How to Be Less Competitive

Our competitive nature is often a healthy force in the name of progress. However, it can also make you hate you coworkers, teammates, friends, family, strangers, cats, dogs, plants, cars and air. If you're uber-competitive and feel like something is beating you, then it consumes your every thought. Take your competition in doses and prevent yourself from getting into a fist fight.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Patience

1. Understand that winning and losing are overrated. Those two ends more or less define competition. In a sporting event, the pain of losing subsides fairly quickly within a day, a week or sometimes a month, unless you're Bill Buckner.
2. Be realistic about the value of what you're competing for. For this step, work is a good example. Everyone wants to succeed and excel in the office. Most people want to have the higher paycheck that goes along with it. In the end, realize that it's only a promotion. If you're "competing" with someone else for it, let the chips fall as they may. If you get the promotion, great. If they get it, great. The state of your existence is not going to be seriously impacted if you don't get it.
3. Continue to operate as usual. If you find that you're trying harder just to win--in whatever it is--then you probably don't deserve to "win" anyway. Also, if you're simply maintaining your modus operandi, then it's less likely you'll feel let down afterward because you didn't place undue emphasis on the result.
4. Remember your competition isn't much different than you are. I'm a firm believer that some people are rotten and don't deserve a pot to, well, you know. By and large, however, people are just people, like you and me. So, if they "beat" you, is it really that bad? Should you begrudge them their accolades? After all, they were only trying to do the best they could, like you were.
5. Exhibit humility in the outcome. If you "win", then be gracious. If you "lose", then be gracious. It's as simple as that.

Tips & Warnings

• Brown-nosing, whining or anything else will be noticed. Don't resort to that, particularly if the competition has. It will reflect poorly on you.
• Be sensitive to the competition's motivations. If the other party is extremely competitive, realize it's likely coming from insecurity. Maybe they have a poor self image. Maybe their marriage is loveless, deteriorating a little bit more each day and this thing is the only thing they have going for them. They're using this to offer the appearance of success even though they're dark and sad and hollow inside. You'd hate to unleash that cry-fest beast by provoking it. Unless you like being competitive, in which case, provoking it is exactly what you should do.

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