In the workplace everybody wants to be the best at what they do. They want to be noticed and recognised, and therefore compete with mates with a goal to stand out.

Make me better; a page that offers motivational quotes and personal development tips explains that it can be extremely easy for you to compare your work with other people’s work. 

When you start to compete with others, you’ll continue to judge your own life and the true self values that you do not strive for. Even if you deem yourself to be more successful under their values, you’ll only be completing something important to them and not to you.

Much as competing with others comes with advantages, rivalling with oneself can have numerous benefits too.

Aline Ujeneza who works as an accountant in a petroleum company, says that competition with yourself is the best competition that can bring effective success.

A person that tends to always look on what their mates are doing and where they are, always feels bitter about themselves and jealous about their colleagues, she says.

Such competition can drain a person because they are always focused on where others are, and not where they are or where they should be. It is more of "it is not my time now but my time will come.’ And in the meantime, be the one to make it happen, whenever you feel like you are not where you are,” she says.

Emmanuel Nsengiyumva a bank teller points out that competition at work should not be unhealthy because this breeds negativity.

"A person competing with their workmate will always find ways to sabotage them if it means them being at the top. That person will always feel that they are right and no one should be better than them, which is impossible. Such negativity will not help that person reach their success because they will be in competition with others and not themselves,” Nsengiyumva says.

What self-competition teaches you

Nadia Uwamahoro says that there are a lot of benefits that come with competing with yourself, benefits that determine what you want and what you don’t want.

"The most important part of competing with yourself is that you get to set your own values, you choose what goals fit you best, what objectives you want to accomplish and what you want to compete on,” she says.

According to Make me better, healthy competition is good when we are learning from other people, but when we grow too competition-focused, we will begin to compare ourselves to others and stop looking at their efforts as a benefit to them accomplishing their values.

Ngabo Kamanzi who works in the IT field shares a few things self-competition teaches us: 

You learn new things from your colleagues:

Kamanzi says that when a person is too focused on being better than their workmates, it is challenging to establish a quality relationship with them. When you constantly see your mates as competition it will restrict you from learning from them. If a person can work together with their workmates, they can share knowledge.

You focus on your skills:

When we are in competition with others that might have more skills than us, it will frustrate us, but when we choose to focus on ourselves we learn where to improve and how to upskill ourselves.

We accept the fact that we are not always the best:

Kamanzi says that no one is always the best in everything, there will be people better than us and it is okay, we only have to be happy with how we progress and learn how to celebrate even our mere improvement. Competition with ourselves is not stressing ourselves, but recognising how good we are and how better we can be.