Life is not a competition.

First Published 4 August 2022

Book club came around really quick this month – mainly due to last month’s being delayed because I had the audacity to go on holiday! We caught up yesterday to talk about The Courage to be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga.  We seem to be on a roll in that we all really liked the book of choice again, and we got a lot out of it.  

This one has given me massive amounts of food for thought (I even took notes this time!) – and you may be pleased to hear that I am not going to talk about all of it 🤣 – if you do decide to read it, please do let me know what you think – I’d love to have a chat about it.

One of the topics covered was around competition and rivalry.  As you can imagine, that peaked my interest…

I’ve read before, that the only person that it is beneficial to be in competition with, is the version of ourselves from yesterday.  And I think this book helped to reenforce this concept for me.  

We are designed to work with other people in cooperation and collaboration and not competition and rivalry.  The analogy used was a story about running a marathon.  This got me to thinking about all the races where the runners are encouraged by the crowd and the other participants too.  I even remember watching a clip of a person falling and the other runner’s around them helping them back up and restoring them to the place they were in before the fall.  

This highlights for me that these runners remember that the objective of the race is to complete it rather than to ‘beat’ everyone else.  I wonder how often this is forgotten.  When did it become not enough to achieve the target and instead became more about the order in which we complete something?

There are so many more examples of where collaboration and cooperation is the way to go rather than being a rival.  At the end of the day, it just feels nicer.

So, I am off to go actively look for a collaboration opportunity – well I will do after I make it through all the training I am doing this month. 

For any of my long standing Kinesiology clients – you may remember the excitement of me getting new tools to ‘play with’ when working with you, well I only went and signed up for 2 courses this month – which just means LOADS of new stuff!  So if you haven’t been to see me for a while, now is a perfect chance to come for a top up and experience the new stuff 🙂

If you do decide to read The Courage to be Happy, hit comment, book a natter or just pick up the phone – I’d love to know what you think.