The Comparison Trap That’s Destroying Your Confidence as a Rower
The split screen on the erg monitor shows your splits next to your teammate’s. They’re five seconds faster.
Your brain immediately starts running the narrative: “I’m not as good. I don’t belong here. I’ll never catch up.”
Sound familiar?
Comparison is the fastest way to destroy confidence in rowing. And the sport makes it almost impossible to avoid. You’re literally racing next to other people. You see their splits on the monitor. You know where you sit in the boat or the lineup. The times are objective and public.
But here’s what makes comparison so poisonous: you’re comparing your internal experience to their external outcomes.
You feel your doubt. Your struggle. Your bad days. Your setbacks. Your anxiety at 3am before the race. Your impostor syndrome. Your private doubts about whether you belong in the first boat.
You see their results. Their composure. Their victories. Their highlight reel. Their fast erg scores.
This comparison is fundamentally rigged. You will always lose because you’re comparing two completely different categories of information.
When you look at a faster teammate and think “they’re so much better than me,” your brain is running a narrative based on incomplete data. You don’t see their struggle. You don’t feel their doubt. You don’t experience their bad training days.
You see them pull a fast 2k and your Racing Brain files this as evidence that you’re inadequate by comparison.
Here’s the neurological problem: your Racing Brain treats comparison as predictive data.
“They’re faster than me” becomes “I can’t compete” becomes “I shouldn’t even try” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you underperform because you’ve already decided the outcome.
Your automatic brain doesn’t distinguish between observation and prediction. It sees someone faster and generates a threat response that actually impairs your performance. The comparison literally makes you row worse.
You tighten up. Your technique degrades. You pull harder instead of smarter. Your Racing Brain is running a status-threat program instead of an execution program.
The antidote isn’t to stop noticing other people’s performance. That’s unrealistic in a comparative sport. The antidote is to redirect your attention to your own trajectory.
Similar to mental toughness, when you catch yourself running the comparison script, ask these three questions:
This shifts from comparative to developmental framing. Maybe you can’t match their current splits, but can you hold splits that used to be impossible for you? That’s progress your Racing Brain can work with.
Concrete, measurable evidence of your own improvement. Not relative to them. Relative to your previous capacity.
This highlights mastery development. Things that feel easy now used to be hard. That’s competence accumulation your Racing Brain cannot dismiss.
You’re on the erg next to someone pulling splits five seconds faster than you. The comparison thought arrives: “I’m so slow compared to them.”
You notice it: “There’s the comparison thought. My Racing Brain is doing the status assessment thing.”
Then you redirect: “What’s my target for this piece? Am I hitting it? What can I control right now?”
You focus on your own process. Your own execution. Your own progress.
After the piece, you log: “Maintained target split of 1:55 for full 2k despite comparison thoughts showing up.”
That’s evidence. Your Racing Brain predicted that noticing someone faster would derail your performance. The data shows you noticed and performed anyway. The association between comparison and failure weakens.
This shift from comparative to developmental framing is harder than it sounds because your Racing Brain has been trained to assess threat and status by scanning for social hierarchy cues.
Rowing amplifies this by making status highly visible and quantifiable. Everyone knows who’s fastest. The lineup is public. The seat racing is objective.
Retraining this pattern requires deliberate practice. Every time you catch yourself running the comparison script, you notice it without judgment and redirect to your own evidence log.
Not as a feel-good exercise. As a systematic reorientation of what data your automatic brain learns to prioritize.
Once a week, sit down with your evidence log and look specifically for your own trajectory patterns:
You’re building a documented record of your own development that exists independent of anyone else’s performance.
When your Racing Brain tries to run the comparison program (“they’re so much better”), you have empirical counter-evidence (“look at my actual trajectory over time”).
Identify your next practice where comparison thoughts typically show up. Before you start, write down your target metrics for that session. Not their metrics. Yours.
During the piece, when comparison thoughts arrive, notice them and redirect to your own execution focus.
After the piece, log one specific thing you executed well from YOUR plan. Not how you compared. What you controlled.
Do this for two weeks. Notice how often you can execute your own process successfully while comparison thoughts are present. That gap is where comparison-proof confidence lives.
The goal isn’t to never notice other people’s performance. The goal is to perform your own process regardless of what you notice about others.
Get more information about building confidence (and much more) in the free Mindset Clinic. Looking for personalized support integrating this into your specific program? Explore how we can work together.
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