February 27, 2025 • 51 mins
When you're struggling with your sense of purpose, job hunting or feelings of success, it can be very hard to see someone else who has everything you want, and not feel jealous. In today's episode, we break down the very important psychology of career jealousy in our 20s, including:
- The 3 types of career jealousy
- Why it's most common in our 20s
- Career jealousy between friends and siblings
- The unspoken consequences
- How to turn envy into inspiration and admiration
- 4 tips to not let envy control you + questions from the listeners
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. If you can't already hear it, surprise, surprise,
(00:20):
I am once again ill. I have a pretty nasty
like cold slash chest infection, So I really apologize for
my voice being very, very nasally. I just got back
from a lot of travel, like three weeks in the
United States and then traveling for a family birthday. It's
obviously taken a little bit of a toll, but I'm
(00:43):
on the up and up. I'm feeling better. I just
want to say sorry, slash acknowledge that my voice is
going to sound perhaps a little bit nasally in this episode.
Hopefully by next Tuesday. I'm fully mended, and you guys
don't have to bear with the sick voice for any
much longer. But I really didn't want to skip this episode.
(01:04):
I didn't want to skip this Friday's topic because we're
talking about something I think is very near and dear
to a lot of twenty something year olds navigating our
careers in our twenties is tough. There are a lot
of dead ends, a lot of moments where we feel incapable,
We feel like we're falling behind. We can't get the
promotion we want, let alone the job. And the thing
(01:27):
that always makes it worse is seeing someone who is
seemingly not struggling at all. They have the dream job,
they have the career progression, the success, the accolades. Maybe
it's not even someone that you know. It could be
a celebrity, an influencer, someone you follow online. Regardless, we
(01:48):
can't help but look at all that they have and
feel not just envious, but pretty terrible about ourselves. It
also probably elicits some thoughts like why not me, Like
this is so unfair, they don't even deserve it, And
with those thoughts comes a lot of shame, because we
have been taught from an early age that jealousy is
(02:11):
a so called ugly emotion and we should just be
happy for others rather than bitter. I think anyone who
has experienced career jealousy or jealousy of any form knows
that that is not always a choice, and that is
a very very lovely sentiment. To be happy for everyone
at all times. But jealousy is just a part of life.
(02:33):
It's hard, and it's sometimes miserable, but it's also not
an emotion that we are going to let define us.
We want to form a healthier relationship with it, especially
in our twenties and especially when it comes to our
professional lives. So today we are talking career jealousy in
(02:54):
our twenties, why it happens, what it feels like, and
most importantly, how to ensure it doesn't weigh you down.
Because we have so much more to worry about in
this life. What other people may or may not be doing,
or may or may not have should not be added
to that list. I really want to take us through,
(03:15):
of course, the psychology of this experience, and I want
to talk about my own personal struggle with this, because
I'm going to be super vulnerable. This is something that,
especially when I was in my early twenties, I think
ended up hurting a lot of my relationships that I
was quite jealous and I felt quite insecure about where
I was heading. From those experiences, I hope and I
(03:36):
do believe I've learned a lot, So hopefully you can
learn from my mistakes and maybe take something from my wisdom,
but I also want to talk about how this shows
up between siblings, between even our bestest of friends, the
role of self esteem, culture, even social media influences. There
is a lot packed into this episode today. Hopefully it
(03:57):
is an entire guide book. If you are struggling this
in your life right now, Hope you know you're not alone.
Hope you leave this episode not feeling too terrible about yourself,
but also knowing how to manage this very complicated feeling.
Without further ado, let us get into the psychology of
career jealousy. So what is professional or career jealousy. Let's
(04:25):
start with a nice, good old fashioned explanation. It's pretty simple.
Career jealousy describes feeling envious, almost exclusively towards someone's professional
life compared to your own, and seeing something in their
life or professional success that you want or maybe even
feel that you deserve. Let's be super super clear here,
(04:51):
it is so much more common than you think. Jealousy
in general is a very universal human emotion. Of course,
about seven twenty percent of people pulled in a recent
piece of research reported that they experienced jealousy at least
once last year. And career jealousy is in fact one
(05:11):
of the top ways that we experience this feeling, after
firstly material jealousy and interpersonal jealousy, so feeling jealous of
the relationships that someone has with someone else. Current estimates
say that around twenty seven percent of people experience career
jealousy in their lifetime, with that typically spiking at two
(05:33):
different points in time. The first one, of course, is
our twenties, and the second one is actually in our fifties.
Of course, unsurprisingly, it is exceedingly common in our twenties,
as I just said, and I would even say more
so now in this generation compared to those who have
come before. It's common in our twenties, I think because
(05:54):
insecurity around just about everything is common in our twenties.
It is such a general experience that we are all
going to have to feel as if we have absolutely
no clue what we're doing in almost all areas of
our life, and so when we see someone who apparently
does know what they're doing, it can be shocking and
(06:15):
immediately elicit a sense of panic, like, wait, hold up
a second, it must is it just me who's falling behind?
Is there something I'm doing? Wrong. Is there something that
no one is telling me that these people have somehow
figured out? Now? If those thoughts aren't deliberately shut down
pretty quickly, this can become a chronic thought pattern for us,
and that obviously it takes a massive toll in our
(06:38):
self esteem. It can also have us looking around for
more evidence that we are indeed failures. So we start
selectively searching or seeking out further examples of what we
have now already tend to believe about ourself, that we're behind,
that we don't know what we're doing, that we are
(06:59):
the only ones. It's a very nasty trick that our
mind plays on us. You probably know it by the
term confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favor,
and recall information in a way that confirms our prior
beliefs or values, including the mean beliefs that we have
(07:22):
about ourselves that are just in no way helpful. Thinking
of yourself as a failure is in no way helpful.
But for anyone who has struggled with that, they know
that that is not always the easiest thought pattern to break.
If it has become ingrained by repeated instances of you
thinking that that is the case. That kind of also
(07:44):
means that you stop seeing or acknowledging the people who
are struggling, the people who are unsure of what they
want in their careers, who are unemployed, and you only
unconsciously pay attention to the people who have it all together.
So you end up having this very selectively skewed vision
(08:04):
of people in their twenties and what professional success looks
like for them. In general. This can also cause a
lot of anger and resentment, because when you feel terrible
about your circumstances, there are kind of only two alternative
roots for your brain to take. You can either feel
bad about yourself and believe that your circumstances reflect your
(08:27):
character and your worth. That's option one. Or you can
feel angry at the world, and you can feel angry
at other people and say, well, you obviously don't deserve this.
This is unfair. Like I said, it's very very nasty,
and it's often subconscious or unconscious. Now, career jealousy is
(08:48):
not a one dimensional thing. It's not just one big
bucket of fear, insecurity, and frustration. I've come to realize
that I think there are actually three forms of career jealousy. First,
I think we can be jealous towards someone just for
having a job. You know, like I said before, it's
bloody tough out there. It is tough sometimes if you're
(09:10):
in the trenches and one of your friends suddenly gets
a great job whilst you've been working really hard and
looking for way longer, it's very difficult not to resent
them and resent your circumstances. Secondly, we can feel professional
jealousy over someone else's sense of purpose. So it's not
(09:30):
just that they have a job or they have a career,
but they have something that they really care about, and
who amongst us doesn't want that Having a purpose when
it comes to our profession, I think turns a job
into a career. Like a job is something that you
can just do because it makes money, a career and
(09:51):
even bigger than that, a mission is something that you
are personally invested in and there's like a fire in
your belly. From repeated psychology studies in this area that
this sense of purpose is linked to increased life satisfaction
and sometimes even life expectancy. So when you're in your
(10:13):
twenties and it seems like everyone is slowly figuring out
what they want to do, and you haven't figured it
out yet, you can feel really really envious. I will say,
I think the older we get, the more we realize
that our profession or our career is not our primary
sense of purpose in life. It's not the sole thing
that can imbue your life with a sense of meaning.
(10:34):
So I know, those statistics I just gave all like
those findings seem kind of scary, like, oh my god,
are you telling me if I don't find my purpose,
I'm going to die sooner? No, No, absolutely not. You
have a lot of time to find your purpose. It's
more that I think people struggle with thinking it's only
going to come from a job. The people who are
truly happy realize that it comes from more than just that.
(10:56):
But sometimes career can fulfill that need early on in
our lives before we've learned that lesson. Okay, Finally, the
final kind of bucket of envy is envy towards someone's progress,
success and the material things that they have been rewarded with.
You know, the friend or the person online who you
(11:17):
see and they are going on these amazing trips and
they are suddenly buying nice clothes, nice dinners, winning awards,
they've been promoted like three times before twenty five, they've
bought a house from their job. These situations of material success,
objective material wealth can serve as a very stark and
a very tangible reminder of what we don't have. Maybe
(11:41):
I'm gonna say this, of what we don't have yet.
That's the other cruel part of career jealousy. All we
can ever focus on is what we don't have right now,
not what we've had in the past, not what we
may have in the future, and we don't focus on
what we actually don't want. You know, you might see
someone who you're like immediately envious of. They're famous, they're successful.
(12:04):
Immediately you're like, well, maybe I should be doing that.
What you don't think is, you know, I probably don't
actually want to be famous. I probably don't want to
work one hundred hours a week. I probably don't want
to live out of my suitcase. But it's this want
what I can't have mindset and cherry picking all this
(12:25):
situations and the selective parts of someone's story that make
us feel miserable. Why does this happen? Because I think
we can all agree that given how awful career jealousy
feels it's not something that we are voluntarily opting into.
