by Elizabeth Clark Wickham

All women have a competitive button.

Sometimes it’s prominent. It gets pressed continually in the heat of the day - when its owner rubs shoulders at work, when she goes to the gym, when she attends a party.

Sometimes it’s inconspicuous. It’s only triggered when bumped in the exact spot - when exchanging baby stories with another mom or when shopping with a girlfriend.

When the competitive button is activated, it can bring about positive results under the right focus. In our particularly vying society, however, the competitive button can get pushed so often that it starts to hurt the owner...and others.

What then? How can women restore a competitive balance?

The lies of a competitive culture

Reacting in destructive ways when the competitive button is activated is the natural outcome of a society defined by all or nothing.

“We’ve become obsessed with the notion - as Donald Trump has often been quoted - that there are only two kinds of persons: winners and losers, and of course, everyone wants to be a winner,” says author George Simon, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology and has specialized in personality and character disorders for over 25 years.

Simon clarifies that it’s not about demonizing competitiveness, but about identifying the root problem, that “there’s nowhere near the same value placed on character development than there is on simply winning. That’s one of the main reasons there’s a character crisis in most industrialized societies. We’ve become far too accustomed to the notion that the competitive way is the only way to achieve excellence and reach lofty goals.”

Within this cutthroat culture, certain lies circulate. Women have come to believe them and act upon them when their competitive button is pushed, sometimes sadly leaving character in the backseat.

Lie #1: Competing is about comparing.

Lindsay Driscoll, a textbook designer in Colorado Springs, Col., cites her high school coach as a reference concerning her competitive streak: “It doesn’t matter if you are out in the parking lot playing tiddlywinks - she is going for blood!”

Today, Driscoll observes competitive females firsthand as a Junior Varsity Girls Basketball coach, her second job. But competition is not contained in the court alone, it spills over into party attendance, clothing, relationships with young men and grades. Driscoll attributes the friction she observes to women not understanding the difference between competition and comparison.

“We have blurred the lines between the two because our society puts so much pressure on being the best. Our society usually defines the best by comparing to the worst,” she says. “You can make anything into competition, but in its nature, not everything is competition. When it comes to games and something you can win, that is competition. It becomes comparison when we view ourselves in light of how we stack up to someone else.”