Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast. Kelly here.

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

It's completely normal to have moments where you are looking to your left and your right

and trying to check and see what somebody else is doing, or you might feel jealous or even

appropriately threatened by another individual who comes into your space.

Whether you are the best at skill X, better than everybody else,

and then here comes somebody else showing up who does it better than you. Or maybe it's physical

competition. Somebody has a better body, quote unquote, than we do. Or has some features that we're

jealous of.

Jealousy is common.

I think it's a healthy emotion.

When jealousy doesn't fester, it's completely healthy emotion.

And competition can at times make people better.

Like having someone in your lane that is doing something similar may make you strive to be a

better person. However, if we are opting out of the struggle, competition can be a very ugly thing,

and it can keep us feeling that we need to maintain a certain look, a certain standard, a certain

skill set to have value.

And that people who may look on the surface to have better of those things can make us feel

inadequate and keep us struggling to keep up with an ideal that is probably unrealistic and unnecessary.

Our inheritance as black women of joy and love and community and abundance, there is no

competition there. So today we're going to talk about where competition comes from, what historically and

culturally makes us competitive with each other, and then talk about three ways to opt out

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