What It Really Takes to Liberate Our Competitive Nature and Reroute it into Creative Fuel

Aug. 8

Article Published for The Vital Creative Collection, Written by Casey Balon

Denying a facet of our human nature will not create deeply nourishing, nor sustainable, forms of relating; developing intimate partnerships with our instinctive qualities will.

I asked for a table for one beside the window. Without hesitation, the host responded “Yes, we do,” but he still had to check. I had made the request in the way you ask when you expect the answer to be yes, but translate that you will be unaffected if the answer is no. This is one of the tickets, I have found, to appropriately creating safety while asking for what you actually desire.

He took a minute to make sure there was a place for me.

I ordered a café latte made with oat milk (an imitation dairy habit I’d been meaning to kick), a coconut ginger soup, and a side of smoked salmon. I had been given a table big enough for three; it was right by the window.

basking in a sea of collaboration

I am a self-proclaimed ‘girl’s girl’. (I am, innately, a woman’s woman.) While I am sensitive to group dynamics, more often than not, I thrive in a sea of collaboration, team-based work, and a sense of sisterhood just as deeply as I do on my individualized path of creation. Group work has served as a powerful catalyst for my personal evolution — both in facets of refinement, as well as growth. I find I am always a student in these spaces, learning more about myself and the other through each interaction.

While dismantling traditional structures of power has not been my focus, softening the edges of the unspoken hierarchy that (somewhat naturally, but not typically authentically) develops within groups of influential humans has been relevant to me.

This is to say: Paying attention to anti-competition rhetoric — in the arenas of relating, professional work, and creative endeavours — is of keen interest to me.

the push and pull

I have noticed a resurgence of conversation around the idea of ‘dissolving competition’ in favour of peaceful collaboration, specifically in spaces of business, transformational facilitation, and creative entrepreneurship. At first glance, I too am in favour of such a movement, but this topic’s roots are much deeper than what is being presented.

By grazing over the body-based motives driving our desire to compete, anti-competition messaging can backfire. While these well-intended, re-directive motions are often presented in a somewhat genial way, they merely skim the surface of viability and do not sustainably mitigate the damaging expressions we associate with rivalry.

What we really desire is not to reject the entirety of this quality (which seemingly strengthens its most malignant manifestations anyway), but to compassionately listen to, contextualize, reform, reroute, and work with its needs and energy until its automatic expression (and honest intention) is to exhibit in healthy ways.

In other words: Altogether denying our competitive nature is a proposition suitable only for a silly goose.

the distinction

It has occurred to me that many are speaking to the idealistic qualities of establishing a less competitive approach to business and relating without doing the necessary work to establish true safety in the process.

We can pretend we aren’t being competitive all we want, but until we address the subconscious patterns, beliefs, and behaviours that internally drive our perceptions, choices, and interactions, we will continue to covertly manipulate (even damage) other folks more than if we owned and revitalized our relationship to competition.

There must be a distinction made between how to arrive at a healthy and genuine expression of collaborative creation versus bypassing the natural experience of competitive qualities while wielding shame to further suppress this instinct — one which possesses valid physiological roots.

There is a vague, yet palpable, undercurrent to the anti-competitive approach (an unspoken agreement) that we will all smile politely when someone brushes up against the edges of the neat boxes we have placed ourselves in, perpetuating a further suppression of women to fall in line with a new set of rules. It’s a sly way of putting us in our place and maintaining the current status quo.

the internal foundation of self-recovery

“At one time, it was believed that females did not know how to engage in healthy competition because we, unlike our male counterparts, did not learn this skill playing sports.” In her book Communion: The Female Search for Love, the brilliant Bell Hooks explores why females are often unable to affirm the exceptional skills and talents of other females.

The heart of the matter stems from the perceived threat of being annihilated, cut down, and excluded as methods of policing one another, “Before women can create abiding love with one another, we must learn to be truth tellers, to break with the sexist notion that a good woman never tells what she really thinks. Many a friendship between women has ended because one person failed to speak her truths directly to her friend.”

To orient towards a solution, Hooks poses six pillars of self-esteem (what she deems ‘the bedrock of self-love’); these pillars include the art of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and personal integrity.

She outlines the establishment of this internal foundation as an integral form of self-recovery, stating: “No woman who chooses to be self-loving ever regrets her choice. Self-love brings her greater power and freedom. It improves her relationships with everyone. But most especially it allows her to live in community with other women, to stand in solidarity and sisterhood.”