Career jealousy, I think is on the rise for a
couple of reasons. Firstly, I think the reason that we're
(12:49):
experiencing it more is that we have just more opportunities
to compare this day and age. Every single thing is
public and online. There's a really fascinating research paper I
found when I was researching this episode which explored envy
towards social media influences in South Korea, and it found
(13:10):
that our level of personal jealousy increases alongside our usage
of social media. Now that might seem pretty obvious, but yeah,
the more you are exposed to these perfect ideas of
success that are very very present in this generation, the
more we feel lacking. There is also, you know, literally
(13:31):
a social media for our jobs, LinkedIn. I remember writing
an article when I was back in university and it
was titled like in hell they make you use LinkedIn,
where I talked about how it's basically just another way
to feel constantly behind. It's another example of appearances, and
(13:51):
I think my opinion on it still stands when all
you see of people's careers is the glossy outside, not
the grueling inside. It's very easy to feel like you're
missing out. The other reason that we might feel jealous
is that career does just make up such a big
part of our identity. It is, in fact one of
what we call the big buckets of identity. So if
(14:12):
you think about who you are, there are all these
different areas where you can pour energy into that make
you feel accomplished as a person and build upon your identity.
So your relationships, your values, your family, your history, your career.
Career is a big bucket. When something is that prominent
in our lives, when you could be spending a third
(14:35):
of your waking life in your job or working towards
your career, of course your brain is going to want
to make sure you're doing okay relative to others. Comparison
in this way acts as a form of validation that
we are doing okay. Our brain naturally goes to that place.
(14:56):
It doesn't always realize that we're going to come up
short in our own minds, so comparison is obviously a
huge reason we experience career jealousy. There are two ways
that we compare ourselves to others, upwards and downward. Social comparison.
I'm sure you've heard about this on an episode before
upward social comparison. You're going to look at someone who
(15:17):
is perhaps doing better than you and think, oh my gosh, wow,
they're really amazing. I want that. Why don't I have that?
You're looking upwards. You're comparing beyond what you are currently
capable of. That can either relictit feelings of inspiration and
motivation or despair. Then we have downward social comparison. Now,
(15:38):
downward social comparison balances out upward social comparison by allowing
you to look and observe people who you think aren't
doing as well as you and experience a self esteem boost. Basically,
you're saying, and it sounds really terrible, but this is
genuinely what's going on in your mind. Well, at least
(15:59):
you know I don't have it as bad as them.
So which direction of comparison you will gravitate to in
this situation often depends on your personality and your current
emotional state and factors like resilience and self esteem. So
for those of us with a high need for achievement
(16:19):
and high levels of confidence, we typically gravitate towards upwards
social comparison, specifically the kind that brings about admiration rather
than feelings of insecurity. If you are someone who believes
in yourself, who really wants to succeed, who believes they
can succeed, you are not going to be threatened by
(16:40):
someone doing better than you. You're going to use it
as an asset. Now, if you are lacking self confidence,
you feel less self assured, maybe you've seen your self
esteem plummet recently, you are more likely to engage in
downward social comparison as a deliberate form of comparison, but
upward social comparison as a less deliberate for I'm going
(17:02):
to explain that lots of words in that sentence. Essentially, intuitively,
your brain is going to want you to compare to
people who are doing so called worse than you because
it makes you feel better. But actually what ends up
happening is when you get into that comparison mindset, you
can't help but kind of slowly move over into comparing
(17:25):
yourself to people who are doing better than you. It's
going to make you feel pretty terrible. Now, this might
be an uncomfortable but pretty obvious truth. Your career, jealousy
and comparison is probably also related to your current levels
of insecurity, more specifically a greater fear of inadequacy that
(17:46):
you might have, and this fear is a lot more
common in individualistic societies. So individualistic societies are those in
which we value personal wealth, that material success, things that
make one person look very, very good. This is in
comparison to collectivist societies or collectivist cultures, whereby the success
(18:11):
of one person is everyone's win, so we are more
likely to put effort into seeing the community succeed, into
making sure every member of our family is succeeding, rather
than just being focused on our own success. If you
were raised in an individualistic society, so you know, if
you're raised in the US, if you were raised in
(18:33):
a lot of parts of Europe, if you were raised
in Australia, in Canada, a lot of the times your
main focus and what you have been taught to focus
on is how well you are doing in comparison to others,
not how well the group is doing. And so it
does create this obsession with personal success, meaning that other
(18:56):
individuals in your community, in your kind of social stratosphere,
their success doesn't make you ever, it's never going to
make you feel good the way that it wouldn't a
collectivist culture. It's only going to make you feel terrible.
So again, if you're sitting there feeling career jealousy, thinking,
oh my god, I don't want to feel this way anymore.
(19:17):
I feel so bad about it. I just want to
be happy for my friend, for my sister, for my relative,
for that person, my colleague. Often it's not your fault,
it's how your brain has been trained. The other really
insidious part of comparison that we haven't mentioned is comparison,
specifically negative upward social comparison often continues even when you
(19:40):
do find success. So there are a lot of examples
of what we call the achievement treadmill, where people who
have seemingly done it all, they are happy, successful, fulfilled,
they're at the top of their game, they still feel
like they could be doing better. They still feel like
there is more to achieve, and so you are never
(20:02):
happy with where you are. This is why we really
really need to tackle this comparison cyclical comparison sickness almost
early on in our lives, early on in our twenties,
perhaps before you've found success, because otherwise, if you get
into this mindset of I can always be doing better,
I can always have more. That is also the mindset
(20:25):
that is going to make you deeply, deeply unhappy. I
want to talk about one final reason here as to
why career jealousy is probably on the rise. We've talked
about social media, we talked about how there's more room
for comparison. Let's now just talk about the very nature
of our professional environments right now or the job market.
(20:46):
Simply put, the job market right now is so difficult.
I know a lot of you have been experiencing this personally.
You've been dming me saying, I just what am I
doing wrong? Maybe like you've been looking for a job
for months, nothing is coming your way. Eventually, when we're
in that situation, we're going to start to think that
(21:08):
something is wrong with us. But objectively, I want to
tell you right now, job vacancies are declining, There is
increased competition for a smaller number of positions. People are
taking longer to hire people, and they are hiring less. Overall,
AI has significantly shifted what kind of roles people are hiring.
For all of this, to say, a big contributor to
(21:31):
our psychological state is always going to be the environment
in which we are in, and the environment in which
we are in right now is not particularly conducive to
feeling optimistic or happy about where you're at in your career. Now,
if we're in this situation where a lot of us
are struggling, and then suddenly there is this person who
is not who will got the jackpot, who has figured
(21:55):
it all out, of course we're going to feel envious.
It's this primal instinct of ours kicking in saying how
can we have that. It's very much born from the
days when we could fight and steal for the better territory,
we could fight and steal for the better piece of meat,
for the position closest to the fire. Nowadays, we've been
socialized to realize that, you know, you probably can't go
(22:19):
up and wrestle with someone for their job at a
big four firm. But those old parts of our brain
that see something we want and immediately are trying to
figure out either a how we can get it or
b why we want it so much. It's still very
much alife. So let's discuss some of the further unspoken
consequences of this, but also what is the path for
(22:42):
getting out of this professional jealousy rut and just being
happy or at least proud of where we are now.
All of that and so much more after this shortbreak.
So we're talking about career jealous see, and yes, it
can feel like frustration. It can feel very shameful and ugly.
(23:05):
It can feel like secretly wanting someone to fail, which
we never want to feel like makes us feel like
a terrible human. Here's what else can happen. I think
the two most common manifestations of envy are disparagement and distancing,
specifically in relation to our social relationships. You begin to
resent your friends, you resent your colleagues even and you
(23:26):
act out in a bitter and annoyed way. Comparing to
strangers is one thing, and I think the consequences of
that are very isolated. They're very much individual for us.
But comparing to peers, let alone close friends, is when
we really start seeing interpersonal consequences. So I'm talking drama, tension, fighting,
(23:47):
distancing between us and our friends. Honestly, though, you are
more likely to feel jealous of a friend than a stranger.
It's why it is so common. So there was a
two thousand and five Dean study that found yes, we
are more likely to feel envy when the person we
are comparing ourself to is a similar age, the same gender,
(24:10):
has similar values or even physical similarities to us, because
it just gives more of a stark contrast to what
we don't have. This person is a similar age, this
person is our friend, this person maybe went to the
same university. So much about our situations are similar. So
what is it that we don't have in common that
is setting our experiences apart? When someone is like us
(24:34):
in many ways, it can further highlight what we are
lacking and make us feel really terrible. I received this
message from someone actually that I think describes this very
very well. She said, something I've been struggling with is
my best friend and roommate recently landed her dream job,
and it's all she talks about rightfully, so, but I'm
(24:55):
struggling so much with my hatred of my current job.
How can I be more enthusias I honestly, I could
have written this myself because I was once in your shoes.
I literally it was my best friend and my roommate
got their dream job in the firm that I wanted
a job in, and I didn't get any bites. Basically,
(25:16):
I was unemployed for the summer, and I'm gonna admit it,
I did entirely the wrong thing. Because I was so insecure,
I didn't want to talk to her about it. I
shut her out. I distanced myself because her happiness. Honestly,
it made me feel bad about myself, not because I
didn't want her to be happy, but because I wish
(25:37):
that I could be happy with her, And the only
way I saw that happening was if we were having
the same experience. My biggest piece of advice in that
situation and what I wish I had done. I wish
I had just told her. I wish I had just said, Hey,
I'm I am really trying to be happy for you,
and I'm sure that if I was in your if
(25:57):
our roles were reversed, you would be so much better
at this than I am. But just given how horrible
I feel right now, I just can't be there with you.
