Comparing ourselves to other people is one of the most common sources of workplace unhappiness I come across in my coaching practice.
It rarely announces itself directly – people don’t usually say they want help with the comparisons they’re making. But when we dig into the root of someone’s frustration, dissatisfaction, or self-doubt at work, a comparison with a colleague is very often sitting underneath it.
It’s worth pausing here. Think of the last time you compared yourself to someone else. I’d guess it didn’t leave you feeling great. Comparison is a normal, common human activity, but it’s also something that can quietly erode our focus, our happiness, and our satisfaction with our own work and lives.
Why we compare ourselves to others
We’re social creatures, and social comparison serves a real evolutionary purpose. We want to understand the quality of our group membership: how accepted we are, how valued we are, and how we’re performing relative to others in our group. In our ancestral environment, this comparison was limited to a small, familiar circle – family, tribe, close colleagues.
Today, that circle has expanded enormously. Thanks to social media in particular, we’re now comparing ourselves not just to people we know well, but to complete strangers on the other side of the world. And this is where things start to go wrong.
The identity of the person we’re comparing ourselves to matters a great deal. If it’s someone close to us, the comparison could be more likely to be realistic and contextually appropriate. But when we compare ourselves to people we don’t know well, or don’t understand the full context of, we end up comparing our own messy, complicated reality to a curated, partial view of someone else’s outcomes. That’s rarely a fair fight, and it tends to leave us feeling worse.
The cost of unhelpful comparison
Comparisons affect both how we feel and how we behave. We can end up unhappy with our status, our performance, or even our appearance. Once we’re caught up in the thoughts these comparisons generate, it’s easy to spiral into rumination about the past and predictions about the future. The kind of automatic negative thinking our minds are so good at producing when left unchecked.
This pulls us away from the present moment, which matters for two reasons. First, we’re often better placed to be doing something else entirely – there’s usually something more pressing on the to-do list. Second, the present moment is where we can actually take helpful action, and unhelpful comparisons rarely lead anywhere useful. They tend to leave us feeling that we’re falling short, and that there’s nothing we can do to close the gap.
Over time, these comparison-driven stories become part of our self-concept – the narrative we carry about who we are. And because comparisons come to mind so easily and so often, they can end up shaping our decisions and behaviour more than we’d like.
Four ways to respond more helpfully
The good news is that we can change our relationship with these comparisons. Here’s where I’d usually start with a coaching client.
1. Notice you’re doing it. This sounds simple, but it’s genuinely powerful. Comparisons often run in the background, and we only catch them once we’re already feeling their effects. Building the habit of noticing when you’ve slipped into comparison mode opens the door to everything else on this list.
2. See the comparison as just a thought. In psychological terms, this is called cognitive defusion – learning to relate to our thoughts as passing mental events rather than facts we need to act on. A thought is just a thought. It doesn’t need a response, and we don’t need to resolve how we’re thinking or feeling before we get on with our day. It’s also worth remembering that everyone does this. There’s nothing wrong with you for making comparisons; it’s a universal part of being human.
3. Get curious about where it’s come from. Rather than trying to suppress or shut down the comparison, ask yourself why you’re making it, why now, and why with this particular person. Sometimes the honest answer is that you’ve no idea, and you can simply let it go. Other times you’ll uncover something genuinely meaningful – perhaps this person is pursuing a goal that matters to you, or living in a way you’d like to live. That reframes the comparison as something closer to admiration, and opens up a more useful question: what does this matter to me, and what am I trying to achieve here? Often the answer is that it doesn’t matter as much as it felt like it did, which takes a lot of the sting out of it.
4. Notice how you feel and how you’re behaving as a result. Comparisons can put us in contact with emotions that spill into behaviour we’re not proud of. Catching this early – noticing that you’re winding yourself up – lets you decouple how you’re thinking and feeling from how you choose to show up in that moment.
Where self-compassion comes in
This is where self-compassion becomes so relevant. When we bring self-compassion to a comparison, we can say: it’s okay to feel this way, these aren’t bad thoughts or feelings, and I can be kind to myself in this moment. We can acknowledge that comparing ourselves to others is something almost everyone does – it’s not weird, and there’s nothing wrong with us for doing it. We can also acknowledge that the comparison itself is unhelpful rather than accurate. It’s not an objective, apples-with-apples analysis; it’s a bit of rule-of-thumb thinking that isn’t serving us well.
That’s a far more compassionate response than labelling or judging ourselves, or treating the comparison as valid fact. And it frees us up to bring our attention back to the present moment – and everything useful that moment has to offer, including that long to-do list.
Not all comparisons are bad
It’s worth being clear that the goal isn’t to shut down every comparison. Some comparisons can be genuinely useful.
Comparing yourself to a role model. Imagine noticing a colleague who delivers a crisp, engaging summary at every team meeting, while your own updates feel stumbling and forgettable by comparison. Left unchecked, that comparison could just leave you feeling inadequate. But it can also be treated as spotting a role model in your environment – which opens the door to a very different response: asking them how they do it, and starting your own development in that area. That’s a comparison that sparks a positive developmental journey rather than a spiral of feeling less than.
Comparing yourself to your past self. This is a comparison I’d actively encourage. Rather than measuring yourself against someone else’s outcomes, ask how you’re doing today compared with last week, or how a particular skill has developed compared with last month. Reviewing your own progress regularly – through something as simple as a habit tracker, or a slightly more involved reflective practice – lets you make small course corrections before they start to feel like a much bigger task.
The bottom line
Most of the comparisons we make aren’t intentional or objective. We’re comparing our own insides – our full lived experience, our effort, our setbacks, our self-doubt – with someone else’s outsides: their results, their visible behaviour, their highlight reel. We don’t see the hours they’ve put in or the struggles they’ve navigated to get there. We just see the wins. That’s not a fair comparison, and it never really adds up.
If there’s one habit worth building from all of this, it’s simply noticing when you’re comparing yourself to someone else, and then meeting that moment with curiosity rather than judgement. That alone is far more helpful than buying into the comparison, or trying to mentally shut it down.
