Blogtoberfest Day 2 - Who are you competing against?

Today I realised that I am not perfect, but more importantly I realised I don't have to be perfect.  Actually I think I pretty much realised that a long time ago, that I wasn't perfect, so it is not a sudden or recent realisation.  I guess it more about realising and accepting that I don't have to be perfect.

Sometimes we get to the whole comparing ourselves to others thing and we are so hard on ourselves.  We think why can't I do this like suzy? or why can't I do that like Mary?  Well the truth is that we don't have to ....we don't have to be like anybody else, we just have to be like us.  We all have different qualities and abilities and I think it's about making the most of them.

Recently I joined Toastmasters and I put my name down to do my first speech, which is called The Ice-Breaker speech.  It is a speech will tells the audience a little about you and who you are.  You can give an overview about your life, or take one aspect of your life and tell them about that.  

I put my name down on the agenda online to give the second speech of the night.  One of the members who takes care of the agenda wrote back and asked me if I definitely wanted to speak 2nd as she was concerned if the person before me gave a good speech that I might be put off by it, especially given it was my first speech.  My response to her was I am only competing against myself.  In this case it is not a competition speech in which you compete against others and if that were the case it would be a competition.  I am only there to improve myself and the challenge is to improve with each speech.  

So while we all want to improve at different things in our lives, it is important to remember that we all have different qualities.  We all do things differently.  We have the ability to do different things.  We all have different lessons to learn in life and different paths to take.  I think too it is important to remember that the lesson is different for everyone and not to compare ourselves to the life and lessons of others.