736. Why Are You Scoring Yourself on Someone Else’s Scoreboard

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Part one of a two-part series on self comparison opens with the hard truth that most people are not behind at all. Lesley Logan traces the borrowed scoreboards we inherit from parents, from past versions of ourselves, and from a social feed built entirely of highlight reels. She unpacks a goal she once wrote down that was never actually hers, and why envy works better as a diagnostic tool than a verdict.


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In this episode you will learn about:

  • Letting go of what no longer serves instead of accumulating more.
  • Why feeling behind at thirty said nothing about actually being behind.
  • Envy read as a highlight of what matters, not a judgment.
  • How a goal written on a Lululemon worksheet was never actually hers.
  • Four homework questions to answer before the radical success audit.


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Episode Transcript:

Lesley Logan 0:00  

I really do want you to stop outsourcing your metrics of happiness because you are comparing yourself on data that isn't the right data you need to get to where you want to go.


Lesley Logan 0:11  

Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.


Lesley Logan 0:54  

Hey, Be It babe, welcome, welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast. Today we're talking about self-comparison, and ooh, I don't know if you were raised on this line, but I was raised on self-comparison is a thief of joy. I guess they didn't have the self part. The comparison is a thief of joy, and you know what? It fucking is. So here's the deal: if you have ever looked at someone else's life online or in your community and felt this immediate sinking pit in your stomach telling you that you are behind, or you just see something, and you're just, "Why them? How do they get that?" I feel that for you. I really, really do. I heard a woman say this beautiful line at a talk the other day, and I'm going to have her on the podcast. She is scheduled, so we will have an episode with her, and we'll probably talk about this deeper. But she had said this, like, hit me. She said, "If comparison is high, clarity is low," and I think if that's all you get out of this episode, then I will, then I've done my job. But today we are going to break down the hard truth. You're probably not behind at all, right? And you know this, you know. But let's talk about why are you scoring yourself on someone else's scoreboard? Because that's what comparison is, right? 


Lesley Logan 1:58  

When we compare yourself to somebody else, it's just like we're using someone else's life and their scoreboard and going, "We are behind," but really, you're in your own fucking game. So this first part. So on Thursday we'll have a second part. We're gonna just talk about comparison and do a radical success audit because I really do want you to stop outsourcing your metrics of happiness because you are comparing yourself on data that isn't the right data you need to get to where you want to go. This is called "Be It Till You See It," right? If you are using the wrong metrics to "Be It Till You See It," you're going to end up being on someone else's costume. It's going to be, don't even know what that is. "Be it till you are in their clothes." That's not going to work. So here's the deal: I am a 43-year-old woman who is talking to you right now, and oh my god, I think I was a 43-year-old in a child's body my whole life. Maybe not that old, but I definitely couldn't wait to be at the next level in the next stage. And I definitely compared myself to so many people. Being young was so hard. I was so hard on myself because, first of all, I didn't have a lot of money when I grew up, and all my friends really did. At least, if they didn't, it seemed like they did because they went to Disneyland before I could. They had cars when they were 16. I had to buy mine, right? Like there's all these just different things that they're so. Oh my god! I was in the AP classes, and these people were so smart. My B plus was the hardest work of life that I could get. My A minuses were, and they came so easy to them. Came so easy, right? And so I remember going to college, and everybody was like finding their husbands and getting married. And I was really proud to not get married in college.


Lesley Logan 3:30  

I mean, because one, my college was super expensive, and two, I'm, thank God, I didn't marry those men, I would have been divorced very quickly, and I probably would have had a life I didn't want to really have a hard time. So, but I do remember after 30, my 30th birthday. I remember just feeling, "Wow, I'm behind. I am behind." Because even though I knew I didn't want kids and that kind of thing, I wasn't married. In fact, I was broken up. I broke up with my partner, and I was semi-homeless, and I had to start over with my studio and blah blah blah, and I just felt behind. Wow, you know. And then it felt every single month of not being in a relationship with the right person was now I'm not going to get married at least until I'm 31. Then it's, you know what I mean, like. And then I just remember feeling I didn't have it all locked down, and I think a lot of women feel that way at a young age, whether or not you want to have children.


