Sometimes Your Biggest Competition Is the Person in the Mirror

If you’ve been following this feed, you know how this goes by now. When it comes to CreativeMornings recaps, it’s not a competition, but you’ve probably mastered the idea of what to expect: CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly talk – one local creative, one theme shared with chapters around the world, no pitch, no agenda. I show up most months. Last week’s encounter broke the format a little, and it turned out to be just the cup of coffee and ridiculously freeing body-shakes I’ve had in a while.

This month’s theme was Competencia (translated from Spanish: competition). It’s a loaded word to hand a room full of creative people first thing in the morning, and CreativeMornings’ Santiago chapter, which chose the theme, put it plainly: competition drives us to improve and innovate, but it also breeds comparison, stress, and isolation. Both things are true at once. That tension was the whole morning.

Our speaker was Anna Urena, a Latin and heels dance instructor who moved to the Valley four years ago and eventually opened her own dance company. And instead of the usual lecture format, Erica Brooks from the CM Phoenix team ran it as a sit-down interview – less TED Talk, more Leno-Letterman couch conversation. It changed the energy of the whole room. You were listening to a conversation instead of being talked at, and somehow that made the ideas land harder.

The room learns to shake it off

Partway through, Anna stopped talking and had the entire room stand up. Jump. Shake. Wiggle. Make noise. No inhibitions, no self-consciousness, just physically shaking off whatever tension we’d all walked in carrying. It felt a little ridiculous for about four seconds, and then it didn’t. There’s something dance instructors understand that the rest of us forget: you can’t think your way out of tension nearly as well as you can move your way out of it. The body processes what the brain keeps replaying on a loop.

That’s the throughline of dance, according to Anna – it’s a physical outlet for the stuff that gets stuck in your head. Anger, sadness, self-doubt. You don’t out-think those. You move through them.

Iron sharpens iron, or it just wears you down

Anna spent years in a dance world that could be genuinely toxic – dancers pitted against each other, comparison baked into the culture, distrust as a byproduct. She was honest about that. But she’d also found a version of competition that made her better instead of smaller, and the difference, she said, was entirely about reframing.

When Erica asked about a time Anna didn’t win, didn’t come out on top, she didn’t tell a redemption story where she won the next round. She said competition keeps you creative. It keeps you alive, in a sense – as long as you’re taking the lesson from it with a growth mindset instead of a scarekeeping one. The research backs her up here more than you’d expect. Workplace competition research shows the deciding factor isn’t whether competition exists, it’s whether people experience it as exciting or as threatening. Exciting produces creativity. Threatened produces defensiveness, and sometimes worse.

“Don’t let something, or someone, tell you that you cannot do something, or that it’s not possible,” Anna said. “Embrace the competition’s positivity and throw out the toxicity that might exist in it.”

The move, as she described it, is to stop treating the person ahead of you as evidence you’re behind, and start treating them as information. Not “they’re better than me.” More like, “there’s something in what they’re doing that shows me where I have room to grow.” That’s a small linguistic shift with a large practical effect – it turns another person’s success from a verdict into a data point.

The mirror is undefeated

The line that created an audible “ah-ha moment” throughout the room came near the end. Anna said sometimes your biggest competition is the person in the mirror. Not a rival dancer, not your neighbor – the one with the bigger house or faster car, not an industry competitor with a bigger client list or nicer studio. You.

She talked about the inner critic in a way that felt refreshingly free of self-help gloss. You’re never going to turn that voice off, she said. That’s not the goal. The goal is turning it down – down enough that you can hear it without organizing your whole day around it. Research on social comparison points to the same thing: constant comparison to others erodes self-esteem and confidence over time, but self-awareness and a growth mindset are what actually blunt it. Not eliminating the comparison instinct. Managing your relationship to it.

You move before you know

Here’s the one that applies to basically every kind of work, creative or otherwise. Anna talked about learning a new dance routine – it does not feel comfortable at first. It’s clunky and half-wrong and your feet are a beat behind the music. You have to do it anyway, before you have any evidence it’s going to work.

That’s true of a first draft too. It’s true of pitching a new client, restructuring a team, taking on a role you’re not sure you’re ready for. The confidence usually shows up after you start, not before. Waiting to feel ready is often just waiting, dressed up as preparation.

I think about this a lot in my own work, matching companies with independent professionals who are often stepping into unfamiliar territory on both sides – a business bringing in outside talent for the first time, a freelancer walking into a team they’ve never worked with. Nobody feels fully ready on day one. The professionals who do well aren’t the ones who waited until they felt certain. They’re the ones who started, adjusted in motion, and let the discomfort be part of the process instead of a reason to stall.

Competition, handled the way Anna described it, works the same way. It’s not something to defeat or avoid. It’s a mirror. What you do with the reflection is the actual skill.

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If you’re in Phoenix and haven’t been to a Creative Mornings talk yet, join us for the next one. Bagels, coffee, and a room full of people who’d rather be curious than sleep in. Not in Phoenix? There’s probably a CM chapter near you – check it out this month.