Here’s part 2 of Donald Miller’s What If Challenge post. To refresh yourself with part one, read here, then proceed.

Next, gather a couple of friends, some other couples or sit one evening with your spouse, read this post, pass out index cards and have people write down five “what if” questions. Now here’s the trick…people are going to write down stuff they can’t control, like what if I hadn’t lost my job or what if my wife hadn’t left. Those are great questions to process, but they aren’t helpful for our experiment. The questions you are looking for are “what if I popped the question” or “what if I found my father” or “what if I held a fundraiser” or “what if I broke up with my bad boyfriend.” Those are the questions we are looking for.

Once everybody has written on their index cards, have each person in the group share one or two aloud. Then issue the challenge.

The challenge is to follow through on at least one item on your list. And you must follow through by the next time you meet, because you are each going to report on what happened.

What will unfold, good or bad, will not be boredom, I assure you. Things are going to get crazy. People are going to start talking, because their lives are suddenly going to get interesting.

Here’s the moral of the story, if you will. God gives life to you to live, and you can either tell meaningful stories or boring stories. We can’t wait around anymore for God to make something happen in our lives, meanwhile we shop at Bed Bath and Beyond. The truth is, God gives you wisdom and direction and morality and His presence and support, and then asks you to live, to conquer, to risk and experience the whole of life.

People grow when they are in motion.

So what do you think? Are you up for it?

The meaning of living fully in the present moment, neither retreating to the past nor anticipating the future, is wonderfully illustrated by a Zen parable about a monk being pursued by a ferocious tiger.

The monk raced to the edge of a cliff, glanced back, and saw the growling tiger about to spring. The monk spotted a vine dangling over the edge of the cliff. He grabbed it and began shinnying down the side of the cliff out of the clutches of the tiger.

Whew! Narrow escape.

The monk then looked down and saw a quarry of jagged rocks five hundred feet below. He looked up and saw the tiger poised atop the cliff with bared claws. Just then, two mice began to nibble at the vine.

What to do?

The monk saw a strawberry within arm’s reach, growing out of the face of the cliff.

He plucked it, ate it, and exclaimed, “Yum! That’s the best strawberry I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.”

If he had been preoccupied with the rock below (the future) or the tiger above (the past), he would have missed the strawberry in the present moment.

Life is best when you do not focus on the tigers of the past or the jagged rocks of the future but only on the strawberry that comes in the here and now.

(photo source)
Adapted from Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.” ~ Marquis de Condorcet

If you took the strengths of others, and compared them to your weaknesses, how do you think you’d size up? And do you think this would make you feel good?

The funny thing is, this is what most of us do at one time or another — and some of us do pretty often.

It’s a sure-fire recipe for a drop in self-confidence and for unhappiness.

It’s also not that useful.

Let’s say I take a look at someone who creates amazing artwork and really top-notch podcasts on their website … and I look at my art and skills, and realize that I don’t come close to measuring up. In fact, I look pretty pitiful (I’m a lousy drawer and I’m a beginner in the podcast world).

But wait a minute: it’s not a fair comparison. Just because I don’t measure up doesn’t mean I should shut down Simple Marriage, or that I should get depressed or jealous or resentful. Instead, if I looked at my strengths — writing practical and honest posts — I can see that I have a lot to offer, a lot to be happy about.

And that’s so important — being able to look at your own strengths, and see your true value. It’s actually one of the keys to success, because without this ability, you will be unmotivated, and won’t believe in yourself.

I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed this question a lot lately: Why is it so hard to live without comparing yourself to others?

It’s a great question. And a tough one.

While it’s natural to make comparisons, the problem is you end up unhappy, even when you have a good life, marriage, and family. The comparisons make you begin to question what you already have.

My quick advice: try to be aware of when you start comparing yourself to others … once you’ve developed this awareness, try this trick: stop yourself.

Tell yourself, “Stop!” And then start thinking about all the things you DO have, the things you love, the people you have, the blessings that life has given you. Make this a regular practice, and you’ll start to be happier with your life.

