In a world where achievements often define us, it’s easy to get caught up in chasing external validation and performance-based identities. But what does it mean to truly escape the comparison trap? As we gear up for a transition to “Grow the Good,” I’m excited to share this solo reflection about the power of uniqueness.
I explain why moving away from seeking external validation through ‘being special’ to embracing our authentic, unique selves can profoundly enrich our lives. We’ll explore how this shift affects not just our personal growth but our relationships and community interactions. Tune in to hear why letting go of the need to feel special is freeing; more meaningful, more sustainable, and so much more rewarding.
You’ll Find Out How To:
- Identify and release the pressures of contingent self-worth
- Redefine success to include personal growth and meaningful contributions
- Cultivate a sense of purpose that resonates with who we are, not just what we achieve
Interested in Learning More?
Listen to the episode
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Brad’s Links
Episode Chapters
- 00:00 New Year Coaching Opportunities
- 00:48 Introduction to the Podcast
- 02:19 Chasing External Validation and Contingent Self-Worth
- 06:58 Balancing Specialness and Uniqueness
- 09:46 Practical Steps to Embrace Uniqueness
- 13:01 Final Thoughts and Podcast Announcement
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Transcript
Sonya Looney 0:00
I’m so excited about the new year, and I have opened up four new coaching spots for my mental performance coaching and health and wellness coaching to help you achieve your goals in the new year, whether you are a business professional, whether you are a recreational or high performance athlete, or just somebody who wants to reach for more and use the tools from health and wellness coaching and from positive psychology. I’ve been doing this for many years, helping people like athletes, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and I would love to join you on your journey and guide you towards unlocking your potential. If you’d like to reach out to me, go to Sonya loney.com and click the Contact Form. Also in the new year, I will be offering some group coaching. We’ll be forming a new cohort to help you unlock your best and stay tuned for all the details of that.
Sonya Looney 1:02
You welcome to
Sonya Looney 1:10
the Sonia Looney show. This is a podcast about high performance and well being. I’m Sonia and I am a former world champion professional mountain biker, a mental performance coach, a keynote speaker and a mom to two little kids, really excited about today’s topic. It’s something that has been percolating in my brain for over a year, and that is talking about the difference between uniqueness and specialness in the culture that we live in, we are celebrated when we are, quote, unquote, special whenever we perform super well at something, whenever we are a high performer. In fact, whenever you walk into a room, how people introduce you is based on the things that make you stand out in terms of achievements. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but that becomes really tied to our identity, and it can generate a performance based identity, which you will get to hear about on the podcast at a later date. Being special can be tied to external validation. A performance based identity is when our self knowledge and personal meanings become tied to performance, According to researcher Ben Walker, and for much of my life as an elite athlete, I chased external validation. I wanted to prove myself, and I’ve said this many times on other podcasts, and initially it was embarrassing to say that, but it was for two reasons. I started competing as a pro mountain biker in geez, 2006 because I wanted to see what I was capable of, because I loved training and pushing myself, but I also was trying to prove myself, because when I grew up, I felt like I only mattered if I was performing at the highest level, and it wasn’t only in sport, it was in school, so if I wasn’t the top student in the class, and I felt like it didn’t matter, and that people didn’t care about me, and that’s really sad, And I know that a lot of people can relate with this feeling, and when winning or results feel like an ultimate marker of self worth, that generates something called contingent self worth. I did a lot of reading about this for my master thesis. In fact, there are many different areas where we can have contingent self worth. Our self worth can be contingent upon confident competence, such as academic competence and intellectual achievements. So your self worth can be tied to high grades or excelling in exams or just simply being recognized as a smart person. Your self worth can be tied to appearance, so physical attractiveness, or maintaining a certain body image, it can be tied to competition, so your self worth can be late to outperforming others or succeeding in competitive environments. And examples are winning races, getting promotions, excelling in whatever sport you may be doing. Another area is approval from others, where our self worth relies on gaining validation or acceptance from peers, family or authority figures. Some examples of that are feeling good about yourself, only feeling good about yourself when you receive praise, get lights on social media or get approval from certain people. Another area is family