The Empowered Edupreneur
The Empowered Edupreneur
Stop comparing yourself to others, do this instead
Feel like everyone’s racing ahead while you’re still figuring things out?
This episode is the gentle reality check your nervous system needs.
If comparison has been stealing your joy, your clarity, or your momentum lately, this one is for you.
Inside, you’ll hear:
- The one shift that will help you stay in your lane.
- Four powerful questions to anchor into when you feel behind.
- Why comparing your progress to others is slowing down your growth.
- And what to focus on instead to build a business that actually feels good.
This is not just mindset. It is the foundation for aligned growth and sustainable success.
And if you are ready to take the first step toward building your own course business, grab my new free Guide: Your $100K Course which will help you extract your most profitable course idea in under 30 minutes.
Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I'm an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs. The owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love. If you are looking to uplevel your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator and business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in. Hello. Hello. So good to have you here. So grateful that you chose to listen to me and my voice today and I've had such an incredible last few days I've had my family come visit me and we've spent so much good quality time together. It was my cousins and we went to the lots of beaches and sunsets and picnics and sea swims and salty sea air. All of the things that make me really, really happy and I have just been really feeling a lot of joy is how I would put it. And just removed myself from social media and I was just such a beautiful feeling. And so I came to my office today and I sat at my desk and I knew, okay, I had to record my podcast episode today and I can batch create this podcast and I do it sometimes. If I know I'm going to be busy, I'll batch create four to five episodes, but I haven't done that for a while. I am just recording this podcast from a place of what is the message that I want to share with you today? What is the thing that needs to come through? And that feels very alive for me at the moment. And today, the message that's come through is very much around comparison and how much of a thief of joy it is for us as we build businesses. And it's a message for those of you who are building a business right now, either you're creating a course or you're showing up all online and you're doing all the things that you want to do to sell your own products online. You have probably felt this feeling before. I know you've felt this feeling before, this low grade energy feeling of she's doing it faster than me, or she's already made it. I am not far enough. Why am I not there yet? I am not good enough. Look where she is. Look where I am. And just this comparison is so sneaky, so pervasive, so exhausting, and it will strip you of your joy faster than almost anything else in this space. And so today I want to talk about what we can do instead, when we are getting into this energy of comparisonitis. Where we can redirect our focus to what we can measure ourselves to genuinely, so that we can stay anchored in our own timeline and our own journey. So that we can stay in our power and not give our power away. So that is what we are jamming on today. The first thing I want to talk about is everyone's on a different path. We are all starting from a different place. We are not all starting from the exact same place. Yes, when we start a business, we generally all start a business from zero in the sense that everyone starts at zero with their email list and with everything that they've created in business. But no one's really starting at the same place because everyone's contextually in a different place. So some people may be starting their business and building a business while raising kids or neurodivergent kids or multiple kids. Others may be single parents raising children and navigating a business on top of it. Some may be navigating grief loss, divorce. I mean, that's a whole different ball game when you're trying to navigate that and start a business or run a business. Others may be very rich in the beginning of their business journey. Maybe they won the lotto or have family money and have more money to invest. Others may have very little money, close to no money, but have more time. Some people have no time, other people have lots of time. These are very important things that make a difference when you are running a business. How much time and money do you have to invest to grow this thing? And so everyone is starting at a different point. So of course everyone's growth is going to take a different shape. And that's not a failure, that's just reality. And this is what you need to measure. You can't measure yourself against other people. You have to measure yourself against yourself. That is it. You have to look at, okay, your own expansion, your own growth, your own becoming. The only question that matters is this. Am I becoming more of the woman I want to be? That is it? Am I becoming more of the woman I want to be? That is where the power is. That's really the only thing you need to be paying attention to. Nothing else matters. So the second thing is you need to have tools, or things you can do when the comparison kicks in. Because that's going to happen naturally. We're human beings. We're always going to compare ourselves to others, especially when we're on social media. It's so easy for you to look at someone who's got success and feel like you're not far enough, you're not good enough, all of this stuff. So when you feel those comparison thoughts creeping in and dropping your energy, then you want to ask yourself a question each day, am I becoming more of who I want to be? Am I improving even in small ways in areas that I care about? Am I becoming someone that I'm proud of? Am I growing mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially? If I look at myself five years ago, am I going to be proud of who I've become? That is it. That's your real progress report. That is the only thing that you need to pay attention to. Just you, how you're showing up in the world, who you are becoming, how you are evolving. It's so easy for us to forget how far we've come when we are staring at someone else and how far they've gone. It's so difficult to lose sight of our own journey. And the magic we've created if we are looking at someone else's journey and the magic they've created. So our work is to keep in our own lane, to stay in our own lane and to keep walking our path. And keep focused. I want you to think of having horse blinders. Horses wear those blinders where they can't look to the sides of them and they can only look forward. That is what we need. We need to have those blinders on, and all we are thinking about is ourselves and our business and our mission and our work, and our soul and our heart. And obviously we care about people around us, but we don't compare ourselves to them. We only look at ourselves. Because I will tell you, and I've been dealing with this a lot recently. And it's a negative aspect of social media, especially Instagram. You see other people, you see what they're doing, you see the success they've had, and you just start to have these