Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout Podcast, Kelly here.

And today I want to talk about how to opt out of comparison.

I want to distinguish from comparison and admiration because I think sometimes those two concepts get a little mixed up.

And I definitely don't want to talk about opting out admiration because I think we should admire people or look up to folks.

So we may admire, for example, someone in our career field or someone doing a job that we dream of.

And we may look at them and

study them to get ideas and clues about what we are not doing currently in our lives or what

we could be doing to get those goals. We may see people on social media feeds or see people in

certain outfits and think, oh, they look incredible. And maybe they have a similar body type to us.

So we think, okay, if they look incredible in that outfit, I wonder how it would look on me.

Admiration is different from comparison.

When we admire someone, it motivates us.

It makes us want to learn what they do and in some ways imitate them. Comparison,

however, is a different category. When we are in comparison traps, which we'll talk about and define

a little bit later this episode, we get stuck thinking about what we don't have. It leaves us feeling insecure and like we're

missing out on something. And it can rob us of our joy and keep us in struggle. Oftentimes,

when we are stuck in comparison, we are also simultaneously stuck in the struggle because we start pursuing goals or

try to live our lives in a way that isn't authentic to us and can keep us trapped from actually

finding that the legacy that belongs to us as black women, which is one of joy and

accomplishment, but of one of like abundance and beauty and community

in our lives. And so I want to talk today about how to avoid getting stuck in comparison

with others, robbing ourselves of joy, but also acknowledging that it's a human tendency,

...