 Why is everyone so competitive these days? It seems like you can't sign on to Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platform without it being one huge competition. You know what I mean? One of our biggest pet peeves recently is just how competitive everyone is these days. Whether it's the number of Instagram followers you have, the car you drive, how much money you make, it feels like the whole world is competing. But today, Erin dropped by and we're going to break down three simple ways to hop out of this competitive mindset and start connecting with people. Yes, so like you said, this first problem is comparing yourself to other people and that leads to depression. You get in this compare, despair loop. But forget about that. There will always be someone who is smarter than you, funnier than you, is taking more exotic vacations than you, or has a cuter dog than you. Hey. Other than peppers, obviously he is the cutest dog. That's not a competition. And why is this going on, right? Science is actually showing that social media use leads to depression. When we hop online and we see this endless highlight reel from other people, we start to feel worse and that leads to this compare, despair loop. So how do we break out of that cycle? Well, the first thing you can do is stop comparing yourself to other people and only compare yourself to yourself, strive to get 1% better each day instead of finding who you can compete with in this external validation. Now, the second thing we want to do is we want to adopt an abundance mindset. That is the easiest way to stop competing with one another. If you don't have your abundance mindset, then you're stuck in a scarcity mindset, which means you have this idea that there's some metaphorical pie, that there's only enough slices for so many people. So you have to compete with other people to get a slice of that pie, but there isn't a metaphorical pie or if there is, there are infinity pies. There are enough pies to go around. There's enough success, love, relationships, wins for everybody. And the easiest way to do this is to start celebrating other people's wins instead of being so focused on your own wins. When we become cooperative, we become that high value person that we talk about here at The Art of Charm. And celebrating other people's victories is the easiest way to do that. I'm really proud of you. That was really good. Better than last time? Yes. Fantastic. The last thing we want you to keep in mind is that when you're being competitive, you're acting as though you never have failures. You're the best and you're not being vulnerable with other people. And vulnerability is what creates connection. If you're only showing the perfect side of your life, people are not going to get to know you on a deeper level. So we want to start by sharing some silly stories from our past where maybe we didn't succeed. High value friends want to hear those stories. They want to listen. They want to help. And that's how you form those deeper connections. So to recap, let's avoid the compare, despair trap by endlessly competing with one another and change our mindset to abundance instead of scarcity. And of course, start being a little more vulnerable, sharing not only your wins, but those losses to allow people to connect with you. Now, if you think you're funnier than Aaron, or you drive a better car than me, or your dog is cuter than ours, drop in the comments below and let us know. And as always, hit subscribe if you enjoyed watching this video. I enjoyed it. Ooh, that was solid.