I just can't match this level of enthusiasm. So I
really think we should just have some time to talk
about other things before we talk about work. Can we
please talk about something that we have in common? Can
(26:20):
we talk about something can we have more shared experiences
so we can go off and talk about those things together.
My other piece of advice is to be curious, to
be open, to want to learn, rather than judge yourself
for what you don't have, and just addressing it before
you spiral is essential. You know, I always promote repair
(26:41):
and honesty in these situations. It does feel more difficult,
but it is one hundred percent the path that you
never regret, because you will regret looking back in five
years time and saying, Wow, that is my best friend.
That was my best friend. I really cared about her.
How come we don't speak anymore? Oh? Oh, it's because
I just didn't speak up and say something. Please please
(27:04):
take it from me. Another unspoken consequence of career jealousy
is that you end up losing motivation and you become
quite discouraged. Jealousy is this weird thing where because we
are only focusing on other people, we actually lose focus
on our own performance and we start to neglect our
own efforts to be better. Specifically, we start to focus
(27:28):
on external factors for our lack of success in someone
else's success. Typically, that comes down to things like fairness,
things like luck, things that we can't control. So essentially,
what happens when we focus too much on what we
don't have in comparison to someone else is that we
start shifting from an internal to an external locus of control.
(27:51):
So this is a psychology term. Essentially, it refers to
how we view our problems and our ability to change
an outcome or to change a situation. So an internal
locus of control, you believe that you are the master
of your own destiny, you are the guiter of your fate.
There are actions that you can take to change what
your life looks like, and you feel willing to take them.
(28:13):
An external locus of control is where you look at
your circumstances and you put it all down to factors
that you can't do anything about. So factors like luck,
factors like fate, factors like I don't know status, money,
where you were raised, you know who you were born
as those factors do play a role, and I'm not
going to deny it. But when we only focus on those,
(28:35):
those are things we can't change, and so our circumstances
is something that we can't change. I need you to
please stop focusing on the unfairness or the role of
luck and start focusing on action. What can you do
in this situation? I will say, you are allowed to
feel kind of bad every now and again. You are
allowed to feel frustrated. Don't suppress those emotions entirely, but
(28:59):
treat it as an indulgence. Treat it as a treat
rather than the whole meal. And when you realize that
you have been stuck in a pity spiral for too long,
I need you to turn around and say, Okay, we
need to do more in the opposite direction. We need
to do more towards our goal rather than towards despair. Okay,
let's talk about how to handle and manage career jealousy.
(29:23):
I had this weird epiphany at the gym the other day.
I was running on the treadmill. And at my gym,
treadmills are set up so it's like two rows. So
when you're on a treadmill, there is someone directly in
front of you, or there is a treadmill directly in
front of you, and there is someone probably running on
that treadmill during the busy times. And I was going
not very fast. I was obviously I'm recovering still in
(29:47):
an illness, and I was watching this girl in front
of me, and oh my lord, she was quick. She
was doing eleven kilometers an hour at like a five
percent incline or like a five point zero incline. And
I was watching her, and I was watching like the
kilometers tick up and whatever. And I was like, oh
my god, I need to catch her. I need to
(30:07):
catch her. And I was like, wait, I'm wan an
entirely different treadmill. What am I gonna go do? Run
on her treadmill with her? Like I can match her pace,
I can do everything that she is doing. We are
still running our own race. When you compare your career
to someone else's career, you are comparing two people running
on two different treadmills. There is no way that you
(30:28):
can catch up with them, but you do need to
focus on your own race. I don't know. I was
just in that situation and I was like, wow, this
has just made me rethink every time I've tried to
feel like I need to beat or best someone for
whatever weird reason, my brain is cooked up. I also
want to remind you, and this is specifically advised for
(30:51):
those of us in our twenties, which I'm assuming is
a lot of you. You are comparing the very beginning
of your race. You know, there are so many years
to come, so many peaks and plateaus that everyone's career
will naturally go through. No one's career is always going
(31:11):
to be on the up and up. There will be
times where they're not motivated, where you get made redundant,
where the culture and the environment shifts. But what we're
doing is we're looking at what possibly only the first
ten years maximum of our career and thinking this defines
(31:32):
the entire race, This defines all of my circumstances from
here until I retire. That is totally not true. How
someone's beginning looks is not always indicative of how their
middle or their end will end up. Just think about
Olympic races or sports games. Even then, like our career
(31:54):
is a lot longer than a two hundred meter sprint,
it's a lot longer than a two hour ballgame. It's
for a lot of us, the majority of our lives.
So there are going to be peaks and troughs. What
you're comparing right now is just the beginning. With all
that being said, I do think it's almost impossible to
will yourself out of feeling envy because it is quite
(32:16):
a spontaneous emotion, right, so it's not an emotion that
we can call on and then get rid of at
our will. It often comes when our guard is down.
But I think to keep chronic and acute envy at bay,
you have to accept the discomfort, but refuse to give
in to the shame that often follows. I think to
(32:39):
keep comparison, specifically professional comparison, from becoming self defeating, I
want you to really explore why it is that you
feel so jealous. I want you to get curious about
what has triggered this feeling for you now. At times,
career jealous is actually an asset because it can spur
(33:03):
on admiration and therefore inspiration. Alongside envy, Career jealousy is
actually telling you something pretty important about what you want.
If this person had a life that you didn't care about,
if you didn't secretly want what they had, you would
not be feeling jealous. You only feel jealous because you
(33:24):
feel invested in that situation, and the reason you feel
invested or emotional about it is because it is something
that you desire, and so in that way, our jealousy
is a great way of providing us with direction. I
heard someone say this the other day, and what they
said was, if you're ever struggling to know what you
want from life, if you're ever struggling with direction, ask yourself,
(33:47):
whose life am I most jealous of? Isn't that so funny? Like?
What is a painful emotion is actually a really important
one because it can reveal all of these parts of you,
all these things and these ambitions that you secretly have.
So I want you to reframe jealousy has proof of
what you want. And I also want you to reframe
(34:10):
jealousy as proof that you can get there, because the
only reason you're feeling envious is because someone has done
what you want to do. So they've done it. This
is really essential because then what we have here is
admiration and motivation rather than just jealousy. So once you
have thought about the person that you are most jealous of,
(34:31):
you now have to realize, actually, they are probably also
going to be the person that I admire the most.
Now you can do a bit of a reverse psychological
engineering exercise. What I mean by that is I want
you to get more curious about their life, what specific behaviors, habits,
or strategies are they using. What are they doing that
(34:55):
you are perhaps not that you can realistically apply to
your own career. What path did they take, What knowledge
do you think they have, what kind of wisdom? Essentially,
what I'm saying is, please, please please lean in, move towards,
not away from, those that you envy. Now, if you're
(35:16):
finding that particularly difficult, there's evidence that doing small favors
for someone that you envy can actually make you like
them more so. This is called the Ben Franklin effect.
If someone's success is really almost hurting you emotionally, ask
them for advice, Ask them if you can get involved
(35:38):
in their project, Ask them if you can study with them,
Ask them to sit down for a coffee with you
and shout them the coffee. Now, this really flips our
brain's perception the people we envy, they're an ally not
a threat. Now to kind of focus on you, you know,
a lot of this has been about what we can
(35:58):
do to change our real relationship to others. What can
we do internally for ourselves. I want you to make
a list of everything that you feel that you are
proud of and that you are good at that has
nothing to do with your professional career or your job.
I want you to work on focusing on the areas
(36:19):
where you are excelling, even if externally and in an
individualistic society, those things aren't as celebrated. So let's go
through a couple. You know, maybe you're training for a
long distance run. Maybe you go to the gym every
single day. That's something that not a lot of people
can say they do. Maybe you commit time to your hobbies.
(36:41):
I would be really, really proud if I read five
pages before bed every night. Maybe you call your Grandma
more than the average person. I want you to feel
proud of something, and I want you to focus on
your assets and what you are good at. There are
so many important psychological studies that show feeling proud of
yourself is endlessly correlated to high self esteem and fewer
(37:05):
feelings of jealousy. And the other part about self pride
is that it's often self determined. Now we're not talking
about arrogance. We're talking about genuine pride in your accomplishment.
That is something that if you find every single one
of us, every single one of us can find something
that we deserve to be proud of. Really, I think
(37:26):
this whole idea of turning inward is so important here.
Stop looking externally for proof that you're doing okay, and
start measuring your value by how fulfilled you feel, even
if others don't see value in what you're doing, how
happy you make others feel, how purposeful you are, how
genuinely happy you can say your days are the progress
(37:49):
that you're making in your own small ways. Taking more
time as well to figure out what you want, taking
more time to find the perfect job or just to
find some kind of path. That's also an asset for you,
because you're not tying yourself down or flinging yourself onto
a moving train too early in your life with no
way of getting off. So I do actually think that's
(38:11):
really really important. Sometimes we see these people and they're
like wonder kins, right like they're twenty one, twenty two
doing these amazing, amazing things. There's a line from a
song that says, I'm always terrified of elevators that rise
too fast they never last. And a lot of people
who are in those situations will tell you that around
the age of thirty or thirty five, they really have
(38:34):
to battle some of the real existential questions about deeper
personal meaning that you're probably managing right now. So my
final tip is to engage in some kind of mental
time travel. There's this brilliant study in psychological science that
found imagining yourself ten years into the future actually really
(38:54):
helps reduce the intensity of current emotional struggles jealousy, envy,
frustration included. So I want you to ask yourself right now,
will I care about this in ten years? What advice
would my future self give me about this moment? If
everything works out well, if I focus on myself, what
is the version of me in ten years going to
(39:16):
be most proud of me that I did. I think
this really helps dampen the jealousy response and it keeps
you having that forward focused vision for yourself. Okay, we're
going to take a short break, but when we return,
I'm going to talk some final reminders and also introduce
you to some listener questions about this topic. Stay with us, So,
(39:43):
my lovely listeners, this is a brand new segment of
the show, the very first of its kind that I'm
trialing out, and it's a little Q and A section.
