Not fun to admit…

I have this recurring “tic” that holds me back at critical times.

For example:

Not too long after I started building up my first email newsletter and website, I was browsing Twitter and I started to see a lot of people talking about this guy named Wes.

Turns out, Wes was also working on becoming the “go to guy” on my topic.

He’d written a bunch of blog posts that got shared like crazy, started an email list, and he was even working on a course on the same topic.

We were running the same race, and he was winning.

So what did I do?

Well, like any mature, professional adult, I started to resent him.

I didn’t do anything overt—it was more like the silent treatment.

Even though I shared a lot of content with my audience, and even though his content was some of the most popular stuff week in and week out, I pretended he didn’t exist.

He was in “my” space, he was getting traction, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to help him out in any way.

Like I said, real mature.

A year or two later, I finally got over myself and realized that maybe we could benefit from teaming up.

I reached out to him, and we partnered up to promote each other’s products. We generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue as a result, and he even ended up producing my newsletter for a while, saving me a lot of work.

This same pattern seems to pop up for me whenever I’m venturing into a new area.

Lately I’ve been exploring some facets of email marketing that I haven’t tried out before, and I’m feeling resistance to learning from other email experts, even though they know way more about this sub-topic than I do.

I’ve come to recognize this “professional jealousy” though.

And now when it rears its head, I try to treat it as a cue and do the opposite of what my inner 11 year old is telling me to do.

There’s something valuable there if I can be open to it.

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