I love my sisters even to this day, but there was a time when my sister shifted from loving me to seeing me as competition. She would always tell me "My friends like you more." or, "People think you're better than me." My sister went from loving me to competing with me. For me, I saw her as smart, funny, shy, quiet, and plain beautiful, but it hurt me to know she would think I was trying to take her friends or her boyfriends. To this day the wedge of competition still has caused damage to our relationship, and it started when we were teenagers, and it hasn't ended since. I hate competing in the sense of seeing my sisters as rivals. Growing up I knew we were stronger together, we were better unified, and we were happier when we were complimenting each other. I don't think it dawned on my sister that the only reason I was better at something was that I was more experienced in it, she was a year and a half younger than me. In the same way I hate competition, because in relationships it is a wall between understanding and communicating.
Websters Defines competition as the activity or condition of competing or to win something or be more successful than someone else. Another definition is to compete for means to make someone else a loser. For there to be competition someone has to be deemed the winner and someone is the loser. But what I found in life when we choose competition there is a relationship broken that could have been made stronger. I think the first question I have in life is who do you see as competition? Is it the girl in the office down the hall, the facebook friend who posts their perfect life, or is it your past experiences and your future expectations? We are all competing in the race we call life. The problem I think we may have is we have traded collaboration for competition and think if we gain approval or to be seen as valuable by people we have won. How sad is it to be worshipped by people but have no life-giving relationships. This my friends are not winning.
The next question I have for you is what are you trying to win? You see you can't have competition if you don't know what you are trying to win. You choose to compete in today society, and I think we forget that we have decided to try to win. Winning is defined as gaining, resulting in or relating to victory in a contest or competition. Many of us are single players trying to be rockstars, but I like the saying "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships." Many of us are trying to do life on our talent alone, we are the smartest, we are the best, but we aren't a team player so we can't use. Many times women I have found think that relationships and competition are transferable. In building successful teams, change a culture, we have to understand that competition doesn't belong in the place of relationships. For too long we have constructed pyramids of relationships trying to build our kingdom of security. Leadership is influence, and it is out of that influence that people will follow you. When you are trying to gain position, people will only support you while you hold that position. So competition is your go to because if you compete and can prove you are better than you keep your position but you ultimately loose relationships.
The last story is a sad one, but their was a woman I desperately wanted her approval, but due to both of our insecurities and listening to gossip from outside voices, we have a broken relationship and it's easier and safer to stay in the place of competition behind our walls than it is to collaborate and see each other as kingdom builders. I wish I could tell you I did everything right but the truth is I let competition in, and so did she. Communication to each other as well as with others became a manipulation and undertones of control rather than complimenting. Fear came in, and anxiety and this relationship turned very bad, and over the course of three years, all communication stopped and still to this day we don't talk to each other. We both avoid each other, and the wall of competition took a relationship that I would love to have now.
Regardless of what someone is doing to you choose to compliment, choose to speak words of life, choose to collaborate because competition destroys relationships, it creates co-dependency and gives a false sense of security and control, but ultimately it isolates you so that you don't have any true relationships in your life. People who know your heart and are for you. I hope today you will make a conscious choice to choose to collaborate and see people as coheirs and collaborators, not competition. Where are you trying to maintain your control and compete to feel like you have security in who you are? Your identity should be found in Christ and no one else.
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