So what I was finding was that after I was
releasing episodes, a lot of you were saying Hey, you
didn't talk about this, and this is really what I
needed advice, and I thought, you know what, I think
that we can bring this in. I think that we
(40:04):
can bring in some of your questions so that I
can answer them right now, right here on the spot. Now,
given that this is a new part of the episode,
I really do want feedback. If all of you come
back and say to me, hey, we actually hate this,
it's going away. This is just as much your show
as it is mine. But I just thought it would
(40:26):
be fun to give it a go. I'm going to
try it for the next four episodes, and after I've
done it for four episodes, I'm going to ask you
guys all again, what do you think? Do you like it?
And depending on what you say will determine its future,
So please provide all the feedback that you want. But
let's get into the questions now. The first question I
got was how does career jealousy and anxiety arise in
(40:48):
siblings and how do you manage it? Honestly, I think
the career jealousy between siblings is a lot more common
than you may think, because there is, of course a
nate familial comparison. There's also all these family archetypes that
we tend to fall into, right, the golden child, the
black sheep, the underachiever, the overachiever, and they really contribute
(41:11):
to this sense of needing to prove yourself, particularly in
comparison to a sibling. Now, we also talked about how
we compare ourselves to people who are most or more
similar to us, specifically friends. Well, let's talk about siblings
for a second. Like, you share some of the very
same genes, you often share parents, you share a childhood environment,
(41:33):
so there's all those differences between you do feel particularly pronounced. Also,
you know, I've seen so many situations where parents often
you know, it's terrible to say, but they do favor
one child and they do really focus on their success.
You see it a lot with child actors, actually child
(41:54):
actresses or actors who their parents put so much into them,
and then the other children are kind of like, Okay,
well what about me. Just because my goals and my
dreams are different and my success looks different based on
the industry that we're in, doesn't mean it's any less important.
So I think those are the circumstances that we're kind
of dealing with here. Innate competition in families archetypes that
(42:17):
we tend to fall into, or roles we fall into.
What I really want you to do is realize that
a win for them is your win as well, no
matter how much you have been conditioned to see them
as competition. Seriously, is that mentality hurting or helping your relationship?
(42:37):
Sibling relationships are oh my god, so underrated, so underrated.
They are so important, they are so special. They are
the people who will hopefully be with you for so
much of your life. And if you have been raised
to be in competition, I think it does get to
a point where you have to seriously look at each
other and say, I don't want to be have relationship
(43:00):
with you anymore. Like this is not helping us. So
fight back against that natural instinct. Take interest in their life,
invest mentally, invest your curiosity in their life, and also
talk about it with them. You know, if you can't
talk about your insecurities with your sibling, who are you
going to talk about it with? Oftentimes they are so forgiving,
(43:23):
and I wouldn't be surprised if your eldest or youngest
sibling who you naturally compare yourself with doesn't turn around
and say, oh my god, I do the exact same thing,
because this is how we've been raised, this is who
we have been raised to be competitors rather than friends.
So that's my advice for that question. Our second question
(43:44):
from another Lovely listener, how to navigate the scarcity mindset
in particular that contributes to career jealousy. So, for those
of you not familiar with this term, the scarcity mindset
is basically it's a combinative fallacy in which we believe
that resources including financial resources, emotional resources, social resources, jobs,
(44:07):
are limited, and so we end up becoming preoccupied with
what we lack rather than what we have, and we
get into this mindset that there is not enough out
there in this world for us to have what we want.
I want to remind you here, success is not a
(44:27):
finite resource that has an end. There's always room for
another famous celebrity. There's always room for a new pop star.
There is not only so much to go around, there
is room for you, and I need you to know
that otherwise I do think you'll begin to see someone
else's advancement as costing you your own, and so you're
(44:47):
never able to have that real kinship and ally mentorship
relationship with other people, and you'll get into this them
versus me mindset, which you know, I actually really understand.
I've fallen in to it a lot of times. It
comes from this idea that what we want is lacking
in the world and there's only room for a couple
(45:09):
of people. You know. It's based on this mindset. Of course,
if I get the job, someone else loses theirs. If
my friend is successful, well I can't be until they're not.
It's very, very untrue. My biggest piece of advice is
to work really hard to undo this mindset. Keep applying
for jobs, keep your options open, volunteer, search for opportunities
(45:33):
in as many areas as you possibly can. And remember
that your success, just because it's not happening right now,
doesn't mean that it's never going to happen. Your dream job,
your dream career, your big break, it might not even
exist yet. It might not even you know, all the
dominoes may not even be aligned to bring it into existence. Yet.
(45:54):
It doesn't mean that where you are now is where
you will always be. There is definitely room for you
at any tape that you want to sit on sit at.
I guess even if you need to carve that space
out over time for yourself. All right, let's talk about
this next question. Why does it feel like sometimes it's
up to luck and not meritocracy? So meritocracy based on
(46:16):
merit it basically suggests that if you work hard enough,
there is something that you should be entitled to. I'm
going to tell you something that I think a lot
of people probably deserve to be told earlier. And I'm
very sorry if it's upsetting, but really, sometimes things are
(46:36):
just up to luck. A small part of everything is
luck right place, right time. They just happen to choose
or make the right decision at the perfect moment when
it worked out for them. I know it's really really rough,
but I feel like it's kind of unfair that we've
all been sold this idea that, yes, if you work hard,
(46:56):
there's something that you are innately deserving of. There's so
many more factors at play. Here's the good news, though
luck is not a finite thing. Just like success, there
is actually heaps of luck to go around, and luck
also turns luck is this tricky little thing where we
(47:17):
are so so focused on what it feels like to
not have it that actually when we do are rewarded
with it, and when the luck does come our way,
we kind of almost don't see it. We're only focused
on the moments when it's not ours. Really, I always
think about my like I think I was like my
eighth grade math teacher. Her name is miss mary Anne,
(47:40):
I think mary Anne something, and she always said luck
is when preparation meets opportunity. So you may not have
the opportunity part yet, but you can work on the
preparation part so that when everything aligns and it's your moment,
you are there to take it. So our final listener
question from the day is about the third type of
(48:02):
career jealousy that we experience. If you remember we have
three categories. The third type is material jealousy. So this
person says, my friends are paid four times more than me.
I feel left out of their lavish lifestyles. What can
I do? Let me just say that is rough. It's
really rough when it feels like your friends are entering
(48:24):
this entirely new financial chapter of their life and you
are stuck in the past. What I really want you
to do is to open communication with them. Hopefully money
hasn't changed their mindset and money hasn't changed their opinion
on you. I'm going to give them the benefit of
the doubt and say that it hasn't, and so I'm
assuming they still very much love you. They desire your company,
(48:48):
they want your company. I really want you to just
discuss with them opportunities to do things that are less
expensive and that are more affordable, and that maybe don't
include four course meals and don't include luxury spending, but
are simple. Honestly, I feel like I've had conversations with
friends like this before, where I've been like, hey, like,
(49:10):
you know, I can't come to your birthday dinner, but
I would love to do this smaller thing with you.
Or someone said, hey, I can't afford to contribute to
this gift, or I can't afford to go on this trip,
but I want to still be involved in some way.
A good friend will be receptive of that. I also,
I want to give you a really really strong piece
of advice here. Please do not try and match their spending.
(49:34):
I'm not a financial advisor, obviously, but I've seen people
do this. I remember reading an article about someone who
got into a significant amount of debt trying to keep
up with their friends' lifestyle. If they are your friends,
you don't need to impress them. And doing things just
for appearances rather than meeting your actual needs and spending
(49:57):
money where you feel it's purpose is a very dangerous
game to play, and I wouldn't want to see you
get into debt or into trouble because you feel like
you need to impress your friends. If they're the people
who need to be impressed, they're probably not your friends.
So obviously I don't have all the full information, but
I would really just say have a chat with them
(50:18):
about it. Don't excessively spend money, and if you feel
like their priorities have changed beyond well because of the money,
maybe start considering whether your priorities towards friendship should change
as well. Okay, my lovely listeners, thank you for joining
me for this new segment. As always, please let me
(50:38):
know what you think of this. Also, what I'll be
doing is I'll be putting up the questions three to
four days in advance on Instagram. So if you want
to get involved in these questions, you want to be
able to contribute to episodes, please follow me over there.
It's at that psychology podcast. And also I love hearing feedback.
I love hearing episodes suggestions from your Really do have
(51:00):
such a beautiful community, So come on over, get involved,
and if you're already there, well say hello. I'll see
you over there. Make sure that you are following along
with the podcast so you know when new episodes go live,
and leave a five star review if you feel called
to do so, or share this episode with a friend
who feel like might be struggling with a lot of
(51:20):
career jealousy. Trust me, a lot of us are in
the same boat. This is a no shame zone. Hopefully
you have been able to learn how to better naviget
these feelings or at least reframe your thoughts towards your jealousy.
