You’re at a conference or a workshop with professionals in your industry, and you realize everyone around you is more successful or further ahead in their career than you are. You felt great about your progress until you walked into the room. Now, you feel behind and even unaccomplished.
How do you deal with it?
First, realize we have all (including the more successful people in the room) been there at some point in our lives.
Second, reframe your thinking.
What if you were at a conference and found yourself to be the most successful person in the room? You immediately feel good about yourself imagining it; it gives you a sense of importance and a degree of status among your colleagues. But what would you leave the conference having learned? How would a room full of less successful people push you to grow, evolve, and scale?
There’s a huge difference between being the person everyone learns from and being the person who is constantly learning. Being more successful than others feels good in the moment, but it can make you lose sight of all you can accomplish long-term.
As long as you’re not too hard on yourself about the present, being surrounded by winners will only push you to become one yourself.
Surround yourself with people whose law firm is happy with six-figure income, and you’ll think your seven figures is miles ahead of everyone. Because in that room, it really is. Enter the room where everyone is at eight and nine, and suddenly you get a reminder of how much is actually possible.
You think a certain goal is only reserved for a select few, and then you sit across from someone who accomplished it. Suddenly, you have evidence. And evidence is powerful. Because if they did it, there’s a good chance you can do it too.
These people aren’t superhuman. They have the same bones, blood, and muscle. They’ve simply made different decisions, developed different habits, taken different risks, and accumulated different experiences. And being around them exposes you to the type of thinking and acting that got them there.
How do these people spend their time?
What do they prioritize?
How do they make decisions?
What risks are they willing to take?
What habits do they have that you don’t?
No, don’t copy someone else’s life and lose sight of what makes you uniquely you. But start paying attention to those things, and you’ll begin to see that success isn’t as mysterious as it once seemed. You’ll remember that it’s not one massive, lucky decision but a collection of small ones made every day, regardless of how you’re feeling, over a long period of time.
The more time you spend around people who are ahead of you, the more your perspective expands. You walk into the room with one definition of what’s possible and walk out with another one.
That’s why you shouldn’t be intimidated by being the least successful person in the room; you should be excited about it.
When everyone around you is learning from you, you feel good about yourself, and you’re comfortable. When you’re learning from everyone around you, you’re growing.
So seek out the rooms that make you feel a little uncomfortable with this new mindset. Find those who are where you want to be, build relationships with them, and study how they operate. Because sometimes the fastest way to expand your vision of what’s possible is simply to spend more time around people who have already done it.
