By Brianne Fitzgerald | Executive director, B Greater Consulting

I was listening to a podcast recently in which a woman had been through a low point in her life and had come to the realization that many of the decisions that she was making in her life were a result in some way because she was “competing for position.” She meant the idea of trying to be someone she wasn’t, trying to be like someone else, or trying to please someone else.

I hadn’t really thought much about the way she phrased it until that podcast. I began thinking about things that were obvious in my life where I felt I would have been competing for position. As children, we can probably reflect and think about where we could give 1 million examples of this. However, as adults, we don’t look at what we do as competing for position, so therefore we deny what’s right in front of us (news flash – we all do it all the time).

If you really sit back and take a hard look at your life — maybe it’s just a span of a few months or maybe it’s a span of a few years — we’ve all participated as adults in the competition for position. It may not be obvious to us at first, but we are all guilty.

So why is this occurring? What has caused us to get to this point in our lives where we continually compare ourselves to others? How did we get to the place where we think that we’re not worthy or good enough, and want to continually compete for position?

We can fall into a funk. We can devalue ourselves. We don’t feel as though we have the skills or abilities to achieve certain things. We have this “idea” of what things should be like, and we don’t feel that we will be accepted or valued until we make that idea a reality. We see others use social media platforms to share their stories and we think that we should be like them or we should strive to be like them. It all can give us a false sense of reality or false sense of hope. The idea that it creates may not be who we really are, who we should be, or who we are truly meant to be. When we compare ourselves to others in whatever way outside of just plain goal-oriented nature, we put ourselves in a situation where we are competing for position. 

So how do we get to a point where we compete less for position, and start to truly believe that we are valued and that we are going to bring contributions to the table every single day?

One way many people distance themselves from the notion of competing for position is to disconnect from the world by taking a break from social media. Whether it’s two days, 10 days, or a month at a time, people usually come back refreshed and with the right frame of mind. They’ve taken themselves away from the stressors and the notion of competing for position, and they sit back and focus on what else is going on in their lives (worrying less about others or what they think).

One other way we can work on this is by lifting up other people. You know the saying that a smile is contagious? So is giving compliments and finding ways to show appreciation. It takes a conscious effort of trying to point out and think of ways to recognize ways that others are
contributing to your world. It’s not something we have to do every moment of every day, but if you think about it a few times a day, you can think of many people in your life. For me, I start every day by telling my daughter she’s beautiful and I love her. 

Another thing that I value doing a few times a year is lifting myself up. I ask people who are around me in various aspects of my life to give me a few words to explain what impact I make in their lives or how they would describe me to others. These words are very powerful — they describe you usually in ways that you may not recognize or may not have thought that would describe you. This is a good way to remind yourself of the contributions you’re making to others, and to really know that you are important and valued. 

We know that competing for position is just part of life. It may not be what we were taught to do, but it sure is a part of our culture today. However, what we really need to do is figure out how we recognize it and make sure that as women we are feeling valued, important and needed. We need to know that we’re contributing something every single day that is meaningful, purposeful, and important.

Brianne Fitzgerald is the executive director of B Greater Consulting, helping nonprofits fill in the gaps. She was honored in 2015 as the winner of the YPC Amy Jennings Impact Award, recognized as a Business Record Forty Under 40 in 2016, and awarded the Impact Award in 2017 from the Youth Leadership Initiative. Fitzgerald is active as a volunteer for Simpson College, serving on both the Alumni Association Board of Directors and the Multimedia Communication Advisory Board. She is also the Community Leadership Program Project Chair on the Greater Des Moines Leadership Institute Board of Governors. She is a married mother of three. Connect with her via email.