As a reminder, as we end this episode, please be safe,
be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk
(51:42):
very very soon,
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. If you can't already hear it, surprise, surprise,
(00:20):
I am once again ill. I have a pretty nasty
like cold slash chest infection, So I really apologize for
my voice being very, very nasally. I just got back
from a lot of travel, like three weeks in the
United States and then traveling for a family birthday. It's
obviously taken a little bit of a toll, but I'm
(00:43):
on the up and up. I'm feeling better. I just
want to say sorry, slash acknowledge that my voice is
going to sound perhaps a little bit nasally in this episode.
Hopefully by next Tuesday. I'm fully mended, and you guys
don't have to bear with the sick voice for any
much longer. But I really didn't want to skip this episode.
(01:04):
I didn't want to skip this Friday's topic because we're
talking about something I think is very near and dear
to a lot of twenty something year olds navigating our
careers in our twenties is tough. There are a lot
of dead ends, a lot of moments where we feel incapable,
We feel like we're falling behind. We can't get the
promotion we want, let alone the job. And the thing
(01:27):
that always makes it worse is seeing someone who is
seemingly not struggling at all. They have the dream job,
they have the career progression, the success, the accolades. Maybe
it's not even someone that you know. It could be
a celebrity, an influencer, someone you follow online. Regardless, we
(01:48):
can't help but look at all that they have and
feel not just envious, but pretty terrible about ourselves. It
also probably elicits some thoughts like why not me, Like
this is so unfair, they don't even deserve it, And
with those thoughts comes a lot of shame, because we
have been taught from an early age that jealousy is
(02:11):
a so called ugly emotion and we should just be
happy for others rather than bitter. I think anyone who
has experienced career jealousy or jealousy of any form knows
that that is not always a choice, and that is
a very very lovely sentiment. To be happy for everyone
at all times. But jealousy is just a part of life.
(02:33):
It's hard, and it's sometimes miserable, but it's also not
an emotion that we are going to let define us.
We want to form a healthier relationship with it, especially
in our twenties and especially when it comes to our
professional lives. So today we are talking career jealousy in
(02:54):
our twenties, why it happens, what it feels like, and
most importantly, how to ensure it doesn't weigh you down.
Because we have so much more to worry about in
this life. What other people may or may not be doing,
or may or may not have should not be added
to that list. I really want to take us through,
(03:15):
of course, the psychology of this experience, and I want
to talk about my own personal struggle with this, because
I'm going to be super vulnerable. This is something that,
especially when I was in my early twenties, I think
ended up hurting a lot of my relationships that I
was quite jealous and I felt quite insecure about where
I was heading. From those experiences, I hope and I
(03:36):
do believe I've learned a lot, So hopefully you can
learn from my mistakes and maybe take something from my wisdom,
but I also want to talk about how this shows
up between siblings, between even our bestest of friends, the
role of self esteem, culture, even social media influences. There
is a lot packed into this episode today. Hopefully it
(03:57):
is an entire guide book. If you are struggling this
in your life right now, Hope you know you're not alone.
Hope you leave this episode not feeling too terrible about yourself,
but also knowing how to manage this very complicated feeling.
Without further ado, let us get into the psychology of
career jealousy. So what is professional or career jealousy. Let's
(04:25):
start with a nice, good old fashioned explanation. It's pretty simple.
Career jealousy describes feeling envious, almost exclusively towards someone's professional
life compared to your own, and seeing something in their
life or professional success that you want or maybe even
feel that you deserve. Let's be super super clear here,
(04:51):
it is so much more common than you think. Jealousy
in general is a very universal human emotion. Of course,
about seven twenty percent of people pulled in a recent
piece of research reported that they experienced jealousy at least
once last year. And career jealousy is in fact one
(05:11):
of the top ways that we experience this feeling, after
firstly material jealousy and interpersonal jealousy, so feeling jealous of
the relationships that someone has with someone else. Current estimates
say that around twenty seven percent of people experience career
jealousy in their lifetime, with that typically spiking at two
(05:33):
different points in time. The first one, of course, is
our twenties, and the second one is actually in our fifties.
Of course, unsurprisingly, it is exceedingly common in our twenties,
as I just said, and I would even say more
so now in this generation compared to those who have
come before. It's common in our twenties, I think because
(05:54):
insecurity around just about everything is common in our twenties.
It is such a general experience that we are all
going to have to feel as if we have absolutely
no clue what we're doing in almost all areas of
our life, and so when we see someone who apparently
does know what they're doing, it can be shocking and
(06:15):
immediately elicit a sense of panic, like, wait, hold up
a second, it must is it just me who's falling behind?
Is there something I'm doing? Wrong. Is there something that
no one is telling me that these people have somehow
figured out? Now? If those thoughts aren't deliberately shut down
pretty quickly, this can become a chronic thought pattern for us,
and that obviously it takes a massive toll in our
(06:38):
self esteem. It can also have us looking around for
more evidence that we are indeed failures. So we start
selectively searching or seeking out further examples of what we
have now already tend to believe about ourself, that we're behind,
that we don't know what we're doing, that we are
(06:59):
the only ones. It's a very nasty trick that our
mind plays on us. You probably know it by the
term confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favor,
and recall information in a way that confirms our prior
beliefs or values, including the mean beliefs that we have
(07:22):
about ourselves that are just in no way helpful. Thinking
of yourself as a failure is in no way helpful.
But for anyone who has struggled with that, they know
that that is not always the easiest thought pattern to break.
If it has become ingrained by repeated instances of you
thinking that that is the case. That kind of also
(07:44):
means that you stop seeing or acknowledging the people who
are struggling, the people who are unsure of what they
want in their careers, who are unemployed, and you only
unconsciously pay attention to the people who have it all together.
So you end up having this very selectively skewed vision
(08:04):
of people in their twenties and what professional success looks
like for them. In general. This can also cause a
lot of anger and resentment, because when you feel terrible
about your circumstances, there are kind of only two alternative
roots for your brain to take. You can either feel
bad about yourself and believe that your circumstances reflect your
(08:27):
character and your worth. That's option one. Or you can
feel angry at the world, and you can feel angry
at other people and say, well, you obviously don't deserve this.
This is unfair. Like I said, it's very very nasty,
and it's often subconscious or unconscious. Now, career jealousy is
(08:48):
not a one dimensional thing. It's not just one big
bucket of fear, insecurity, and frustration. I've come to realize
that I think there are actually three forms of career jealousy. First,
I think we can be jealous towards someone just for
having a job. You know, like I said before, it's
bloody tough out there. It is tough sometimes if you're
(09:10):
in the trenches and one of your friends suddenly gets
a great job whilst you've been working really hard and
looking for way longer, it's very difficult not to resent
them and resent your circumstances. Secondly, we can feel professional
jealousy over someone else's sense of purpose. So it's not
(09:30):
just that they have a job or they have a career,
but they have something that they really care about, and
who amongst us doesn't want that Having a purpose when
it comes to our profession, I think turns a job
into a career. Like a job is something that you
can just do because it makes money, a career and
(09:51):
even bigger than that, a mission is something that you
are personally invested in and there's like a fire in
your belly. From repeated psychology studies in this area that
this sense of purpose is linked to increased life satisfaction
and sometimes even life expectancy. So when you're in your
(10:13):
twenties and it seems like everyone is slowly figuring out
what they want to do, and you haven't figured it
out yet, you can feel really really envious. I will say,
I think the older we get, the more we realize
that our profession or our career is not our primary
sense of purpose in life. It's not the sole thing
that can imbue your life with a sense of meaning.
(10:34):
So I know, those statistics I just gave all like
those findings seem kind of scary, like, oh my god,
are you telling me if I don't find my purpose,
I'm going to die sooner? No, No, absolutely not. You
have a lot of time to find your purpose. It's
more that I think people struggle with thinking it's only
going to come from a job. The people who are
truly happy realize that it comes from more than just that.
(10:56):
But sometimes career can fulfill that need early on in
our lives before we've learned that lesson. Okay, Finally, the
final kind of bucket of envy is envy towards someone's progress,
success and the material things that they have been rewarded with.
You know, the friend or the person online who you
(11:17):
see and they are going on these amazing trips and
they are suddenly buying nice clothes, nice dinners, winning awards,
they've been promoted like three times before twenty five, they've
bought a house from their job. These situations of material success,
objective material wealth can serve as a very stark and
a very tangible reminder of what we don't have. Maybe
(11:41):
I'm gonna say this, of what we don't have yet.
That's the other cruel part of career jealousy. All we
can ever focus on is what we don't have right now,
not what we've had in the past, not what we
may have in the future, and we don't focus on
what we actually don't want. You know, you might see
someone who you're like immediately envious of. They're famous, they're successful.
(12:04):
Immediately you're like, well, maybe I should be doing that.
What you don't think is, you know, I probably don't
actually want to be famous. I probably don't want to
work one hundred hours a week. I probably don't want
to live out of my suitcase. But it's this want
what I can't have mindset and cherry picking all this
(12:25):
situations and the selective parts of someone's story that make
us feel miserable. Why does this happen? Because I think
we can all agree that given how awful career jealousy
feels it's not something that we are voluntarily opting into.