doubts, this, I'm not good enough. I'm not skilled enough, I don't know enough. I should be further along. I should be making more money. I should be doing all these things. And then that immediately makes me feel very low energy. It starts to make me doubt myself, doubt my voice, doubt what I want to do in the world. I lose my power. And when I lose my power, I don't want to post. I don't want to show up. I don't want to sell. I don't want to connect. I just retreat. And so who does that serve when we retreat? And stay quiet. Who does that serve? Does it serve you? Does it serve your audience? Does it serve your family, your friends? It doesn't serve anyone. Being in our power serves me, you, everyone. And the only way we can be in our power is if we stop looking at everyone else and stay in our own lane, right? And the next thing I want to share is. Most of what you see online is not the full story. It's the filtered, curated, the airbrushed version. It's the shiny result without the messy process. It's chapter 20 instead of chapter one. It's the transformation instead of the mess on how to get there. Because no one's going to really post a lot of the mess, or the negative things because no one wants to be absorbing negative content all day. Otherwise, we would be looking at the news and let's be honest, we don't want that. We don't want to have low vibration stuff. But the reality is, life is hard. Everyone's navigating some crazy stuff at the moment. We have no idea what someone else has had to walk through to get to where they are and we're only seeing 1%, 2% of what's real. So we have to keep that in mind. Everyone is going through the same kind of life mess, maybe different versions of it, but life is life and it's going to be hard for all of us. And social media isn't a true reflection of that. And so you just need to be mindful that you realize that you take everything with a pinch of salt. And that we're only seeing the top of the iceberg when it comes to people's lives. We're seeing the good stuff, but we're not seeing the bad stuff. And that makes you kind of question, oh, why is my life so bad? Or why are these bad things happening to me? But really, everyone's going through it. We're just not posting it all the time. Now, this message really matters more than we think. This isn't just a mindset conversation. This is a business strategy that I'm sharing with you. It might not seem like strategy, but I want you to view it as strategy. Because when we are comparing ourselves to others, we abandon our own voice. When we copy other people, we lose our own essence, our own voice. When we compare ourselves to others. We second guess our own intuition, our own magic. We second guess our offers, our content, our message. And when we doubt ourselves, we struggle to really land our message. Our message doesn't become this powerful magnetic energy transmission. It becomes diluted and lost and weak. And so the noise around us when we're tapped into all of everything else and all of other people's journeys and stuff, we lose our own voice ultimately. So the less you compare with others. The more you trust yourself, the more you trust yourself, the more aligned you feel. The more aligned you feel, the more energy you have. And the energy of what you carry and how you bring that to the world and the message you share with the energy that you share it with. That is what makes people want to buy from you. That plus obviously strategy, but with your energy. And so this really is a strategy thing. Because how you show up in the world is completely impacted by your internal world, your dialogue, what you are thinking, what you're feeling. And if you're thinking, oh, I'm not good enough, she's further ahead than me. You're comparing yourself all the time. How do you think you're going to come across when you show up in the world. With doubt, you're going to be questioning yourself. And people can feel that. People don't want to buy from someone who's questioning themselves all the time. So if your mind has been spiralling with self-doubt. If you feel like everyone else is moving faster. If you're wondering if your why your timeline is so slow and you're thinking, oh, your results aren't enough. I'm inviting you to come back to yourself and ask real questions that matter. Am I showing up as the woman I want to become? Am I evolving in a way that makes me proud? Am I learning, growing and taking action every day in pursuit of the dream that I want to create? If that's a yes, then you are fine. You are doing everything as you should be doing. You are exactly where you're meant to be. Your journey is unfolding exactly along the timeline that it's meant to unfold for you, and That is a magical thing. It's all divinely guided. That is what I feel. And so you don't want to look at other people's story. Look at your story, ask the right questions, and only measure yourself against yourself. That was the message that I wanted to bring to you today, very short, but very powerful. I think we can all hear this message many times in our lifetime because we'll all need to have these reminders because we're all human and we're always going to feel that comparison night is creep in. But it is very toxic. It takes away your power and it will affect your business greatly if you don't manage it and get on top of it. Okay. Now, if you have been sitting with a feeling of wanting to create a course, but you are unsure of how to take the first step. You need some clarity. You may be unsure of what to create your course in, or exactly the niche to put it in, or the idea, or you want to solidify something. And you want to build something that sells and scales that people want to buy, and that makes you amazing money. Then I actually created a free guide just for you. It's called your a 100K Course Guide, and it's a step by step mini guide that will help you extract your most profitable course idea right from under your nose in under 30 minutes. This is a really beautiful first step in pulling out clarity and crafting an idea. Using the power of ChatGPT and prompts as well, so by the end of that exercise you are feeling energized and you've got this idea that you can potentially go and birth into the world that can make you money for years to come. Because I truly believe that we are all sitting on a hundred K course idea. We just don't know it yet. And I really want to help extract that for you. So if you want to grab that, it's free, it's new, completely free. And you can just click the link below and grab it and enjoy. And I hope this episode landed well for you. And just remember, stay in your own lane and keep your power. All right. Thank you so much for being with me today, and I will chat to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you are an educator, teaching business owner, trainer or coach who wants to package your knowledge and experience into your digital course that impacts others and makes you incredible money, but you don't know where to start and you need help with clarity. Then click the link below and grab my free a 100K Course Guide where I help you extract profitable course ideas straight from under your nose in less than 30 minutes. You'll walk away with new found clarity and energy, and an idea that could change the trajectory of your life. I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business in life you love.
