A while back, I was running my business alone and barely holding it together. Money was too tight to hire anyone to help me, so I was doing all of it myself, one woman with too many jobs and not enough certainty about any of it. And when you’re in that spot, unsure about money and carrying the whole thing on your back, you start watching other women – the ones who seem to be doing better than you. You tell yourself you’re looking for ideas, and part of that is true, but part of it is something else.
I watched women in my field who were further along than me. I watched what they posted, how they sold, and where they seemed to be going, and I told myself I was in search of direction, which, to be fair, is half of what I was doing. But there was another thing happening underneath that I didn’t want to look at, and it took an interaction with another woman for me to finally see it.
We first connected online, and when I saw that she was visiting where I lived, I reached out and asked if she’d like to grab dinner at one of my favorite spots. She hadn’t been, so she was in. When we first made the plan, it was easy; I was excited to meet her. But in the days before the dinner, I started looking more closely at her because it was becoming real, and I wanted to know who this woman I was about to meet actually was. I went through her page, and I saw how easily everything seemed to come to her. I already knew she was successful. She’d been traveling before arriving in my town. And sitting there, having done none of that, I started to feel it. I was budgeting just to make this dinner work, and she was moving through the world like money and ease were nothing. That gap opened up something in me.
Then the voice came, the one I think every female entrepreneur knows intimately. It started asking questions like, What does she have that I don’t? What is she doing that I’m not doing? How does she have all this success and I don’t? What am I doing wrong? Am I just not enough? Every question pointed to the same answer: that she had cracked a code I hadn’t, and every one of those thoughts hit harder than the last.
Nothing about her had changed. She hadn’t done anything to me. The only thing that changed was that I got close enough to hold myself up against her, and the second I did, I started losing.
That dinner wasn’t the beginning – it was just the first time I caught it while it was happening.
Comparison had been running in me for years by then, yet I never once called it what it was. I told myself I was researching, that I was studying successful women so I could learn from them, and this was how you figured out the game. But what I was actually doing was going through another woman’s business, her posts, her launches, her funnels, and making a list of everything she could do that I couldn’t. A list of everything she had that I didn’t. I was itemizing my inadequacy, line by line.
And here’s the part that gives it away: I would choose women making millions while I was barely making anything at all. Not women a step ahead of me, whose path I could actually follow. Women whose lives had nothing to do with mine, whose numbers I couldn’t have reached in five years of perfect execution. That’s not what you do when you’re looking for a roadmap; that’s what you do when you’re looking for proof. I wasn’t studying them to figure out how to get there. I was gathering evidence for a case I had already decided that I would never be successful, I didn’t have whatever they had, and every impossible woman I found was another exhibit.
It also never propelled me. Not once. I might have come away with a tactic or an idea, but it never made me successful. I came out smaller than I went in, every time, and then I did it again the next week.
Every hour I spent cataloging another woman’s success was an hour I did not spend on my own. And the work I wasn’t doing was the work that would have made me money. I wasn’t finding my voice. I wasn’t figuring out what I was actually passionate about, what I had to say that no one else was saying. I wasn’t finding my people, talking to them, or learning what they needed. I wasn’t mining my own work for what was already good in it. All of that was sitting there waiting for me, and instead I gave those hours to women who didn’t know my name.
That’s the theft. Comparison took the exact hours it requires to build a business and spent them on someone else’s, leaving me with a longer list of my own shortcomings as the receipt.
I never wanted to do what she does. I wanted to do what I do.
What I know now, on the other side of it, is that I don’t have women I look up to. Not because I think I’m above anyone, but because I don’t want what anyone has. I can look at a woman who’s built something extraordinary and admire the work, admire the roads she’s paved for other women, and feel nothing but respect, and then go back to my own life without measuring a single thing.
That’s what it looks like when the comparison is gone. No smugness, just the absence of wanting. Because when I stopped watching other women and finally spent that attention on myself, I found my own road, and it turned out I never wanted theirs. All those years I spent grieving lives I would have turned down if you handed them to me. All that time proving I could never do what she does, when the truth was I never wanted to do what she does. I wanted to do what I do.
You cannot find that road while you’re standing on someone else’s, and that’s the cruelest part of comparison; it keeps you facing the wrong direction. Your life is behind you the entire time you’re staring at hers.
I want you to be honest with yourself about how many hours you have given to this. Scrolling through her page, reading her copy, totaling up what she has and what you don’t. Add it up over the last year. That’s not time you lost, that’s time you spent, deliberately, building the case against yourself, and while you were building it, your business went nowhere.
What did it cost you? The offer you didn’t make because she was already doing it better. The price you didn’t raise because she seemed more established, polished, or more entitled to the number than you. The post you didn’t write, the pitch you didn’t send, the thing you didn’t launch, because you’d already decided how it ends. Every single one of those was money, and comparison talked you out of all of it.
She isn’t taking anything from you. She doesn’t know you’re doing this. She’s just living her life, building her thing, and getting richer, and the whole time you’re watching her do it, comparison has its hand in your pocket.
You can’t quit comparison by deciding to quit comparison. I tried, and the comparing always came back, because I was treating the symptom and leaving the wound wide open.
It ends when you know what you’re worth without needing another woman’s life to measure it against. Then there’s nothing left for comparison to feed on. You can look at any woman, at any level of success, and none of it rocks you, because what you’re worth doesn’t get decided by what she has.
Comparison is the thief of joy. But if you’re building something of your own, it’s also the thief of your time, your money, and your success, and it will keep taking for exactly as long as you let it.
This is the work I do with women in my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. It’s two weeks of daily one-on-one work with me, delivered by email, where we go after the worthiness wound underneath comparison, the one that has you measuring yourself against every woman who’s further along and coming up short every time. Every day you get an assignment built specifically for you. It’s $397, and it’s for women who are done watching everyone else build while their life waits.
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