Career jealousy, I think is on the rise for a
couple of reasons. Firstly, I think the reason that we're
(12:49):
experiencing it more is that we have just more opportunities
to compare this day and age. Every single thing is
public and online. There's a really fascinating research paper I
found when I was researching this episode which explored envy
towards social media influences in South Korea, and it found
(13:10):
that our level of personal jealousy increases alongside our usage
of social media. Now that might seem pretty obvious, but yeah,
the more you are exposed to these perfect ideas of
success that are very very present in this generation, the
more we feel lacking. There is also, you know, literally
(13:31):
a social media for our jobs, LinkedIn. I remember writing
an article when I was back in university and it
was titled like in hell they make you use LinkedIn,
where I talked about how it's basically just another way
to feel constantly behind. It's another example of appearances, and
(13:51):
I think my opinion on it still stands when all
you see of people's careers is the glossy outside, not
the grueling inside. It's very easy to feel like you're
missing out. The other reason that we might feel jealous
is that career does just make up such a big
part of our identity. It is, in fact one of
what we call the big buckets of identity. So if
(14:12):
you think about who you are, there are all these
different areas where you can pour energy into that make
you feel accomplished as a person and build upon your identity.
So your relationships, your values, your family, your history, your career.
Career is a big bucket. When something is that prominent
in our lives, when you could be spending a third
(14:35):
of your waking life in your job or working towards
your career, of course your brain is going to want
to make sure you're doing okay relative to others. Comparison
in this way acts as a form of validation that
we are doing okay. Our brain naturally goes to that place.
(14:56):
It doesn't always realize that we're going to come up
short in our own minds, so comparison is obviously a
huge reason we experience career jealousy. There are two ways
that we compare ourselves to others, upwards and downward. Social comparison.
I'm sure you've heard about this on an episode before
upward social comparison. You're going to look at someone who
(15:17):
is perhaps doing better than you and think, oh my gosh, wow,
they're really amazing. I want that. Why don't I have that?
You're looking upwards. You're comparing beyond what you are currently
capable of. That can either relictit feelings of inspiration and
motivation or despair. Then we have downward social comparison. Now,
(15:38):
downward social comparison balances out upward social comparison by allowing
you to look and observe people who you think aren't
doing as well as you and experience a self esteem boost. Basically,
you're saying, and it sounds really terrible, but this is
genuinely what's going on in your mind. Well, at least
(15:59):
you know I don't have it as bad as them.
So which direction of comparison you will gravitate to in
this situation often depends on your personality and your current
emotional state and factors like resilience and self esteem. So
for those of us with a high need for achievement
(16:19):
and high levels of confidence, we typically gravitate towards upwards
social comparison, specifically the kind that brings about admiration rather
than feelings of insecurity. If you are someone who believes
in yourself, who really wants to succeed, who believes they
can succeed, you are not going to be threatened by
(16:40):
someone doing better than you. You're going to use it
as an asset. Now, if you are lacking self confidence,
you feel less self assured, maybe you've seen your self
esteem plummet recently, you are more likely to engage in
downward social comparison as a deliberate form of comparison, but
upward social comparison as a less deliberate for I'm going
(17:02):
to explain that lots of words in that sentence. Essentially, intuitively,
your brain is going to want you to compare to
people who are doing so called worse than you because
it makes you feel better. But actually what ends up
happening is when you get into that comparison mindset, you
can't help but kind of slowly move over into comparing
(17:25):
yourself to people who are doing better than you. It's
going to make you feel pretty terrible. Now, this might
be an uncomfortable but pretty obvious truth. Your career, jealousy
and comparison is probably also related to your current levels
of insecurity, more specifically a greater fear of inadequacy that
(17:46):
you might have, and this fear is a lot more
common in individualistic societies. So individualistic societies are those in
which we value personal wealth, that material success, things that
make one person look very, very good. This is in
comparison to collectivist societies or collectivist cultures, whereby the success
(18:11):
of one person is everyone's win, so we are more
likely to put effort into seeing the community succeed, into
making sure every member of our family is succeeding, rather
than just being focused on our own success. If you
were raised in an individualistic society, so you know, if
you're raised in the US, if you were raised in
(18:33):
a lot of parts of Europe, if you were raised
in Australia, in Canada, a lot of the times your
main focus and what you have been taught to focus
on is how well you are doing in comparison to others,
not how well the group is doing. And so it
does create this obsession with personal success, meaning that other
(18:56):
individuals in your community, in your kind of social stratosphere,
their success doesn't make you ever, it's never going to
make you feel good the way that it wouldn't a
collectivist culture. It's only going to make you feel terrible.
So again, if you're sitting there feeling career jealousy, thinking,
oh my god, I don't want to feel this way anymore.
(19:17):
I feel so bad about it. I just want to
be happy for my friend, for my sister, for my relative,
for that person, my colleague. Often it's not your fault,
it's how your brain has been trained. The other really
insidious part of comparison that we haven't mentioned is comparison,
specifically negative upward social comparison often continues even when you
(19:40):
do find success. So there are a lot of examples
of what we call the achievement treadmill, where people who
have seemingly done it all, they are happy, successful, fulfilled,
they're at the top of their game, they still feel
like they could be doing better. They still feel like
there is more to achieve, and so you are never
(20:02):
happy with where you are. This is why we really
really need to tackle this comparison cyclical comparison sickness almost
early on in our lives, early on in our twenties,
perhaps before you've found success, because otherwise, if you get
into this mindset of I can always be doing better,
I can always have more. That is also the mindset
(20:25):
that is going to make you deeply, deeply unhappy. I
want to talk about one final reason here as to
why career jealousy is probably on the rise. We've talked
about social media, we talked about how there's more room
for comparison. Let's now just talk about the very nature
of our professional environments right now or the job market.
(20:46):
Simply put, the job market right now is so difficult.
I know a lot of you have been experiencing this personally.
You've been dming me saying, I just what am I
doing wrong? Maybe like you've been looking for a job
for months, nothing is coming your way. Eventually, when we're
in that situation, we're going to start to think that
(21:08):
something is wrong with us. But objectively, I want to
tell you right now, job vacancies are declining, There is
increased competition for a smaller number of positions. People are
taking longer to hire people, and they are hiring less. Overall,
AI has significantly shifted what kind of roles people are hiring.
For all of this, to say, a big contributor to
(21:31):
our psychological state is always going to be the environment
in which we are in, and the environment in which
we are in right now is not particularly conducive to
feeling optimistic or happy about where you're at in your career. Now,
if we're in this situation where a lot of us
are struggling, and then suddenly there is this person who
is not who will got the jackpot, who has figured
(21:55):
it all out, of course we're going to feel envious.
It's this primal instinct of ours kicking in saying how
can we have that. It's very much born from the
days when we could fight and steal for the better territory,
we could fight and steal for the better piece of meat,
for the position closest to the fire. Nowadays, we've been
socialized to realize that, you know, you probably can't go
(22:19):
up and wrestle with someone for their job at a
big four firm. But those old parts of our brain
that see something we want and immediately are trying to
figure out either a how we can get it or
b why we want it so much. It's still very
much alife. So let's discuss some of the further unspoken
consequences of this, but also what is the path for
(22:42):
getting out of this professional jealousy rut and just being
happy or at least proud of where we are now.
All of that and so much more after this shortbreak.
So we're talking about career jealous see, and yes, it
can feel like frustration. It can feel very shameful and ugly.
(23:05):
It can feel like secretly wanting someone to fail, which
we never want to feel like makes us feel like
a terrible human. Here's what else can happen. I think
the two most common manifestations of envy are disparagement and distancing,
specifically in relation to our social relationships. You begin to
resent your friends, you resent your colleagues even and you
(23:26):
act out in a bitter and annoyed way. Comparing to
strangers is one thing, and I think the consequences of
that are very isolated. They're very much individual for us.
But comparing to peers, let alone close friends, is when
we really start seeing interpersonal consequences. So I'm talking drama, tension, fighting,
(23:47):
distancing between us and our friends. Honestly, though, you are
more likely to feel jealous of a friend than a stranger.
It's why it is so common. So there was a
two thousand and five Dean study that found yes, we
are more likely to feel envy when the person we
are comparing ourself to is a similar age, the same gender,
(24:10):
has similar values or even physical similarities to us, because
it just gives more of a stark contrast to what
we don't have. This person is a similar age, this
person is our friend, this person maybe went to the
same university. So much about our situations are similar. So
what is it that we don't have in common that
is setting our experiences apart? When someone is like us
(24:34):
in many ways, it can further highlight what we are
lacking and make us feel really terrible. I received this
message from someone actually that I think describes this very
very well. She said, something I've been struggling with is
my best friend and roommate recently landed her dream job,
and it's all she talks about rightfully, so, but I'm
(24:55):
struggling so much with my hatred of my current job.
How can I be more enthusias I honestly, I could
have written this myself because I was once in your shoes.
I literally it was my best friend and my roommate
got their dream job in the firm that I wanted
a job in, and I didn't get any bites. Basically,
(25:16):
I was unemployed for the summer, and I'm gonna admit it,
I did entirely the wrong thing. Because I was so insecure,
I didn't want to talk to her about it. I
shut her out. I distanced myself because her happiness. Honestly,
it made me feel bad about myself, not because I
didn't want her to be happy, but because I wish
(25:37):
that I could be happy with her, And the only
way I saw that happening was if we were having
the same experience. My biggest piece of advice in that
situation and what I wish I had done. I wish
I had just told her. I wish I had just said, Hey,
I'm I am really trying to be happy for you,
and I'm sure that if I was in your if
(25:57):
our roles were reversed, you would be so much better
at this than I am. But just given how horrible
I feel right now, I just can't be there with you.
