Breaking the "Competition" Cycle: What I Wish I'd Known Sooner

When we started writing this month’s “What’s Guiding Us” in our newsletter, we wanted to share our perspective on the theme “Give to Gain” and how to show up and support women. While our career paths couldn't be more different, we discovered a surprising common thread in our pasts: the heavy, often silent pressure of "competition" with other women. What happens when you stop looking sideways and start looking forward together?

Here is how we each unlearned the cycle of competition to find something much more rewarding:

Nicole:  Growing up, it always felt like there was a competition between me and any other woman I knew. It wasn’t until I became an adult and started my own healing journey that I was able to identify why. 

My internal narrative (the story I was telling myself) was that if other women were succeeding, it meant that I was failing. In my life, this story was perpetuated by society, friends, and family. Not directly, of course, but there was always this feeling of “when others get something, it takes away from me”. 

By engaging in therapy and taking a deeper look within myself, I noticed that this didn’t align with me. This mindset created a constant doubt in myself. I harbored resentment towards others, and was angry most of the time. I wanted to be happy for others, even if they were “ahead” of me. 

Society often communicates this idea that things are black and white, either/or, this or that. However, two things can be true at the same time. I can feel disappointed that I am in a different place in life than another woman AND feel proud of her for her accomplishments. 

I feel very fortunate to have connected with, and surrounded myself with women of this mindset. Whenever I have a new idea or project, the women in my life respond with a resounding “Amazing, how can I help support you?”. It fills me with joy and excitement when I am on the receiving end of this support. I also give this support as often as I can. 

As women, we have so many things working against us already. Let’s not let feelings of failure or inferiority push us further apart. When one woman succeeds, we all succeed!

Kristina: When I started my career in 2000, I joined an HR training program with 9 other women who had just graduated from college. We spent 3 weeks in an onboarding program before we set out to do different projects for various teams in the organization. We were from all over the US, so we were each other's first friends in Philadelphia. 

Having each other made everything easier at first. There was always someone to grab lunch or dinner with, someone to meet for happy hour, someone to experience the city with. And inevitably, we’d compare notes. What were you working on? How was your manager? What did your project actually mean for the company?That's where things got complicated for me.

My placement hit a snag early on, the leader I was supposed to work with left the organization not long after I started. I felt uncertain, and listening to what everyone else was building gave me FOMO before FOMO had a name. I was managing recruiting for a large internship program, but I was convinced that everyone around me was doing something more visible, more impactful, more important. I told myself I was falling behind. That I'd be passed over for the best permanent placements. When one of my cohort members landed theirs, I'd smile and say congratulations  but on the inside, I was quietly asking myself, Why not me?

A few years and one company later, the pattern hadn't changed.

I was in Seattle for a long weekend with my bestie when a team announcement came through email. A peer had just been promoted to Director. We were in different functions, working on completely different things, but none of that logic reached me in the moment. All I could think was: How? I spent most of that trip pouting, mentally rehearsing everything I'd done that she hadn't, calculating what I must have been overlooking about myself.

It's so cringy now to think about how I behaved then. It took me far longer than I care to admit to get over myself.

My internal monologue had cast me as the victim, someone things happened to, rather than someone actively shaping her own direction. And when I finally stepped back and looked at the whole picture, I saw something different. Every single woman I'd been measuring myself against had taken a completely different path. Some went on to hold big titles at big companies. Others became stay-at-home moms. Some left HR to pursue other field. Each of them was, as best I could tell, living exactly the life she'd chosen.

In your 20s, it's almost impossible not to look sideways. When you're still figuring out what your path is supposed to look like, your peers become a kind of compass but a wildly unreliable one. Because as the saying goes, “comparison is the thief of joy”. When you're busy measuring your chapter three against someone else's chapter seven, you lose sight of the story you're actually writing.

The shift happened for me when I finally got clear about my own direction: my real wants, my actual needs, the version of success that felt true for me rather than impressive to everyone else. Once I had that clarity, someone else's promotion stopped feeling like a verdict on my worth. I could finally celebrate their win without it costing me something.

Later in my career, when I'd sit with employees who were struggling with similar feelings, stung by a peer's promotion, rattled by someone else's opportunity…I'd offer them the same simple reminder: Keep your eyes on your own paper.

Every person is running a different race on a different timeline with different finish lines. Our paths may cross, our seasons may overlap, but our "why" and our "when" are entirely our own.

That's not a consolation prize. That's the whole point.

Here's what we want you to take away from all of this (aka the “so-what”):

The women around you are not your competition. They are your context, your community, and if you let them be -  your greatest resource.

When we stop measuring ourselves against each other, something remarkable happens. We start seeing each other. We ask better questions. We make more generous assumptions. We share what we know instead of hoarding it. We root for each other's wins without secretly hoping they won't outpace our own.

The women who helped us most in our careers weren't the ones I competed with. They were the ones who were honest with us, who championed us in rooms we werent in, who told us the truth when we needed it and celebrated loudly when we earned it. And we hope we did the same for them.

That’s the mindset shift. From comparison to curiosity. From scarcity to abundance. From quietly asking why not me to loudly cheering “look at her go” .

It is. Stay on your paper. Trust your path. And cheer for the women who’s getting her time in the spotlight.