The Effects of Social Comparisons
But let’s take a look for a moment at what’s wrong with comparing yourself with others:

• Like I said, it’s usually an unfair comparison to start with. As a result, you’ll always come off bad if you look at someone’s strengths (including what they have, like houses and cars) and your weaknesses.
• Even if you compare strength to strength, there will always be those who are better, and those who are worse. Where you are on the ladder of accomplishments or purchases has nothing to do with what you want to do.
• Even if you do well in comparison with others, you may be artificially inflated from this comparison. It’s a short-lived boost of ego if you win the comparison — easily knocked down.
• You end up resenting others for doing well, without really knowing the true person. You can see this if you’ve ever resented someone upon first meeting them, and then later realized you got the wrong idea.
• You might end up talking about your own accomplishments more than is necessary. No one appreciates that.
• You might criticize someone in public, trying to knock them down, often unfairly.

These aren’t good things.

Let’s look at how to stop this phenomenon.

Breaking the Habit of Comparing Yourself With Others
So how do you break this cycle of comparing yourself with others? Here are some tips I’ve found useful:

1. Awareness. Most often we do these social comparisons without realizing we’re doing it. It’s a natural act, I suppose, and as a result it’s something that is done without consciousness. So the solution is to become conscious — bring these thoughts to the forefront of your consciousness by being on the lookout for them. If you focus on these thoughts for a few days, it gets much easier with practice, and soon it’ll be hard not to notice.
2. Stop yourself. Once you realize you’re doing these comparisons, give yourself a pause. Don’t berate yourself or feel bad — just acknowledge the thought, and gently change focus.
3. Count your blessings. A better focus is on what you do have, on what you are already blessed with. Count what you have, not what you don’t. Think about how lucky you are to have what you have, to have the people in your life who care about you, to be alive at all.
4. Focus on your strengths. Instead of looking at your weaknesses, ask yourself what your strengths are. Celebrate them! Be proud of them. Don’t brag, but feel good about them and work on using them to your best advantage.
5. Be OK with imperfection. No one is perfect — intellectually, we all know that, but emotionally we seem to feel bad when we don’t reach perfection. You aren’t perfect and you never will be. I certainly am not, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. Sure, keep trying to improve, but don’t think you’ll ever be the “perfect person”. If you look at it in a different way, that imperfection is what makes you who you are, you already are perfect.
6. Don’t knock others down. Sometimes we try to criticize others just to make ourselves look or feel better. Taking someone else down for your benefit is destructive. It forms an enemy when you could be forming a friend. In the end, that hurts you as well. Instead, try to support others in their success — that will lead to more success on your part.
7. Focus on the journey. Don’t focus on how you rank in comparison to others — life is not a competition. It’s a journey. We are all on a journey, to find something, to become something, to learn, to create. That journey has nothing to do with how well other people are doing, or what they have. It has everything to do with what we want to do, and where we want to go. That’s all you need to worry about.
8. Learn to love enough. If you always want what others have, you will never have enough. You will always want more. That’s an endless cycle, and it will never lead to happiness. No matter how many clothes you buy, no matter how many houses you own, no matter how many fancy cars you acquire … you’ll never have enough. Instead, learn to realize that what you have is already enough. If you have shelter over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, and people who love you, you are blessed. You have enough. Anything you have over and above that — and let’s admit that all of us reading this blog have more than that — is more than enough. Be good with that, and you’ll find contentment.

“To love is to stop comparing.” ~ Bernard Grasset

(photo courtesy)
Adapted from Zen Habits

Pardon while we take a short break from our Valentine’s Week of Giveaways. Although, this break could actually be part of the giveaways, but this time we are giving away a free ebook to any and all who want one!

Love Everyday is a collection of ideas, thoughts, tips, and the like complied from over 25 of my fellow love and relationship bloggers. There are essays from Dan Miller, Kathleen Quiring, Alissa Bowman, Mandi Ehman, SM Columnist Dustin Riechmann, Stu Gray, and many others.

This Ebook is definitely worth the read. And the best part – it’s free.

Download it here. Or many other places around the blogoshere.

Here’s where you come in. Download your copy now, tweet about it, post about it on your site or Facebook, or print out a bunch of copies and place them on windshields in your city. However you choose, spread the word.

Enjoy.
The giveaways will resume this afternoon so be sure to check back later.

Photo courtesy Brandon Warren