I just can't match this level of enthusiasm. So I
really think we should just have some time to talk
about other things before we talk about work. Can we
please talk about something that we have in common? Can
(26:20):
we talk about something can we have more shared experiences
so we can go off and talk about those things together.
My other piece of advice is to be curious, to
be open, to want to learn, rather than judge yourself
for what you don't have, and just addressing it before
you spiral is essential. You know, I always promote repair
(26:41):
and honesty in these situations. It does feel more difficult,
but it is one hundred percent the path that you
never regret, because you will regret looking back in five
years time and saying, Wow, that is my best friend.
That was my best friend. I really cared about her.
How come we don't speak anymore? Oh? Oh, it's because
I just didn't speak up and say something. Please please
(27:04):
take it from me. Another unspoken consequence of career jealousy
is that you end up losing motivation and you become
quite discouraged. Jealousy is this weird thing where because we
are only focusing on other people, we actually lose focus
on our own performance and we start to neglect our
own efforts to be better. Specifically, we start to focus
(27:28):
on external factors for our lack of success in someone
else's success. Typically, that comes down to things like fairness,
things like luck, things that we can't control. So essentially,
what happens when we focus too much on what we
don't have in comparison to someone else is that we
start shifting from an internal to an external locus of control.
(27:51):
So this is a psychology term. Essentially, it refers to
how we view our problems and our ability to change
an outcome or to change a situation. So an internal
locus of control, you believe that you are the master
of your own destiny, you are the guiter of your fate.
There are actions that you can take to change what
your life looks like, and you feel willing to take them.
(28:13):
An external locus of control is where you look at
your circumstances and you put it all down to factors
that you can't do anything about. So factors like luck,
factors like fate, factors like I don't know status, money,
where you were raised, you know who you were born
as those factors do play a role, and I'm not
going to deny it. But when we only focus on those,
(28:35):
those are things we can't change, and so our circumstances
is something that we can't change. I need you to
please stop focusing on the unfairness or the role of
luck and start focusing on action. What can you do
in this situation? I will say, you are allowed to
feel kind of bad every now and again. You are
allowed to feel frustrated. Don't suppress those emotions entirely, but
(28:59):
treat it as an indulgence. Treat it as a treat
rather than the whole meal. And when you realize that
you have been stuck in a pity spiral for too long,
I need you to turn around and say, Okay, we
need to do more in the opposite direction. We need
to do more towards our goal rather than towards despair. Okay,
let's talk about how to handle and manage career jealousy.
(29:23):
I had this weird epiphany at the gym the other day.
I was running on the treadmill. And at my gym,
treadmills are set up so it's like two rows. So
when you're on a treadmill, there is someone directly in
front of you, or there is a treadmill directly in
front of you, and there is someone probably running on
that treadmill during the busy times. And I was going
not very fast. I was obviously I'm recovering still in
(29:47):
an illness, and I was watching this girl in front
of me, and oh my lord, she was quick. She
was doing eleven kilometers an hour at like a five
percent incline or like a five point zero incline. And
I was watching her, and I was watching like the
kilometers tick up and whatever. And I was like, oh
my god, I need to catch her. I need to
(30:07):
catch her. And I was like, wait, I'm wan an
entirely different treadmill. What am I gonna go do? Run
on her treadmill with her? Like I can match her pace,
I can do everything that she is doing. We are
still running our own race. When you compare your career
to someone else's career, you are comparing two people running
on two different treadmills. There is no way that you
(30:28):
can catch up with them, but you do need to
focus on your own race. I don't know. I was
just in that situation and I was like, wow, this
has just made me rethink every time I've tried to
feel like I need to beat or best someone for
whatever weird reason, my brain is cooked up. I also
want to remind you, and this is specifically advised for
(30:51):
those of us in our twenties, which I'm assuming is
a lot of you. You are comparing the very beginning
of your race. You know, there are so many years
to come, so many peaks and plateaus that everyone's career
will naturally go through. No one's career is always going
(31:11):
to be on the up and up. There will be
times where they're not motivated, where you get made redundant,
where the culture and the environment shifts. But what we're
doing is we're looking at what possibly only the first
ten years maximum of our career and thinking this defines
(31:32):
the entire race, This defines all of my circumstances from
here until I retire. That is totally not true. How
someone's beginning looks is not always indicative of how their
middle or their end will end up. Just think about
Olympic races or sports games. Even then, like our career
(31:54):
is a lot longer than a two hundred meter sprint,
it's a lot longer than a two hour ballgame. It's
for a lot of us, the majority of our lives.
So there are going to be peaks and troughs. What
you're comparing right now is just the beginning. With all
that being said, I do think it's almost impossible to
will yourself out of feeling envy because it is quite
(32:16):
a spontaneous emotion, right, so it's not an emotion that
we can call on and then get rid of at
our will. It often comes when our guard is down.
But I think to keep chronic and acute envy at bay,
you have to accept the discomfort, but refuse to give
in to the shame that often follows. I think to
(32:39):
keep comparison, specifically professional comparison, from becoming self defeating, I
want you to really explore why it is that you
feel so jealous. I want you to get curious about
what has triggered this feeling for you now. At times,
career jealous is actually an asset because it can spur
(33:03):
on admiration and therefore inspiration. Alongside envy, Career jealousy is
actually telling you something pretty important about what you want.
If this person had a life that you didn't care about,
if you didn't secretly want what they had, you would
not be feeling jealous. You only feel jealous because you
(33:24):
feel invested in that situation, and the reason you feel
invested or emotional about it is because it is something
that you desire, and so in that way, our jealousy
is a great way of providing us with direction. I
heard someone say this the other day, and what they
said was, if you're ever struggling to know what you
want from life, if you're ever struggling with direction, ask yourself,
(33:47):
whose life am I most jealous of? Isn't that so funny? Like?
What is a painful emotion is actually a really important
one because it can reveal all of these parts of you,
all these things and these ambitions that you secretly have.
So I want you to reframe jealousy has proof of
what you want. And I also want you to reframe
(34:10):
jealousy as proof that you can get there, because the
only reason you're feeling envious is because someone has done
what you want to do. So they've done it. This
is really essential because then what we have here is
admiration and motivation rather than just jealousy. So once you
have thought about the person that you are most jealous of,
(34:31):
you now have to realize, actually, they are probably also
going to be the person that I admire the most.
Now you can do a bit of a reverse psychological
engineering exercise. What I mean by that is I want
you to get more curious about their life, what specific behaviors, habits,
or strategies are they using. What are they doing that
(34:55):
you are perhaps not that you can realistically apply to
your own career. What path did they take, What knowledge
do you think they have, what kind of wisdom? Essentially,
what I'm saying is, please, please please lean in, move towards,
not away from, those that you envy. Now, if you're
(35:16):
finding that particularly difficult, there's evidence that doing small favors
for someone that you envy can actually make you like
them more so. This is called the Ben Franklin effect.
If someone's success is really almost hurting you emotionally, ask
them for advice, Ask them if you can get involved
(35:38):
in their project, Ask them if you can study with them,
Ask them to sit down for a coffee with you
and shout them the coffee. Now, this really flips our
brain's perception the people we envy, they're an ally not
a threat. Now to kind of focus on you, you know,
a lot of this has been about what we can
(35:58):
do to change our real relationship to others. What can
we do internally for ourselves. I want you to make
a list of everything that you feel that you are
proud of and that you are good at that has
nothing to do with your professional career or your job.
I want you to work on focusing on the areas
(36:19):
where you are excelling, even if externally and in an
individualistic society, those things aren't as celebrated. So let's go
through a couple. You know, maybe you're training for a
long distance run. Maybe you go to the gym every
single day. That's something that not a lot of people
can say they do. Maybe you commit time to your hobbies.
(36:41):
I would be really, really proud if I read five
pages before bed every night. Maybe you call your Grandma
more than the average person. I want you to feel
proud of something, and I want you to focus on
your assets and what you are good at. There are
so many important psychological studies that show feeling proud of
yourself is endlessly correlated to high self esteem and fewer
(37:05):
feelings of jealousy. And the other part about self pride
is that it's often self determined. Now we're not talking
about arrogance. We're talking about genuine pride in your accomplishment.
That is something that if you find every single one
of us, every single one of us can find something
that we deserve to be proud of. Really, I think
(37:26):
this whole idea of turning inward is so important here.
Stop looking externally for proof that you're doing okay, and
start measuring your value by how fulfilled you feel, even
if others don't see value in what you're doing, how
happy you make others feel, how purposeful you are, how
genuinely happy you can say your days are the progress
(37:49):
that you're making in your own small ways. Taking more
time as well to figure out what you want, taking
more time to find the perfect job or just to
find some kind of path. That's also an asset for you,
because you're not tying yourself down or flinging yourself onto
a moving train too early in your life with no
way of getting off. So I do actually think that's
(38:11):
really really important. Sometimes we see these people and they're
like wonder kins, right like they're twenty one, twenty two
doing these amazing, amazing things. There's a line from a
song that says, I'm always terrified of elevators that rise
too fast they never last. And a lot of people
who are in those situations will tell you that around
the age of thirty or thirty five, they really have
(38:34):
to battle some of the real existential questions about deeper
personal meaning that you're probably managing right now. So my
final tip is to engage in some kind of mental
time travel. There's this brilliant study in psychological science that
found imagining yourself ten years into the future actually really
(38:54):
helps reduce the intensity of current emotional struggles jealousy, envy,
frustration included. So I want you to ask yourself right now,
will I care about this in ten years? What advice
would my future self give me about this moment? If
everything works out well, if I focus on myself, what
is the version of me in ten years going to
(39:16):
be most proud of me that I did. I think
this really helps dampen the jealousy response and it keeps
you having that forward focused vision for yourself. Okay, we're
going to take a short break, but when we return,
I'm going to talk some final reminders and also introduce
you to some listener questions about this topic. Stay with us, So,
(39:43):
my lovely listeners, this is a brand new segment of
the show, the very first of its kind that I'm
trialing out, and it's a little Q and A section.