She deepens, “Personal integrity is the foundation of self-love. Women who are honest with themselves and others do not fear being vulnerable. We do not fear that another woman can unmask or expose us. We need not fear annihilation, for we know no one can destroy our integrity as women who love.”

positioning ourselves in opposition to ourselves; covert shame places our denied qualities in overdrive

I could not resonate more with Hook’s proposition, as it is through an intimate (and honest) connection with self — our WHOLE self — that we are able to truly nurture and amplify healthy relationships with others. A deeply-established and practiced subconscious foundation of self-worth provides a springboard for loving interdependence.

What I haven’t spotted in Hook’s body of work is a motion to deny, hide, reject, or shame particular aspects of our self while on the pilgrimage of establishing a healthy internal foundation of self acceptance and self love. Where the waters become murky in today’s mainstream rhetoric is when we propose this form of internal fragmentation as an appropriate solution capable of resolving harmful expressions of competition.

While our individual relationship with competition is guaranteed to be unique (with some folk authentically expressing very few competitive behaviours), a true sense of liberation from the unhealthy expressions of a quality, pattern, or dynamic we have exemplified in the past does not come from denying their existence.

Refusing to partner with this aspect of ourselves can end up positioning us in opposition to ourselves, strengthening the potential for our competitive nature to “squish out” and be expressed in malignant ways — ways that can cause harm not only to ourselves, but to other influential women (in our realm of immediate connections and beyond).

a distraction from what we are actually desiring

What I believe we are actually craving when we propose to “dissolve competition” is to dissolve the energetic, verbal, physical, and behavioural threads that attempt to devalue and cut down other women for personal gain.

I adore the subtle nature of a gathering or event that is created in such a way where each person in attendance feels celebrated and supported in their full, genuine, and healthy expressions of self — and of the embodiment of their unique soul templates. This form of relating naturally opens up loving connections that deepen our self-acceptance, and ends up liberating us to authentically amplify our powerfully-expressed peers.

a solution that can provide sustainable progression and longevity

From my vantage point, the real answer (the one that provides longevity and true power for both the individual and the community around her) exists within developing intimacy with the parts of ourselves that are competitive, thereby creating an opportunity for us to befriend the raw (and most innocent) texture of competition herself.

What I believe we mean when we declare that we will no longer be comparing ourselves to other women (or frankly to any other human) is that we will be actively working to connect deeply with our internal landscape, in order to be a powerful articulation of ourselves alongside other powerful folk. It is no secret that we crave spaces and places and circles where we feel we belong to ourselves while naturally belonging within the group.

It is SO natural — most natural — to desire this.

when we pretend there isn’t a natural form of competitive fire in our bones, it finds insidious and noxious ways to express

To outright deny our competitive nature — rather than harness and redirect it into a healthy expression of being — is to deny facets of our own humanity, and frankly, provides an outright diversion from the heart work* required to reveal a greater depth of loving relational capacity.

I’d venture to propose that this walk — from unconscious competitiveness to deeply-rooted alliance — is something all women, all humans, long to experience.

*Heart work in this context refers to the toolkit of self-reflection, somatic work, subconscious rewiring of neural pathways, retrieval of abandoned aspects of self, working with our internal ‘parts’ through modalities such as Internal Family Systems, emotional fitness and mental health work, energetic health, generational healing, trauma resolution, and beyond. The concept further acknowledges contributing elements, including but not limited to — connection with nature, practicing new forms of communication and behaviours through one’s relationships with others, and immersing oneself in life-giving work in the world.

an essential, affirming impulse

In her book On Our Best Behavior Elise Loehnen recounts Rachel Simmon’s 2002 book about girlhood in America, Odd Girl Out, writing:

Because we’re so unsettled by these expressions of “all that,” and because our first instinct is to judge, criticize, and condemn, rather than to explore our own feelings about what a girl who present herself as “all that” is doing that feels so minimizing and threatening, we miss the lesson. Per Simmons, we “learn to mute feelings of jealousy and competition…. Jealousy and competion do not disappear but instead morph into ‘acceptable’ forms. To remain steadfastly ‘good’ and ‘nice,’ girls must resort to hidden codes. They learn, in other words, to express competition and jealousy indirectly.”

Loehnen continues with stunning accuracy:

One could argue that competition — our desire to win or get a thing — is an essential, affirming impulse, one that should not be shut down, much less policed. Instead, when we belittle, undermine, or sabotage, we suffer twice: These actions feel terrible because they also violate all our conflicting desires to be seen as good, to be women who are kind and caring. It’s a Catch-22. And it is deeply human. It wouldn’t feel so shameful if we could openly discuss what it brings up for us and the move on.

emotional inheritance and our search for corrective experiences

When we think what we need is to gather in an arena of zero competition, perhaps what is being presented is a moment of opportunity to evaluate the unconscious motives driving our yearning to control how other women relate to us.

