You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.Consulting/selfversusself

We naturally tend to compare how we are getting on in life with how others are doing, or with some simple idea of our ‘socially-expected outcomes’ that many of us believe we should be able to effortlessly proceed through life and achieve. This is encouraged by the fact that we live in a competitive society. In such a society, we are rewarded for striving to achieve commercial or professional advantage over those that we see as our competitors. This is called playing the Self Versus Others Game. Naturally enough, we come to see our success as being a matter of ‘winning’ the game of life defined by how we are progressing on the external measures we use to compare ourselves with other people’s achievements.

Some aspects of social media are now adding fuel to the fire of such comparisons by showing us an endless stream of our friends, acquaintances or influencers carefully curating the presentation of, not only their work lives, but their social and home lives also. For many of us, this does not compare well with what seems from the inside to be the somewhat chaotic texture of our own lives. Often our lives feel like we are just making the whole thing up as we go along. They are lives that seem nothing like the images we see on social media of people living what seem to be wonderful, self-actualised, joyous, and fun filled existences.

Even when people do talk on social media about things going wrong in their lives, sometimes this can also turn into another source of potential competition. This can happen when we watch them document blow by blow their triumph over adversity. This can set up yet another standard that we have to aspire to achieve as we bumble our way through dealing with our life problems. In contrast to them, we seem to have little sense of triumph, merely a feeling of trying to merely survive this thing called life.

Everyone is special - Right!

Over a number of recent decades, the way that people have approached child-rearing and children’s education has meant that many of us have been raised on mantras such as: ‘you are special’; ‘you can do anything’; and, ‘you can be a winner’ at whatever you put your mind to. This is reinforced by the way in which society almost exclusively focuses on celebrating and rewarding those who excel rather the vast mass of people who will, by definition, be more average than anything else.

It is not logically possible for the majority of people to be ‘winners’ when held up for external comparison with the elite who are at the top of any particular area of endeavour. It sounds harsh to today’s ear, but most of us will, simple as a matter of logic, be mediocre rather than excellent at what we do and would be categorised as ‘losers’ in any external comparisons with such elites. But should most of us bother to play the Self Versus Others Game and end up being defined as ‘losers’ by the way the rules are stacked against us? In answering this, it is useful to first think through the factors that influence the outcomes of our lives.

The Three factors that Influence the outcomes of our lives

There are three factors that influence the outcomes of our lives.

1. Our genetics and the way these unfold throughout our lives.

2. The opportunities we are given and what happens to us in life from the womb onwards. Society, in the form of other people, factors these opportunities and what happens to us in life (to the extent that other people are aware of them) and creates a rough expectation about what might be called our ‘socially-expected outcomes’. We then internalise this expectation and spend our time measuring our actual achievement against these socially-expected outcomes.

3. The complex inner game that we are faced with when we try to work towards our socially-expected outcomes. Much of the time this game, even though it is happening within ourselves, seems out of our conscious control. The way this game plays out is heavily influenced by 1 and 2. It can take us down twisting and obscure pathways that mean that we do not end up anywhere near achieving what our socially-expected outcomes look like. And even for those of us who seem to have achieved our socially-expected outcomes, we may have only arrived at this achievement on the basis of a tortured inner life. One in which we are desperately trying to keep up with social expectations that we are constantly struggling to meet.

Playing the Self Versus Self Game

There is still much that is unknown about 1 above (genetics) and also its interaction with 2 (opportunities and experiences we face). In addition, 3 (the inner game) that takes place inside us is mostly obscured from other people seeing and understanding its level of difficulty. So it is therefore unwise to mainly structure our lives around trying to achieve our socially-expected outcomes that inevitably fail to factor in all that we are dealing with in working with these three factors. It is particularly unwise to do what society encourages us to do - to let our long-term happiness depend on whether we do, or do not, achieve our socially-expected outcomes.

A much more productive approach to life is to reframe the game we are playing away from a Self Versus Others Game to a Self Versus Self Game. The Self Versus Self Game consciously sets it focus on 3 above - simply how well we are playing our inner game. It moves our preoccupation away from whether or not we achieve our socially-expected external potential. Thinking in terms of Self Versus Self we become much more interested in how well we play our inner game given our limitations and how well we manage adapt to, and accept, the twists and turns of the inner game as it plays out in our lives.

The Cards we have been dealt

When thinking about this inner game, it is useful to think in terms of the ‘cards that we have been dealt’. We can think of life as consisting of everyone being dealt a random set of playing cards. These cards are the three factors that are listed above. The only thing we can ultimately have any control over in our lives is how well we do in the inner game of playing the cards we find appearing in our hand.

When focusing on the inner game, a good place for most people to start is for them to cut themselves some slack about their expectations as to their internal ease of achieving their socially-expected outcomes (3 above). Many people hardwire these expectations into sets of ‘rules’ or beliefs that govern their lives. For instance such rules might be: ‘I am the type of person who obviously should be able to . . .’; ‘My peers are able to do X, so I should also be able to’; or, ‘Given my potential and opportunities, I should have been able to achieve a lot more in my life’. Applying these rules to the way we run and evaluate our success in life is not a good idea.

One tool I use with clients in helping them focus on their inner, rather than outer, game is the RULES Tool. This is a tool that is used to challenge and change rules or beliefs that are based on internalising our socially-expected outcomes. It frees up space for us to think more in terms of what we should regard as a success in the in the inner game of Self Versus Self, rather than the outer game of Me Versus Others. So they may end up converting the above rules to: ‘No one knows how easy or difficult it is for different ‘types’ of people to get where they have got, so I am not going to judge my success against others’; ‘Just because my peers are able to do X says nothing about how hard the inner game has been for me in comparison to them’; and, ‘Regardless of how I have done in the external game, I have faced major challenges in my inner game and I am proud of the fact that I have got to where I have got to in working with those challenges and not letting them totally sink me.’

As clients change their rules and beliefs, it is likely that they will also have to work on accepting their feelings about not meeting their socially-expected outcomes. The Accept Your Feelings Tool is a tool I use to help them do this.

In addition, to address self-criticism and lack of acceptance of themselves, I sometimes get clients to use the Caring for the Self and Others Tool. They use this in a mode where they focus on turning care back in on themselves in the face of the internalised self-criticism that they have developed over the years. This self criticism has developed because of them internalising social pressure into rules and beliefs that evaluate their success against socially-determined rather than Self Versus Self-determined, outcomes.

You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.consulting/selfversusself.

Please note that when you are dealing with issues around child rearing, relationships, dealing with stress of any type or doing psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.