If you’ve been listening to the Coaching, Transformational, or Spiritual Communities or Industries, you’ve heard the advice, the warnings, and the explicatives about how to approach Competition.
They say: No matter what, and under any circumstance: Don’t be competitive!
And, you’ll hear or read things like:
“When you’re competitive, you’re in your lowest level energies”
“You should only collaborate, not compete”
“Competition is for people coming from a scarcity mindset”
“Good”, empowered, and especially spiritual people (particularly women!) are taught that in order to be in their best selves, they cannot and should not exhibit any type of competitive thoughts, feelings or behaviors.
Well….I’d respectfully like to call B.S. on all that and bust the myth that Competition is “bad”.
This myth that there is no room for Competition in an evolved or spiritual life or business is hurting well-meaning entrepreneurs, and can really damage their inner life, their sense of self, their relationships, as well as their outer results.
Let me explain a little more:
The impulse to be Competitive is a normal, natural, powerful impulse that every single human being has access to, and most human beings experience (whether they realize it or not).
The highest & healthiest level of competition energy motivates individuals to keep on reaching their best, and their best, and their best….as they see others achieving their best.
Healthy competition energy inspires individuals to want to improve, to want to create more in aligned ways, to reach their highest potential, and to achieve higher visions for themselves and for the world.
Healthy competition creates respect among competitors and mutual awe and excitement for the expression of true mastery and craft and creation.
We see this all the time in sports, for example. Athletes (for the most part, not including a few outliers) leverage their competitive nature to become stronger, more skillful, and the best they can be.
We see lots of healthy Competition in nature too! It is an essential energy.
The problems with Competition arise when the act of Competition or Being Competitive is judged, made “bad” and wrong and dirty, not allowed. That’s when the natural and normal energy of Competition gets disenfranchised and stuffed down into Shadow.
And when you – or your clients – have rejected and put your natural, normal, and powerful Competition energy in Shadow, here are some things that can potentially happen:
- You end up in the lowest and unhealthiest level of Competition energy: Jealousy
- You run the risk of doing something out of integrity when it comes to competition; for example, stealing someone else’s ideas or speaking poorly of them behind their backs or doing something to take them down
- Because you’ve cut off your Competition Energy, you’ve actually disconnected from some of the natural mojo and energy that you vitally need to achieve the things you want to achieve
- You might worry that other people are Jealous of you, or want to “steal” your ideas
- Other people end up accusing you of stealing their ideas, or they speak about you behind your back or they try to take you down (this is your repressed Shadow energy boomeranging back at you)
- You consistently beat yourself up or berate yourself for not being as good as others
That’s because whenever you repress a natural energy inside of you – like Competition – that wants healthy expression, whenever you stuff it into Shadow…it still finds a way to express itself….it’s just usually not the expression that serves you or anyone else.
When you’re able to reclaim and own and love your Shadow – in this case the healthy expression of Competition energy – SO MUCH can change.
You get to feel more empowered and less paranoid all the time. You get access to the life force energy you need to get things done in aligned and energizing ways. You are freed from feeling jealous of others or bad about yourself. You take pleasure in EVERYONE’S success.
Working with Shadow – whether it’s your Competitive Shadow, or your Anger Shadow, or your Lazy Shadow, or your Spender Shadow, or ANY Shadow – is such a big and important topic…for us and for our clients. It is the key to so much growth and transformation, and freedom from self-sabotage behaviors
But effectively working with Shadow requires deep care and specific processes and expertise to be able to unwind the hidden energies and re-activate them in their highest expression. It’s not a “once and done” process, and it’s not one that any practitioner can just “wing it”. That’s why I include a full training retreat on Shadow in Into the Depths: Ritual, Archetype and Facilitation Mastery as well as Sacred Depths Coach Training. The tools and skills for working with Shadow are pure gold…both for our clients as well as for ourselves.
I know this article might be a little bit of a controversial one. Would love to hear your thoughts!