If we cannot trust ourselves to authentically uplift other women (while allowing ourselves to be expanded by the resonant aspects of their path), we will not trust another woman’s genuine desire to elevate and amplify us.

From this lens, our internal posture naturally elevates our external one.

Upon deeper reflection, we might find that our inclination to dissolve all competition carries origins both from our authentic core values AND misplaced values or intentions. The latter (potentially driven by a myriad of factors such as societal conditioning, generational patterning, or wounded aspects of self) can unconsciously drive us to replicate dynamics, perpetuating our search to provide closure for a past experience that left an ‘open wound’ or scar on our perception of self, as well as our ability to be in deeply loving relationship with others.

If we’re seeking to create a sense of internal safety by expecting a rejection of our human instinct, we will eventually see the limitations of our approach. We may then choose to explore what a sense of integrated and healthy competition could feel like, uncovering what we would really need to be able to trust in our ability to intuitively discern between the mutual beneficial forms and the damaging forms of the quality.

the liberation of this raw energy — translation: rerouting it into creative fuel

When we come to re-know, revitalize, and liberate the raw energy of our competitive nature, we translate it into creative fuel.

Our interdependent allyship with the parts of ourself that carry this quality allows us to completely revolutionize it, wielding its inherent charge and power for actual good — for pouring into paradigm-shifting innovations, soul-level collaboration, and collective expansion that wouldn’t be possible if we were moving in silos or denying the sacred essence of our pure desire to compete.

the gold created only in community

The anthropologist Margaret Mede once offered the simple, yet stunning, observation: “To make a difference… women have to do impossible things and think impossible thoughts, and that is only done in community.”

If our goal is to bring a well-nourished, embodied sense of collaborative leadership (and actual love) to the community table, then our underlying intention of equal importance is to bring our current sense of wholeness — our integrated expression of selves — to the table.

an insider’s look: the original (untouched) notes for this piece

Much of the following content not only provides beautiful context, but an in-depth look and extension of the work above.

Nonetheless, in this case, the content that follows got cut from the above article — not necessarily because it is less relevant, but because I am not always precious with my writing.

My intention with sharing the rough work with you is to give you an ‘inside look’ at how the bones of the piece were flowing when I was not curating my content for an audience, but rather simply writing to get it out on the page (it’s pretty neat to notice the difference in tone), as well as to provide further material on the subject.

Here are the unedited notes:

the real question

Why are we still insinuating women should be repressing their competitive nature, rather than guiding them to befriend it, harness it, and redirect it into a healthy expression that actually serves co-creation, collaboration, and a more powerful articulation of collective emboldened leadership? A soft directness. Transforming it from an unconscious liability to a subconscious — and conscious — strength.

re-contextualizing, disentangling, movement from distortion to clarity

The essence of anti-competition movements ring true for me: I agree that the distorted use of competitive behaviours is damaging, but my proposition is that it is actually by disentangling the reason why and re-partnering with the energy within it (releasing the pressure valve of suppression and rerouting that energy (liberating it) that we can direct it into the energy of creating. Building something more powerful - yes, together. This is to say, this is not a political discussion or a play on words. But for realsies.

i’m curious: a short rant

Holding this with a light touch, my question is: do you think the men are doing this on the basketball court? Agreeing to smile and celebrate politely without further discussion. Can we take a look at this differentiation in standards and ask: What in the actual fuck is going on here? This is patriarachal wounding, and its not those in cis-male bodies demanding we follow the rules. It’s us. We’re demanding it of ourselves and everyone else around us. Surely, someone could track this back to a systemic root (or even a human-constructed distortion of biblical teachings) but I’m speaking to the exemplification and embodiment of the anti-competition tactics of today.