Lesley Logan 4:24  

There's this thing we've got to get this stuff done early, and as we know, that's not true. But it doesn't mean that it still doesn't feel true, right? It doesn't. It feels true. And there's also the idea, you know, retirement is around the corner. I mean, it's not really around the corner, but I want to retire early, so it's around the corner. Do I have enough money for that? I, I should have had this many members by now, so then I could do X, Y, and Z. And so it's just, it's a really hard time because there does feel like there's a timeline, and that we're trapped, and that we are behind, even if we don't look at other people, because there's just things we want to have done by now, and the reality is, as a business owner, as long as I've been, everything takes longer than we want. It will always have problems, and all of a sudden, you'll have been there, and you'll be looking back, and wow, how did that go? 


Lesley Logan 5:13  

Like I was at Brad's birthday party, and with a friend, and he didn't know how we met, and so I told the story. I was like, "Yeah, that was 11 years ago. That's 11 years ago. 11 years ago, when we got married, fuck. Wow, time does fly when you're having a good time. But also, we have to remember that this is a really good time for us to edit, get rid of, let go of things, not just keep accumulating, because it makes it really difficult to find the success that you want if you're trying to carry all the things from the past decades with you. So, what do you have to let go of? Is it friends? Is it a dresser you've just been shoving more shit in? Is it a car? Is it a job? Is it a goal that isn't yours? 


Lesley Logan 6:03  

So, for example, before I became a Lululemon ambassador, this would be 14 years ago, 15 years ago. When you come to the house, you'll see that my picture is on the wall here. It's fucking huge, and I don't know what to do with it. So it's just right there, staring at you, the guest bedroom, bathroom. But they had us do this goals thing: one year, five year, 10 year goals, right? And it had to be health related and personal and business or whatever, successful, whatever. And I put down that I wanted to do a yoga teacher training. I liked going to yoga classes. I had done a Pilates instructor teacher training. I was finishing up my second one, and I was, you know, I should do a yoga one because then I can teach yoga classes because that's what everyone does in fitness. They have 17,000 certifications. They could teach all these different formats, and I should do that. And then six months later, when I looked at that sheet, I hadn't even touched. I hadn't even Googled a yoga certification. Didn't even look one up. And guess what? There was one happening in Equinox where I worked, and I didn't even think, oh, I could do that one.


Lesley Logan 7:00  

None of that even came to my mind, and so what that meant was I was accumulating goals that weren't right for the success that I wanted to have, and so my love, we really need to be thoughtful about the things that we haven't let go of that no longer are serving a good purpose for us right now.


Lesley Logan 7:20  

All right. So next thing I want us to focus on before we get into our homework audit, I want us to talk about the borrowed scoreboard. Right. So this is ideal. We often get goals from our parents, but are often your parents put goals on you. I hear parents talk about their kids today and what school they're going to go to and how they're going to be, and what sports they're going to be in, and I'm, oh my god, do the, and I can't even keep my mouth shut, which has got me in trouble. Do they even like it? And they're going to like it. They get so defensive at me, and I'm, oh, this is I'm not supposed to talk. They're just supposed to talk at me. Okay, noted. But oftentimes our parents have had goals for us, right? And so we feel like we're disappointing people when we don't do those things, and so then not only do we do them or we try to have fun doing them, we kind of keep that goal as part of who we are supposed to be.


Lesley Logan 8:10  

We also have past versions of ourselves that we are using still to think about how we are doing things and if we're doing a good enough job. We 10 years ago definitely could handle a 12- to 13-hour workday and sleep and still do all the workouts and eat really well. And the person of me today cannot do that. If I don't get my work done in six hours, that's it. That's all I have, folks. And I have caught myself going, "Lesley. You should be able to do this. You just sit down at dinner and get another fucking hour of work done," and I just can't. So I can't. That's me in that moment comparing myself to an old self, using that old self's scoreboard and brain and things, and social media sucks for this, right? And so goes back to that thing: when comparison is high, clarity is low. If you open up socials and you are feeling bad about yourself when it's over, my dear, there's a big sign your scoreboard is not your own, because you know that it's all a highlight reel. You know that it has to be. That's the only way this works, because you definitely don't know the people that are made fun of for not having it being the weird ones that are doing something stupid on the strip, and it will be embarrassed that someone filmed them doing that. You don't want that, so you put out the highlight reel, and not to say that you should also put yourself up crying because I really hate videos of people crying. I think we know it's a highlight reel, and yet we'll compare ourselves to others. And the thing that you cannot get in 2200 characters or in a three-second hook is all the things that went wrong before that beautiful thing went up, right? 


