All of us struggle with comparing ourselves to others, if we are honest. We build entire systems based on this idea, such as employee of the month awards, university league tables and even country comparisons (e.g. economic performance measures). Yet how healthy is this, on an individual level?
Dean Furness was forced to confront this question in a very real, personal way. Taking his tractor out to the field one day in December 2011, Dean was hit by a 700-pound bale of hay which left him paralysed. He was told by doctors that he would never walk again.
Dean’s world crashed down. How could he come to terms with who he now was? He used to be a strong, capable farmer – working the land and proudly providing for himself and his family. Now, he needed to wait at the table whilst others reached for him. To avoid falling into a dark place in his mind, Dean realised he needed to “look up”.
This involved, in his words, “almost forgetting about the person I was before”. He needed to stop comparing himself to his previous self. He also realised that he needed to avoid comparing himself to others in the same physical condition (after a gruelling group rehab session). Yet within all of this difficulty, Dean discovered an amazing truth.
He realised that it was “really up to him” to decide if a particular moment, or day, was “good” or “bad”. There is a powerful lesson here for all of us. If we burn a meal that we cooked for dinner, does it really have to ruin our entire day? Does a bad commute or a poor work meeting need to do the same? It is up to us to decide.
This is a lesson that needs to be continuously learned and re-learned to help us make the most out of life. For Dean, the journey involved doing a half marathon in 2016 and, later, a full marathon. Here, he needed to regularly remind himself not to compare himself to others – particularly the Paralympians around him – and just focus on his own “personal average”.
How can you improve your own personal average, even if you are not engaged in a sport? This TED Talk is a wonderful video to help inspire ideas and answers to that question.
