WRAL: 5 Tips to stop comparing yourself to other moms

Stephanie Llorente, owner of Restored, is a regular contributor to the WRAL-TV Go Ask Mom blog where she writes about relevant topics for working moms. We repost that content here.

I’m naturally competitive. I want to win. And that means, I want to do it – whatever “it” is – better than the person beside me. That level of drive has served me well in my career, marriage and motherhood, but that same competitive spirit also has a blind spot. It’s called comparison, and it’s a trap most moms get sucked into at one point or another – and we don’t even realize it most of the time!

It starts innocently enough – by browsing Pinterest, listening to podcasts, checking a friend’s Facebook status, flipping through a magazine. It grips us – lightly at first, and stronger as time passes. And then it steals from us. It steals our joy. It steals our time. It steals our mindset. It steals our compassion for other moms.

And that’s not OK.

So, how can we identify comparison, address it and prevent it from creeping into our motherhood? I have no perfect answers, but I’ll share what I’ve been doing recently to minimize its impact in my personal life.