Lesley Logan 9:49  

It is so. I'm pretty transparent here, so I know you guys know how much shit our business has gone through to get the things going. Because if you're a member, we're very transparent with you. If you're a listener, we talk this happened, and then that happened, and we did this, and now we're here, and now it works, and it's great, and so exciting. But it's a journey. But most people don't share that stuff, right? And that stuff also isn't sexy, so nobody wants to listen to it, anyways, because you just sound like a complainer. But the reality is that social media makes us feel like we're always behind, that we're not thin enough, that we're not pretty enough, that we're not doing enough things for ourselves.


Lesley Logan 10:20  

My god, to tell you the truth, I hate how I look on this podcast, and yet I will tell you right now, I don't do anything to change how I look on this podcast. But when it comes out, wow, you don't look at the camera, it's like you can't make eye contact. It would be cool, Lesley, if you just did your hair, you know. But the other thing is, is I also know that I don't really care, but it's just there's just something about it because then I see some other beautiful person on their podcast and it's just crisp and clearly filmed in 4,000k or whatever it is, 4k and 4,000k. I sound like that woman who I had podcasts which is it's 20 2000 2026. 


Lesley Logan 11:00  

Anyways, they just look so stunning, and I know how. What I that means that they took an hour and a half to set up that podcast to look that stunning, and I could do that too. But we're not doing that because that's not who I want to be on this. But the reality is that social media often has us comparing ourselves and feeling, "Wow, I do not measure up," but you're measuring yourself to somebody else, and all this, all the support that they have that you may or may not have, right? So I think it's really important that we remember that if we're looking at the shiny front, beautiful things that others are putting out there, we are often ignoring the hidden trade-offs of and the daily maintenance of that lifestyle. We pretend they have such a beautiful background, so that means everything is beautiful. No, probably not. Probably that's the stage that they're showing you. I do yoga with this woman, and I was like, your backyard is so pretty. She's, yeah, and if I were to move this computer three inches, you would see how much storage shit is out here, but you don't because this is the perfect space to look, and so just everybody is hiding all the things that they don't want people to see because they're afraid that that will mean that they're not as successful as they are. But that's not true because they are as successful they are with the junk in the background, right?


Lesley Logan 12:12  

All right. So we need to shift out of a comparison spiral, right? Obviously, we need to do that. We obviously need to have that as an ability. And what I would just want to say is, if you are able to notice that you are in a comparison spiral, that is the first fucking step, and that's a great thing because most people don't even realize that they are in a comparison spiral until they're spiraled out of control. So we need to use when we feel envy as this diagnostic tool that tells you where in your current life, what that is, what is that highlighting, right? So, if I see that somebody looks so stunning in their podcast and they just look like they actually know how what they're doing and their stats look amazing, it is a sign that I actually care that I want this podcast to be successful. It actually has nothing to do with whether I think I'm beautiful or not, that I'm capable. It has everything to do with. I actually give a fuck. I care. That's why I'm jealous a little bit, right? If I look at someone who looks like they have it all together because they are articulate in how they can share what their goals are, and they have these quippy sentences that they say, and that the comparison is high, clarity must be low. It means that I care about making sure that my points that I get to come across succinctly and effectively, right? So when you notice that you're having a little bit of that, you know, jealous eye, we call Darla Jelly Grace because she, when we give Bayon attention, she comes over wants attention, right? Because she wants attention too. That's why she's jelly of the attention he's getting. So it's okay to see something in someone else and want that for yourself. It is a highlight of the thing, right? And so, if you can use it as this, oh, this is important to me, rather than some judgment tool, right? 


Lesley Logan 13:57  

It's a highlighter. It's an expander tool, not one that is talking about how well you measure up or down, right? It's a highlight. It's oh, it's almost like if you think about in the movie Scrooged, which I guess is Charles Dickens, right? When you're visited with the ghosts of Christmas past and present and future, you just see the life that you want the ghost, the ghost of future, Christmas future. This is how your life is going to be. That's what looking at someone else's life and having a little. That means it's something that you want you to have in your future, and so that really helps you and understand what you do have to audit to get that. What you do need to do to train yourself up to do that. What is what you do actually care about? Because sometimes we say we don't care about something, we actually do care about it, right? We do, and that's okay. So just keep that in mind, because sometimes we get envious, and then we get mad at ourselves for being envious, and really, then we miss out on what the envy was trying to tell us. So this is really, really important. You cannot embody, you cannot be your future self if you are trying to step into a costume design for someone else cannot cannot be it till you see it. If what you see is being somebody else and comparing yourself to that, that's you're not able to make decisions as them because you are not them, and that's okay, right? So you can use that person to be an inspiration and put that stuff on your vision board, but it still has to be you doing those things. And so, how would you do it? And that's where the uniqueness comes in. That's where the beauty comes in. That's where why we can have five different computers out there, and I like the one that I like because they designed it for the person that I am, and they market it that way, right? That that kind of thing. So when you see something, you go, "Oh, well, they've already done it, so I can't do it." No, not true, because no one's going to do it like you, whatever the thing is, whatever the it is. 


