To overcome challenges, stop comparing yourself to others | Dean Furness
When you stop comparing yourself to others, you can accomplish great things, says
wheelchair athlete Dean Furness. He shares how, after losing the use of his legs in an
accident, he discovered a powerful new mindset focused on redefining his "personal
average" and getting better little by little.
"It seems we have been measured almost all our lives. When we are infants with our height and weight
and as we grew it became our speed and our strength. And even in school there are test scores and today with our salaries and job performance. It seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers.
Then he was explained about an accident and post situation related to that accident.
After that he said "There were parts of my day that were certainly not as pleasant as they could be, but it was never an entirely bad day. So I’m guessing that all of you have been through a meeting that probably didn’t go very well, or a commute that wasn’t as great as you would like it, or even burned dinner at night.
Did those things really ruin your entire day? What I found in those scenarios is the quicker you move on to what’s next, the quicker you can start attacking things.
And by moving on to next as fast as possible, you shrink the time you spend in those bad scenarios and it gives more time for the good. And, as a result, the good outweighs the bad, your average increases and that’s just how the math works.
It didn’t matter to me if I’d spent the morning really struggling with my medication, or at lunch my legs being very spastic, or even if I had fallen out of my wheelchair.
Ask my wife. It happens quite often. She’s here.
They were just small parts of my day and small parts of my average. And so, in the months and years that followed, I continued to try to attack things in that way.
And before I knew it I was being presented with some pretty incredible challenges, like completing a marathon in a wheelchair. In early 2016, I met my physical therapist, and after a few really grueling sessions, she must have sensed something, because she pulled me aside and said, “You know, you should do a half marathon. In your wheelchair. And, oh yeah, it’s in 10 weeks.”
And i thought in my mind "you are crazy I did not have work out plans. With guidance and encouragement from his physical therapist, coach, team members, his goal shifted for participating in a wheelchair half marathon, a “door closed” behind Dean Furness. His goal for walking again became less. He began to research wheelchair racing. “I had learned my lesson,” he says. “I was really careful not to compare with how accomplished those people on the internet were and how fast they were because if I had, I probably never would have continued going through with it.”
When he was in a room with the best wheelchair athletes, including several Paralympic medalists, he felt pretty small. Dean Furness says “I felt pretty small and I fell back into that trap of comparing myself. I knew that my averages that I had been tracking during my workouts were over 90 seconds slower per mile than theirs.” He had to block such thoughts out and focus on himself.
The best advice he offers to others is “no matter what kind of challenges they might be facing, never compare yourself with others.”
He concludes his talk with these motivational words “Take some time and focus on you instead of others, and I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.”
