Overcoming Intimidating Competition

Being faced with competition as you try to achieve your life’s goals can be intimidating. It feels that way because you compare yourself to them. When you do that, they come across as successful achievers while you’re left feeling insecure.

What you have to remember is that where you are is where they are or where they used to be. There is room in the world for you to succeed as well if not better than your competition.

See Them as Resources

Don’t view your competition as a threat. Instead, see them as resources. If you let yourself, you can learn a lot from your competition. You can learn where and why they experienced failures.

You can also learn how and why they achieved success. By looking at them as resources it will save you from making the same mistakes that they did. You’ll gain the advantage of being able to do more with your time and money if you already know what didn’t work and what did.

Your competitors will be people in the same area that you’ve set your goals in. If you have a business goal and your area is in finance, then you wouldn’t necessarily study someone who is in the area of party planning.

You have to compare things that are alike to get an accurate picture. Figure out what habits the competition has that has helped them get where you’d like to be. It could be that they’ve made some changes in their lives to gain more time to do the things they want to do.

Or it could be that they’ve changed the way they eat so they’ve lost the weight that you’d like to lose. Or maybe they started a business on a shoestring budget and you’re trying to do the same thing.

Look at what steps they chose to get where they are. Besides habits, you want to look at what motivated your competition. Find out what it was that kept them going even when things may have been difficult for them.

Seek out their web presence. You can often find a wealth of information like this. Many people will talk about their habits or the steps they take to reach a goal on their social media sites.

You’ll be able to see how they engage with followers. If it’s a business that’s your competition, check out what it is they’re doing that appeals to customers. Why it is that the customers keep coming back.

Look at how they’ve set up their business and what they used to grow that business. Pay attention to what methods they use for their shopping carts, what selling points they highlight for their products or information.

Look at how they’ve built a subscriber list or how they get their audience to talk positively about them online. If the person you see as your competition is someone who was able to retire young and that’s your goal - study what they did.

Uncover what opportunities they said yes to and which ones they walked away from. Research what kind of training, education or skills this person relied on to create the life that they now have.

Look at your competition to see if they went it alone or they had assistance from someone else. Sometimes the success of another person is highly dependent on the team of people they have working with them or for them.

By learning from the competition rather than letting yourself be intimidated by them, you’ll gain valuable insight that can help you achieve your own goals.

Better Yourself to Beat Them

Once you study your competition, you’ll know what their strengths and weaknesses are. While some people might believe that a competitor is at the top and there’s no way to be better than that, they’re wrong.

You can do things better, faster and easier if you have the skills or education that puts you ahead of the competition. When you improve yourself, then you’ll be the one on top and you’ll know what you need to do in order to stay here.

Some competitors reach the top and then they get so busy staying focusing on what’s new that they forget what already is. If it’s a business goal that you’re trying to achieve, your way of doing things better is going to be to make sure that you don’t lose sight of your existing customers just because you’re looking for new ones.

Too many successful people forget that their pre-existing customers are the reason they’re successful. They might begin to blow off their concerns or be slow to answer. They won’t really care if that customer goes away because they feel they can just replace that one customer.

But what happens is one unhappy customer turns into another, then another. Before they know it, they have a whole lot of unhappy former customers talking about them on social media.

Be better by making it a priority to take care of your first-tier customers. Make sure they get what they want when they want it. If you focus heavily on customer service, you’re going to keep the customers you have as well as draw in new ones.

People want to do business with those who care about their needs. Prove to the customers that what your competitor can do, you can do better than that. Show that you can do it faster and easier as well.

Customers want the quickest, easiest way to accomplish their own goals. Whatever your competitor offers, makes yours bigger. Give them more. Understand what it is that they want whether it’s more product for the same cost or increased usability of what they do buy.

Can one product perform more than one task for them? When you know what your customers want, you can adjust your strategy to meet that need. Increase your skills and knowledge as part of your strategy.

Know more about the product or information than your competitor does. Understand all the ways that what you’re offering can benefit your customer. Look for ways to get this point across that your competitor may not have tapped into.

You can beat the competition by learning how to approach your service or product through the eyes of a customer who’s just now striving for their goals. Be a better instructor or mentor to the customers than your competition is.

It could be that you may need to learn about public speaking or how to conduct a webinar that holds attention. Better yourself so that you can show your customers how they can be better.

Set Yourself Apart

There are set ways to do things and many people choose these traditional, accepted or so-called proven ways in both their personal and professional life. So, what happens is when one person is successful, the next person comes along and tries to emulate everything exactly as the success story did.

While it’s good to learn from a competitor and understand why they succeeded, staying on the same path can be a bad thing. When people hear something over and over that’s the same information, product or concepts they can develop information blindness.

This means that you too will blend in to what’s already out there unless you choose a different path. The interesting thing about wanting to be successful is people tend to work hard to try and blend in because they want to face judgment or ridicule.

For example, some of your friends and coworkers swear by a certain diet. But every time you’ve tried it, you haven’t experienced the same results, if any. You’re frustrated and discouraged and you want to try something new.

But you’re afraid what others will think you try a new, unchartered diet. By blending in, you can stop your own growth. You have to give yourself permission to do things differently and explore alternatives or better options that others may not have tried and may not understand.

Just because something has always been done a certain way on the path to achieving goals doesn’t mean that it’s the best way for you. Instead of being a follower, choose to create your own way.

You’ll develop new insights that your competitor may not have seen. Instead of looking at ways that are, look at ways that may be in the future. Every area of life - from finances to health to relationships - is always shifting as time passes.

New ideas are put into place, new theories and new technology develops. Look to be on the cutting edge of whatever is new that helps you achieve your goals. Focus your attention on untapped areas of growth in the direction of your goals.

Treat new things as an experiment and don’t attach yourself to the results. This way, you can keep what works and implement it and let go of what didn’t work. Don’t be afraid to be bold when trying something new. Challenge yourself to reach for more than you thought possible.