My thesis is this: If we are able to develop a healthy interdependent relationship with competition, we can transform it and wield its inherent charge and power for actual good: for collaboration and collective expansion that wouldn’t actually be possible if we making moves without it.

allies and adversaries

A review of past research on the subject (The development of human female competition: allies and adversaries, carried out by Joyce Benenson) highlights the differences in how competition manifests in females compared to their male counterparts, signaling biological drive, perceived social status, and early childhood development to be some of the ones worthy of noting. These biological differences are relevant.

a necessary cultural shift

My suggestion is not novel. Bare with me as I quote Yung - “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” From a nervous system capacity standpoint, an individualized and ‘inch-by-inch’ approach can be the most fruitful choice in the longrun. Honouring our threshold, and building that capacity at a pace safe for our personal rhythms, the route of bypass, we will most likely reach a blockade - a turning point where we are invited to become a hen we attempt to salvage the remainder of what is left, we will find that there was so much of left behind in the process. When we reject parts of ourselves, we fail to garner the emotional gold that was available at their core. Full acceptance, compassion, intentionally understanding, taking responsibility, partnering with, and integrating the parts of ourselves that we would prefer to deny IS a key to releasing the damaging behaviours that often accompany them.

we must learn to discern between clear intention and covert manipulation

I am fascinated by the behaviours that drive our emotional experience and taking a look at what is under the hood. At a glance, it is easy to label someone else’s obvious emotional display as distasteful or pejorative, but (what matters to me) is the complexities underlying such an experience. I believe that becoming intimate with these nuances provides clarity in navigating the — so often misunderstood — terrain between authentically desiring pure connection and covert manipulative control tactics.

the real problem

THE REAL PROBLEM: Ends ups squishing out in even more dangerous (and unconscious) forms of relating. There’s nothing scarier to me than someone who refuses to acknowledge a basic instinct within their humanity - someone who is completely oblivious to the fact that they too could be capable of being competitive, jealous, or even envious. This is not to say that the spectrum of our relationship to these qualities does not differ. It is true - many of us do not authentically feel or display these qualities often. Many experience them in certain realms of their life (often influenced by experiences of real lack or wounding earlier in life), while not feeling any charge in other areas of their life. One may be jealous when her partner spends the majority of his time working and golfing, while another would not be bothered (or feel any variance of emotional charge) by this. Someone else may desperately desire to conceive and feel incredibly triggered (authentically envious) by someone else’s ability to seemingly conceive without encountering any roadblocks during the process at all. Whatever your thing is, envy its in raw, pure, and unadaltered form is simply a guiding post and messenger. Its the layers of shame that perpetuate it to squish out in harmful ways.

The Anecdotes:

re-positioning competition’s role in our lives

Contextualizing it: See scarcity and expansion notes in black journal - Re-Directing Into the context of Expansion. When we develop a thriving relationship with a quality, we are able to use our keen of eye discernment to consciously wield it into a healthy form of expression - one which actually benefits and amplifies our intended outcome, and provides support for the fellow women in our lives.

developing intimacy with the sensations of the experience

Developing Intimacy with the Sensations and Experience surrounding the emotion (seeing it as a note on the keyboard - one to be played, rather than denying or pretending that note is not there. Pretending it’s not ok to feel something is not only a rigorous betrayal of our human nature, its blatant delusion. What we ACTUALLY have an issue with is not that someone is feeling/experiencing the sensation, but the behaviours, choices, and ways of relating that can occur because of the lack of understanding around what to do with the emotion. Can we imagine a culture of relating that made it safe to feel these things, and we were welcomed to bring them to the table (like actually safe, not just said, but actually safe to bring them into the light and work with them). Or at the very least reduced the shame to work with them internally so that the associated actions and behaviours we are typically scared of do not occur?

Softening the Shame, Speaking to It/Bringing It Out of The Shadows: The shame game is not the gateway to liberation.

Understanding and Befriending It

Working With It (IFS, integration, liberating the energy)

Integrating It And Re-Assigning that Aspect of Self/Part A New Role

Choosing New Behaviours & Facing Our Fears

A Redistribution of Power

a renewal, expansion, and refinement of our emotional fluency

The real recipe is a complete renewal of our understanding of what it means to embrace partnerships/relationships with the full spectrum of human emotion. Emotional intelligence/emotional fluency opens up a reciprocal partnership with each emotion, sensation, and experience.

The pulse: Solidarity and competition are not opposing forces - being an adversary against oneself is.

a final acknowledgement

The writer notes that such an in-depth discussion deserves an even more extensive exploration (and comprehensive overview) to provide fuller service to the historical and cultural nuances of this topic. A book-length project would be required to appropriately shed light on the intricacies of this topic. This article is intended to serve as an opening for discussion.

Sincerely,

— Casey Balon, Editor-in-Chief of Casey Jacque

What It Really Takes to Liberate Our Competitive Nature and Reroute it into Creative Fuel

Article Published for The Vital Creative Collection, Written by Casey Balon