support, so your self worth becomes contingent upon the love, care and recognition of your family members. And two other places are virtue, so your self worth depends on being a good person according to your moral standards. So that’s more of an intrinsic place of contingent self worth. And then there’s also contingent self worth based on God’s love or spirituality. So an example would be feeling worthy when living in accordance to religious morals or spiritual morals. True self worth should not be tied to any type of external outcome, and that is where a lot of the work in self compassion comes in. And you can check out the episodes I forgot. With Dr Kristen Neff and also Dr Diana Hill on self compassion to help cultivate self worth. I don’t think it’s possible to have no contingent self worth, because we’re human beings, but being able to to really work on self compassion or just self acceptance, can help you reduce some of these contingent self worth and also some work that Jennifer Crocker has done, she’s, I think I might have already mentioned her. Some of the work that Jennifer Crocker has done is saying that we can reduce contingent self worth if we set mastery goals, learning from failure goals, or social contribution goals. So back to specialness, you can see how some of those areas of contingent self worth can become a marker of self worth, being special whenever you’re seeking approval, whenever you are competing with others, being special for how you look those types of things. So when I look at my life, whether it’s competing for grades in school or aiming for the podium. The pursuit of specialness was constant, and it was validated constantly. The better I did at something, the more recognition I would get. And when I didn’t do well at something, unfortunately, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t supported or or welcomed, I would even get in trouble whenever I didn’t perform a certain way. I I was in the I was a musician for a large part of my life, until I got to college, and I was always a top performer in music. So it’s not necessarily all bad to be striving for specialness or to have contingent self worth, because you can have high performance, and that high performance can lead to more confidence to see what else is possible in your life. So I want to offer a balanced perspective on that. But when it becomes only about specialness, or you only feel like you matter, or you’re worthy if you are special, or chasing these external validating thing, externally validated, the externally validating things, that could become highly problematic. It could be very anxiety provoking, and as we change in our lives, we might not do those things as well as we used to, or we might not want to do those things that we were previously doing. Specialness is fragile because it relies on being better than somebody else. It’s a zero sum game, just like how many people view competition, and I did a solo episode on rethinking competition, which you might find interesting, because I’m a highly competitive athlete who wants to win all the races that I go to. But how I view competition is not in zero sum terms, even though, at one point in my life, I used to view it that way, because think about this, what happens when someone outshines you? How do you treat them? How do you think about yourself when life changes and performance is no longer the main focus, or maybe you played a college sport and you aged out of your sport. What happens? Specialness fades, and that leaves behind a sense of inadequacy, and it’s a toxic cycle amplified by this performance based identity that I mentioned earlier in in the podcast, and again, Ben Walker is coming on to talk about performance based identity soon, and that means that your self worth gets tied to winning. Okay, so instead of striving for specialness, I forget who it was. It was Orin Orin Davis, or maybe it was Scott Barry Kaufman. I heard somebody talking about uniqueness, and it really perked up my ears, because uniqueness doesn’t rely on competition. It’s it’s about authenticity. It’s not about being better than somebody or proving yourself. It’s about embracing who you are for your values and your strengths and how you impact the world beyond any external metric or result, your uniqueness is not something that can be taken away or overshadowed. It’s yours, and it doesn’t depend on anybody else. We are all truly unique. There’s not going to be anybody else like you, ever that was ever before you or they’ll come after you. So thinking about authenticity, if you are trying to show up as your most authentic self, and hopefully your authentic self is somebody that wants to, you know, help people and not be harmful to people. But if you show up as your most authentic self, your primary goal is not on outperforming others or only in seeking approval. Instead, you’re focused on living authentically, in expressing yourself. I love viewing the start line as a celebration and as a way to express myself. Or whenever I get into a pressure filled situation, like maybe Kino speaking or a workshop or taking on new role,
Sonya Looney 9:33
