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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 20s.
If you can't already hear it surprise surprise 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 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 I want to skip this Friday's topic because we're talking about something I think is very near and dear to a lot of 20
something year olds.
Navigating our careers in our 20s 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 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
can't help but look at all that they have and feel not just envious but pretty terrible about ourselves it also probably elicit 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 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 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 20s and especially when it comes to our professional lives so today we are talking career jealousy in our 20s 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 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 20s 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 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 is a entire guidebook
if you are struggling with this in your life right now I hope you know you're not alone I 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 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 it is so much more common than you think.
Jealousy in general is a very universal human emotion of course.
About 75 % of people polled in a recent piece of research reported that they experienced jealousy at least once last year.
And career jealousy is in fact one 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 27 % of people experience career jealousy in their lifetime with that typically spiking at two different points in time.
The first one of course is our 20s and the second one is actually in our 50s.
Of course unsurprisingly it is exceedingly common in our 20s 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 20s I think because 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 immediately elicit a sense of panic like, wait, hold up a second.
Is it just me who's falling behind?
Is there something I'm 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 takes a massive toll on our 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 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 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 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 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 of people in their 20s 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 routes for your brain to take.
You can either feel bad about yourself and believe that your circumstances reflect your 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 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.
Firstly, 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 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 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 even bigger than that a mission is something that you are personally invested in and there's like a fire in your belly we know 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 20s 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 so i know those statistics i just gave or like those um 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.
But sometimes career can fulfill that need pretty 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 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 25.
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 i'm going to 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.
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 100 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 the 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 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 influencers in South Korea and it found 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 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.
mind it's another example of appearances and 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 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 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.
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 downwards 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 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 elicit feelings of inspiration and motivation or despair Then we have downward social comparison.
Now, 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, you know, I don't have it as bad as that.
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 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 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 form i'm going to explain that lots of words in that sentence essentially uh 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 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 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 status material success things that make one person look very very good now this is in comparison to collectivist societies or collectivist cultures whereby the success 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 were raised in the US if you were raised in 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 individuals in your community in your kind
of social stratosphere their success doesn't make you ever is never going to make you feel good the way that it would in 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
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 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 happy with where you are this is why we really really need to tackle this comparison cyclical comparisons sickness almost early on in our lives early on in our 20s perhaps before you 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 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 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.
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 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 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 got the jackpot, who has figured 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 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 a life So let's discuss some of the further unspoken consequences of this but also what is the path for 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 short break.
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I'm Maria Fernanda -Diez.
My podcast, When You're Invisible, is my love letter to the working -class people and immigrants who shaped my life.
I get to talk to a lot of people who form the backbone of our society, but who have never been interviewed before.
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festival. So we're talking about career jealousy and yes it can feel like frustration, it can feel very shameful and ugly, 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 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 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 2015 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 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 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 struggling so much with my hatred of my current
job how could I be more enthusiastic 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 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 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 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 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 and honesty in these situations it does feel more difficult but it is 100 % 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 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 on external factors for our lack of success and someone else's success.
typically that comes down to things like fairness things like luck things that we can't control so essentially what 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 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 guider of your fate there are actions that you can take to change what your life looks
like and you feel willing to take them 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 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 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 I had this weird epiphany at the gym the other day I was running on the treadmill
and at my gym my treadmill the treadmills are set up so it's like two rows so when you're on the 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 an illness and I was watching this girl in front of me and oh my lord she was quick she was doing 11 kilometers an hour at like a five percent incline or like a 5 .0 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 catch her and I was like wait I'm on an entirely different treadmill what am I going to 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 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 advice for those of us in our 20s, 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 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 10 years maximum of our career and thinking this defines 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 is a lot longer than a 200 meter sprint.
It's a lot longer than a two hour ballgame.
Like it's for a lot of us, the majority of our lives.
So there are going to be peaks and troughs.
What you are 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 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 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 jealousy is actually an asset because it can spur 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 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 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 as proof of what you want and I also want you to reframe 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, 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 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 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 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 do to change our 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 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.
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 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 this whole idea of turning inward is so important here.
Stop looking externally for proof that you're doing OK 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 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 are 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 really really important sometimes we see these people and they're like wonderkins right like they're 21 22 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 30 or 35 they really have 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 10 years into the future actually really 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 10 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 10 years going to be most proud of me that I did I think this really helps dampen the jealousy your 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 hello psychology of your 20s listeners if you're like me you love feeling confident and empowered in your own skin or maybe
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So 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 &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 on.
And I thought, you know what?
I think that we can bring this in.
I think that we 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 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 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 innate 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 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 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 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 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 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 this relationship 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 and I wouldn't be surprised if your eldest or younger 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 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 cognitive fallacy in which we believe that resources, including financial resources, emotional resources, social resources, jobs 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 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 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 into it a lot of times it comes from this idea that what we want is is lacking in the world and there's only room for a couple 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 big 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 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 it doesn't mean that where you are now is where you will always be there
is definitely room for you at any table 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 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 just up to luck a small part of everything is is luck right place right 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 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 are so so um 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 it was like my eighth grade math teacher her name was miss marianne i think marianne 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 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 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 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 full -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 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 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
friend's lifestyle um 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 money where you feel its purpose is 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 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 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 episode suggestions from you all we
really do have 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 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 navigate 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 very, very soon.
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