So what I was finding was that after I was
releasing episodes, a lot of you were saying Hey, you
didn't talk about this, and this is really what I
needed advice, and I thought, you know what, I think
that we can bring this in. I think that we
(40:04):
can bring in some of your questions so that I
can answer them right now, right here on the spot. Now,
given that this is a new part of the episode,
I really do want feedback. If all of you come
back and say to me, hey, we actually hate this,
it's going away. This is just as much your show
as it is mine. But I just thought it would
(40:26):
be fun to give it a go. I'm going to
try it for the next four episodes, and after I've
done it for four episodes, I'm going to ask you
guys all again, what do you think? Do you like it?
And depending on what you say will determine its future,
So please provide all the feedback that you want. But
let's get into the questions now. The first question I
got was how does career jealousy and anxiety arise in
(40:48):
siblings and how do you manage it? Honestly, I think
the career jealousy between siblings is a lot more common
than you may think, because there is, of course a
nate familial comparison. There's also all these family archetypes that
we tend to fall into, right, the golden child, the
black sheep, the underachiever, the overachiever, and they really contribute
(41:11):
to this sense of needing to prove yourself, particularly in
comparison to a sibling. Now, we also talked about how
we compare ourselves to people who are most or more
similar to us, specifically friends. Well, let's talk about siblings
for a second. Like, you share some of the very
same genes, you often share parents, you share a childhood environment,
(41:33):
so there's all those differences between you do feel particularly pronounced. Also,
you know, I've seen so many situations where parents often
you know, it's terrible to say, but they do favor
one child and they do really focus on their success.
You see it a lot with child actors, actually child
(41:54):
actresses or actors who their parents put so much into them,
and then the other children are kind of like, Okay,
well what about me. Just because my goals and my
dreams are different and my success looks different based on
the industry that we're in, doesn't mean it's any less important.
So I think those are the circumstances that we're kind
of dealing with here. Innate competition in families archetypes that
(42:17):
we tend to fall into, or roles we fall into.
What I really want you to do is realize that
a win for them is your win as well, no
matter how much you have been conditioned to see them
as competition. Seriously, is that mentality hurting or helping your relationship?
(42:37):
Sibling relationships are oh my god, so underrated, so underrated.
They are so important, they are so special. They are
the people who will hopefully be with you for so
much of your life. And if you have been raised
to be in competition, I think it does get to
a point where you have to seriously look at each
other and say, I don't want to be have relationship
(43:00):
with you anymore. Like this is not helping us. So
fight back against that natural instinct. Take interest in their life,
invest mentally, invest your curiosity in their life, and also
talk about it with them. You know, if you can't
talk about your insecurities with your sibling, who are you
going to talk about it with? Oftentimes they are so forgiving,
(43:23):
and I wouldn't be surprised if your eldest or youngest
sibling who you naturally compare yourself with doesn't turn around
and say, oh my god, I do the exact same thing,
because this is how we've been raised, this is who
we have been raised to be competitors rather than friends.
So that's my advice for that question. Our second question
(43:44):
from another Lovely listener, how to navigate the scarcity mindset
in particular that contributes to career jealousy. So, for those
of you not familiar with this term, the scarcity mindset
is basically it's a combinative fallacy in which we believe
that resources including financial resources, emotional resources, social resources, jobs,
(44:07):
are limited, and so we end up becoming preoccupied with
what we lack rather than what we have, and we
get into this mindset that there is not enough out
there in this world for us to have what we want.
I want to remind you here, success is not a
(44:27):
finite resource that has an end. There's always room for
another famous celebrity. There's always room for a new pop star.
There is not only so much to go around, there
is room for you, and I need you to know
that otherwise I do think you'll begin to see someone
else's advancement as costing you your own, and so you're
(44:47):
never able to have that real kinship and ally mentorship
relationship with other people, and you'll get into this them
versus me mindset, which you know, I actually really understand.
I've fallen in to it a lot of times. It
comes from this idea that what we want is lacking
in the world and there's only room for a couple
(45:09):
of people. You know. It's based on this mindset. Of course,
if I get the job, someone else loses theirs. If
my friend is successful, well I can't be until they're not.
It's very, very untrue. My biggest piece of advice is
to work really hard to undo this mindset. Keep applying
for jobs, keep your options open, volunteer, search for opportunities
(45:33):
in as many areas as you possibly can. And remember
that your success, just because it's not happening right now,
doesn't mean that it's never going to happen. Your dream job,
your dream career, your big break, it might not even
exist yet. It might not even you know, all the
dominoes may not even be aligned to bring it into existence. Yet.
(45:54):
It doesn't mean that where you are now is where
you will always be. There is definitely room for you
at any tape that you want to sit on sit at.
I guess even if you need to carve that space
out over time for yourself. All right, let's talk about
this next question. Why does it feel like sometimes it's
up to luck and not meritocracy? So meritocracy based on
(46:16):
merit it basically suggests that if you work hard enough,
there is something that you should be entitled to. I'm
going to tell you something that I think a lot
of people probably deserve to be told earlier. And I'm
very sorry if it's upsetting, but really, sometimes things are
(46:36):
just up to luck. A small part of everything is
luck right place, right time. They just happen to choose
or make the right decision at the perfect moment when
it worked out for them. I know it's really really rough,
but I feel like it's kind of unfair that we've
all been sold this idea that, yes, if you work hard,
(46:56):
there's something that you are innately deserving of. There's so
many more factors at play. Here's the good news, though
luck is not a finite thing. Just like success, there
is actually heaps of luck to go around, and luck
also turns luck is this tricky little thing where we
(47:17):
are so so focused on what it feels like to
not have it that actually when we do are rewarded
with it, and when the luck does come our way,
we kind of almost don't see it. We're only focused
on the moments when it's not ours. Really, I always
think about my like I think I was like my
eighth grade math teacher. Her name is miss mary Anne,
(47:40):
I think mary Anne something, and she always said luck
is when preparation meets opportunity. So you may not have
the opportunity part yet, but you can work on the
preparation part so that when everything aligns and it's your moment,
you are there to take it. So our final listener
question from the day is about the third type of
(48:02):
career jealousy that we experience. If you remember we have
three categories. The third type is material jealousy. So this
person says, my friends are paid four times more than me.
I feel left out of their lavish lifestyles. What can
I do? Let me just say that is rough. It's
really rough when it feels like your friends are entering
(48:24):
this entirely new financial chapter of their life and you
are stuck in the past. What I really want you
to do is to open communication with them. Hopefully money
hasn't changed their mindset and money hasn't changed their opinion
on you. I'm going to give them the benefit of
the doubt and say that it hasn't, and so I'm
assuming they still very much love you. They desire your company,
(48:48):
they want your company. I really want you to just
discuss with them opportunities to do things that are less
expensive and that are more affordable, and that maybe don't
include four course meals and don't include luxury spending, but
are simple. Honestly, I feel like I've had conversations with
friends like this before, where I've been like, hey, like,
(49:10):
you know, I can't come to your birthday dinner, but
I would love to do this smaller thing with you.
Or someone said, hey, I can't afford to contribute to
this gift, or I can't afford to go on this trip,
but I want to still be involved in some way.
A good friend will be receptive of that. I also,
I want to give you a really really strong piece
of advice here. Please do not try and match their spending.
(49:34):
I'm not a financial advisor, obviously, but I've seen people
do this. I remember reading an article about someone who
got into a significant amount of debt trying to keep
up with their friends' lifestyle. If they are your friends,
you don't need to impress them. And doing things just
for appearances rather than meeting your actual needs and spending
(49:57):
money where you feel it's purpose is a very dangerous
game to play, and I wouldn't want to see you
get into debt or into trouble because you feel like
you need to impress your friends. If they're the people
who need to be impressed, they're probably not your friends.
So obviously I don't have all the full information, but
I would really just say have a chat with them
(50:18):
about it. Don't excessively spend money, and if you feel
like their priorities have changed beyond well because of the money,
maybe start considering whether your priorities towards friendship should change
as well. Okay, my lovely listeners, thank you for joining
me for this new segment. As always, please let me
(50:38):
know what you think of this. Also, what I'll be
doing is I'll be putting up the questions three to
four days in advance on Instagram. So if you want
to get involved in these questions, you want to be
able to contribute to episodes, please follow me over there.
It's at that psychology podcast. And also I love hearing feedback.
I love hearing episodes suggestions from your Really do have
(51:00):
such a beautiful community, So come on over, get involved,
and if you're already there, well say hello. I'll see
you over there. Make sure that you are following along
with the podcast so you know when new episodes go live,
and leave a five star review if you feel called
to do so, or share this episode with a friend
who feel like might be struggling with a lot of
(51:20):
career jealousy. Trust me, a lot of us are in
the same boat. This is a no shame zone. Hopefully
you have been able to learn how to better naviget
these feelings or at least reframe your thoughts towards your jealousy.
As a reminder, as we end this episode, please be safe,
be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk
(51:42):
very very soon,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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