that can become a place where I might feel pressure and start worrying about self validation, or I can try to show up with my strengths as who I really am and letting myself bind for lack of a better term. And whenever you show up authentically, you’re acting with creativity and you’re contributing to the world in your own unique way. Uniqueness doesn’t ask you to compete. It asks you to connect, to connect with yourself, with your values and with the people around you. And that is a way more pro social place to be than trying to compete with other people and be better than them and push them down. Another fun thing about uniqueness is when you embrace your your own uniqueness, you are naturally embracing and celebrating the uniqueness in other people, so looking for other people’s strengths and values and the things that make them them, if we show up in a competitive environment to try to be authentic and unique instead of trying to be better than it can inspire more collaboration instead of competition. And uniqueness grows with you as you evolve, and we all grow and evolve. It keeps going with you, and it provides a sustainable and different type of source of self worth. The problem with pursuing specialness is that instead of pursuing something, striving or competing to improve or to to impact others through a meaningful goal, you start competing or performing to prove your worth. That’s where perfectionism and burnout creep in, and when your identity gets so tied to winning and there’s no room for mistakes or growth, specialness sets you up for an endless pursuit of never enough someone is always going to be faster or smarter or more accomplished than you. Sorry to break it to you, but it’s true, and the more you focus on being special, the less you’re able to celebrate others. And instead of being inspired by someone else’s success, it can feel threatening, as if their success means that you can’t be successful. And I admit that I struggle a lot with this. Sometimes I think, Well, someone else has already done so well at this. So who cares what I have to say about it. It’s already been done before. But then I heard somebody once say, yes, it might have been done before, but nobody has heard it from you, from your unique perspective, from the way that you personally impact other people. So thinking about your uniqueness when you are going after big goals that maybe you are telling yourself you have imposter thoughts of, I’m not good enough, or who am I to do this? You are somebody to do this, because you are uniquely you. How do we flip the script from specialness to uniqueness? Number one, I encourage you to reflect on your values, identify what truly matters to you, and align your goals with those values. If you picked up, if you pick up any book on act Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, it has many values clarification exercises. If that’s something that you’re personally interested in, I can help you with that. I do that in my coaching. Number two is to redefine success, to focus on process goals and on growth and on social contribution instead of outcomes. And think about how that is lining up with your purpose in life. And you can listen to my my podcast I recorded on purpose. Number three is to celebrate and savor small wins. Reflect on what it was that allowed you to achieve those things, instead of just evaluating how good it was, what effort did you put in? Who did you have to become? How did you grow? What challenges did you weather? Number four is embracing connection, recognizing that everyone brings something valuable to the table, and someone else’s success doesn’t threaten your own. Let me say it again, someone’s someone else’s success does not threaten your own. And that is, again I said, that is my journey that I’m always working on, and number five is to practice gratitude. Appreciate your journey and the unique qualities that you bring to it. Gratitude isn’t just about thinking I’m so thankful. Gratitude is about looking for things within yourself, looking for things within others, and looking for things within the world that are good, that you can celebrate. So I hope that this topic on uniqueness and specialness has inspired you, has made you think a little bit. It’s something that I’m always evolving in my mind. So I’ll keep bringing bringing you along on the journey as I keep learning more about specialness and uniqueness. Something that I want to point out is that people very rarely remember what your result was, but they always remember how you made them feel, and you made them feel the way that they felt because of your uniqueness. If I’m at a race, I guarantee you nobody remembers what place I came in, or when I’m talking to somebody at a race, I don’t care. I don’t notice, but I do remember how I felt around them, and that is what makes you unique. I’m gonna leave you with a quote that comes from a future guest that we already recorded the podcast with, George Mumford, and he says, achievement isn’t the most important thing. Authenticity is and uniqueness is tied to authenticity. Thank you so much for listening. This is the last month of what we’re calling the Sonny Looney show. It will be everything will still be available, but next month it will the name will be changed to the grow the good podcast. I’m very excited about the name change, and we’ve already changed over the structure so the format will stay the same with one solo episode for me, one moving meditation and one guest. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. It’s been seven and a half years of being a podcast host, and as always, I’m with you on this journey of personal growth adventure and our mission to be better every day.
