Making A Room For Self Improvement

Competition is an inevitable part of life, it is most likely to appear in every part of the human interaction which can be in Schools, work, church, sports, and even in personal relationships. When competition is done with the right and pure mindset, it can be a great prompt for self growth and improvement. Healthy competition pushes individuals to strive for excellence and higher levels, it pushes people to discover their strength and also remain motivated. However if a competition is not managed properly and from the place of love, it can spring into toxicity, hatred, resentment, and unhealthy obsession with winning.

An unhealthy obsession in the sense that a person might be in a competition with someone else and even go the extra miles with and evil intention without the other person knowing about what’s going on. An healthy competition is driven by self improvement and motivation and not at the defeat and downfall of others, but in our world today we all know that it is quite hard to see an competition because believe me there’s a saying that “the only people that want to see you do better than them are your parents”. Healthy competition should be about setting personal goals, thinking outside of the box and pushing oneself beyond your comfort zone. In this light a healthy competition can bring about innovation and resilience, it will help encourage people to put out their best in doing something that they already know how to do just by looking up their friends, colleagues, bosses and mentors.

For example in schools, children tend to always be in a competition just so they will always come out as the top in their class, my niece was sent to a new school and in the first semester she came first, and everyone including the teachers were surprised that a newcomer would beat their existing class champion, so last semester my my niece came home with a second position and she was really sad, so this semester she has been working really hard so that she returns back to being the class champion, from this little experience I could tell that it is an healthy competition because they’re only children and they are best friends, there’s no time that my niece would come home and she wouldn’t talk about Zoe, the existing class champion.

Even if they’re competing in class it didn’t stop them from sharing same desk in school, it didn’t stop them from buying gifts for each other when it was their birthdays, and recently we knew that Zoe and her family would be leaving the country soon, we only knew this information because my niece doesn’t stop talking about her.

However an unhealthy competition is known when it is being instigated envy, jealousy, insecurity and constant need of validation, and signs of an unhealthy competition are toxicity, constant comparisons, always feeling threatened and angry about someone else’s success, always trying to sabotage others to get ahead of them. To keep balance on a healthy competition we as human beings should always try to develop self-awareness and a good prospect about success, we should always recognize our own goals and strive to surpass them, and for me I will always say be in competition with your own self rather than other people.

THANKS FOR READING💫