Lesley Logan 15:43  

So since we talked about why we feel like there's a timeline, why we feel pressure, we've talked about the scoreboards, we've talked about comparison actually just being data and information, and I think we're pretty clear that using other people's stuff and then judging ourselves on it is not helping us out. So what I want to do on the next episode is go to the big question: like, what do we put in the place of comparison and scoreboards that are not our own? What do we put in place of that judgment? So in the next episode, we're going to stop questioning our old way and start actively building your custom definition of success that matches your real life, the life you want to have, and your energy and your current season, because that's what's so important, right?


Lesley Logan 16:30  

So I do want to give you some homework questions because I think that that will help us get you ready for the next episode. So even if you are banging these two next to each other, just take a moment, and I want you to take. If you have more than three goals, and your top three goals. If you only have three or less than your three goals that you're currently stressing over. So got them. So who taught you that these specific things equal success? So if you are working on goals and you're until I have this, then I can't have that. Who taught you that? Where'd that come from? You might have to do some morning pages on that. Next question. This is more of a cost-benefit analysis. If you magically woke up tomorrow with the exact life of the person you're comparing yourself to, what hidden daily trade-offs or responsibilities, what do you inherit that you actually don't want? So, if you woke up as a person you're jelly of, what do you think? There, what trade-offs would you get? Right? Oh my god, so funny when I think of that. Oh god, I do not want that.


Lesley Logan 17:36  

I definitely love my life because, right, because I wouldn't have the husband I have, or the dogs I have, or the house I have, or the morning routine I have, I'd have to. Oh my god! I'd have to have two assistants, right? All right. So that's their next question answer. Next one we call the envy decoder. Think of someone you envied recently, stripping away their specific job or relationship or lifestyle. What is the underlying feeling or energy that they have that your current life is missing. So that person that you envied, what do you do? You think that they have more freedom? Do they have more ease? Do they have more playfulness, more visibility? Take away the actual specifics and what's the energy and vibe that they're embodying that you have a little envious towards. That's going to help you understand what you're being till you see, because you might not even actually want to do the thing that they're doing. You just might want to feel at ease doing the thing you want to do, and they look so easeful. 


Lesley Logan 18:25  

Last one is the version of it, you know, the Be It you are trying to be right now actually yours. Are you trying to fit into costume design for someone else? I remember my ex having a party, and I remember being in this fancy dress I had to wear at this party, and I remember looking around this party and going, "I don't even know who these people are." And remember going, "I don't even want to be at this party." And then I looked at the dress, my ex bought me this dress, but I don't love this. I don't like this dress at all, and just feeling whose life is this, right? So it was my reality check, and then I moved out and crashed my car. But anyways, that's a different story for a different day, and they happen kind of over a month apart, but most of the same time. Don't worry. But I want you to do those questions because I think it will really help you in the Be It Till You See It. All right. 


Lesley Logan 19:21  

Well, we have another episode coming up on this topic to talk about those things, and I just want to say thank you for listening so very, very much. Please make sure you share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it. Maybe you share your success audit together. Send in your answers to the beitpod.com/questions. I would love to hear them all celebrate as a win. Whatever your aha moment is, you can be anonymous if you want. And if there's a topic you want us to discuss, you can send that there as well, beitpod.com/questions. And lastly, there's several ways to support this podcast. One is making sure we get more downloads by you telling your friends to listen to it. Another way is leaving a review. So if you haven't done that, I know it's really hard to do, but you can do it on Spotify and you can do it on Apple, and it would mean the world to me. Thanks so much. Have an amazing day. Oh, until next time. Go Be It Till You See It.


Lesley Logan 20:01  

That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.


Brad Crowell 20:44  

It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.


Lesley Logan 20:49  

It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.


Brad Crowell 20:53  

Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.


Lesley Logan 21:00  

Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals..


Brad Crowell 21:03  

Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time. 



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