Social Comparison On Social Contrast Skiing

In today’s society, we all have a tendency to want to be the best at what we do. We strive for success and become frustrated when we fail. We are constantly comparing ourselves to against someone whom we think we should be similar or equal to. Even though we are told not to judge ourselves based on other people and their lives, it tends to be human nature in order to do so. The tendency to do this is based on the social comparison theory. Social comparison is evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others. When we watch another person and see how they act, we cannot help but to compare ourselves to them. This leads us to sometimes secretly hoping for another person’s failure to make ourselves look/feel better.

Her style of skiing was similar to mine and I wanted my scores to be at or above hers. At first, I was happy with the comparison. I thought my scores would be similar to hers, but I quickly realized I was wrong. Unfortunately, I was never able to achieve the scores that she had. She had been skiing for a long time and she kept getting better. It was very frustrating for me to not be able to surpass the scores of the other skier. This situation of upward comparison was not healthy for me. Comparing my athletic ability to others puts more pressure on myself which leads me to make simple mistakes that I would not normally make while practicing alone without other girls around to compare myself to. I was so frustrated that I considered quitting the sport because I thought of myself as a failure, but the failure only pushed me to try even

It made me think that I was not good enough and that I would never be better than that girl. Although this comparison puts a lot of pressure on myself, my scores would not improve if I did not set goals that I want to surpass. Comparing myself to a girl that is better than me, allows me to push myself and want to practice and be better. I constantly wanted to be on the water and bettering my abilities. I pushed myself, which allowed me to increase my scores, even if those scores did not exceed the girl’s that I was comparing myself to. It took me a while to realize that comparing myself to her was unhealthy. I realized that I need to focus on my individual game and improving my own abilities instead of trying to be better than someone else. I also came to the conclusion that the other girl had access to more time on the water and was able to travel to ski schools around the country. This level of waterskiing was not achievable for me at the time, so I stopped comparing myself to her. I eventually started having more fun waterskiing and started making smaller goals that are more achievable for my skill