My most popular article of all time is Do You Idolise Spiritual Teachers? In this article, I share how I let my sense of self-worth as a spiritual teacher depend on the approval of other more established teachers, thus doing a disservice to my own voice and message.

The reason so many people resonated with this article is because, deep down we know we’re spiritual teachers ourselves. Yet, in today’s world it’s so easy to let our spurs of spiritual wisdom be suppressed by small social media followings, and our self-imposed comparison to other spiritual teachers.

I wrote my book Be The Guru: A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming Your Own Spiritual Teacher as a response to this frustration, and made it my mission to keep researching and providing tools that’ll empower you to strip away your ego’s delusions and get your guru on!

While pondering the various ways we compare ourselves to other spiritual teachers, particularly on social media, I thought I’d consult my friend, UK’s first Comparison Coach, and upcoming co-author of #HigherSelfie: Wake Up Your Life. Free Your Soul. Find Your Tribe, Lucy Sheridan.

Here are Lucy’s top 7 tips to stop comparing yourself to other spiritual teachers:

1. Notice What You Notice: If you can feel your stomach tighten or nerves flare up around certain posts or comments online by people in the spiritual world, then that’s a sign it’s time for action to get you back on track with what YOU want. All positive change starts with awareness and stopping any sort of ‘sleep walking’ behaviour.

2. Affirm, “The light in them is the light in me”:  This affirmation can help flip comparison from being a negative, competitive influence to being a source of inspiring content for what is possible in your own life, should you wish to go on your own path of discovery. Ultimately we are each as connected, light-filled and powerful as each other no matter our age, gender or spiritual bias and we need to remind ourselves of this – every day if necessary via a reminder on your iPhone!

3. Focus on your own game: If you want to spread your message far and wide you are going to need to get yourself out there in a way that works for you. What is YOUR plan? When are you doing YOUR webinar or live event? Have you written a proposal for YOUR book? Or started YOUR podcast? Have fun bringing your vision to life and get on with it!

4. Clean up your social media feed: Treat your social media channels like your house party – a fun place to relax, have fun and hang out. If certain people’s Facebook posts or Instagram feed make you feel inadequate, jealous or not good enough in any way around your own spiritual practice, then it might be time to hide them or unfollow them for a while to allow you to focus more on what you want to do, rather than obsess about other people’s activity, and conforming to those.

5. Remember the Filter Factor: An Instagram picture will never tell the REAL story no matter how many likes it gets – you’re just seeing an often cultivated and practiced presentation of a version of the truth. The Filter Factor makes us think everything is perfect and that other people have it AAALLLL figured out, when this is very rarely the case.

6. Don’t get caught with FOMO: Realise that we simply can’t be at every party, every workshop, every meeting, every meet up; and our self worth, or how much we’re liked by others, isn’t dependent on whether we’re there or not, or tagged in that post with other spiritual teachers.

7. Swap competition for collaboration: One of the best things to do is to tune into the fact that we are all linked and connected, not separate and in competition with each other. Reach out to those teachers you feel you’re competing with or are in your face and instead of looking at how you can keep up, set a new standard for those relationships.

Lucy Sheridan is the UK’s first ‘Comparison Coach’ and she’s on a mission to help people live #comparisonfree. Lucy helps Gen Y get over the ‘compare & despair’ of social media and recognise the ‘filter factor’ to focus on their lives OFF line and be happy on their own terms. Lucy is also the co-author of #HigherSelfie: Wake Up Your Life. Free Your Soul. Find Your Tribe published by Hay House April 2016. Learn more about Lucy at www.proofcoaching.com