; thank you, thank you, thank you and have a great week.