How To Use Your Competitive Nature To Achieve Your Goals
Wanting to win isn’t a bad thing.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be driven by your competitive nature. It’s a fuel that can’t compare to anything else.
Sports, games, challenges — we love it, and we want to win, damn it.
Nothing can motivate me more than my own competitive nature — whether it’s competition against others or competing against myself.
Tapping into my competitiveness against myself has been the key to forming a number of great habits. It has helped me achieve a lot of goals and strive to better myself everyday. Below is the outline of the process I’ve used to lose weight, make more money, reduce my meat intake and write everyday.
- Take baby steps
- Unleash your competitive fire
- Form the habit
This process works for me because, aside from my competitiveness, I have a reward-orientated personality. I seek instant gratification, satisfaction and struggle to ignore my impulses.
Being reward-orientated means I eat unhealthy food because I’m ‘craving it’, make unnecessary purchases because I ‘want it at the time’ and say things without thinking them through because I’m ‘feeling it’.
Over the last year, I’ve called my competitive nature into play.
My competitiveness has always been there. A little fire in my belly.
It was just a quality I would often keep benched.
Being too competitive is never a good thing, and as a female, it isn’t really seen as a ‘feminine’ trait (whatever that actually means). Even though times are a-changin’, girls are still often raised to be quiet and dainty, and they definitely aren’t expected to cheer loudly for their achievements.
At school, I would watch as a male counterpart cheered and yelled during a win — and people would cheer with him. I would then watch a female do that same thing, and people would whisper…
Man, she’s so competitive.
Calm down.
It’s just a game.
Being competitive just wasn’t ‘ladylike’.
Yes, a competitive nature can be frowned upon in anyone. It’s rarely seen as a positive trait, but competitiveness can sometimes give a person that ‘edge’ — as long as they maintain a healthy dose of it.
The older I get, the more I refuse to repress this part of my nature.
I’m a good sport (for the most part — banter is a fun part of competitions afterall) and I love a good competition, whether it’s a game, a sport, a debate or a personal goal.
And having a healthy dose of competition with yourself can do wonders.
Having an achievable goal and seeing it through works magic on your self-esteem and confidence. Achieving goal after goal can also have a ripple effect on your life. You’ll start to know what you want, and you’ll know you can get it.
1. Take baby steps.
Biting off more than you can chew is a recipe for failure.
We’ve all been there.
We want to lose weight so we reduce our calories by an excessive amount, go to the gym 7 days a week and shove our mouthes full of bland salads. We’re lucky to make it through the week before we take a detour through the McDonald’s drive-thru.
The key to creating long-lasting habits and seeing our goals through is to always ensure that we are moving at an achievable, reasonable pace.
Take baby steps.
Cut out sugar one week. Increase or revise your gym routine the new week.
By not overwhelming yourself, you are more likely to maintain the momentum. You’ll be challenging yourself, and succeeding. Your successes will fuel you onwards, step-by-step. You’ll be more likely to see the goal through.
2. Unleash your competitive fire.
I’ve wanted to heavily reduce my intake of meat for months now (for several reasons, which we’ll save for another article).
One day, I decided I wasn’t going to eat meat that day. It then rolled into day 2. Come the end of the week, I was about to get my standard chicken rice paper rolls from the Vietnamese restaurant next door when my competitive fire kicked in. Why ruin this streak? I was feeling good. I have more energy. And most importantly, my willpower was making me proud. So I opted for a veggie burger instead. 4 weeks later and I’ve only had meat twice.
A lot of the time when we set off to achieve a goal, we do so for personal reasons. We want to lose weight, make money, find a parter, get a promotion, learn a language, etc. And when you’re the only person who will benefit from said achievements, it’s a lot easier to give up. Afterall, the only person you’re letting down is yourself, and when you’re lacking energy and willpower it’s okay to make peace with that.
But it’s not okay, not really.
You should have your own back. You should feel that fire, and become addicted to the feelings that you get when you do something for yourself. When you say no to the bad and yes to the good.
When you take your baby steps day-after-day, give yourself credit where credit is due.
3. Form the habit.
You’ve heard it before. It takes approximately 21 days to form a habit.
But try not to think too far ahead. This is enough to overwhelm anyone and make you stop in your tracks. Baby steps will lead to habit forming without you intentionally trying.
Take your competitive nature and challenge yourself. Choose something you’d like to do, learn, be. Then take it day-by-day.
Write it down if you want, so you can track your goals see how far you’ve come.
You’ll become addicted to the feeling of achievement. You’ll motivate yourself because you will want to see how far you can go.
Whether it’s more gym, no meat, quitting cigarettes, writing articles every day… 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days… the further you go, the better you’ll feel. And soon, you won’t even have to think about it.
