You’ve been there. You look at your accomplishments and think you’re doing pretty good. Then you see that someone else looks like they put you to shame… literally. Immediately you find you have an intense dislike of the person. You feel that perhaps they don’t deserve what they have. You have worked hard, and look at your results! Or on the flip-side, you may not harbor an active dislike for the individual, yet you have this feeling like an empty pit in your stomach when you compare yourself to them.
Why it hurts you, not them.
Jealousy doesn’t hurt the person you are jealous of one bit. In fact, if you are in competition with them, your jealousy will only help them. Why? If you are jealous you can’t think straight. If you’re jealous, you tend to go to extremes and tend not to think things through. Moreover, instead of coming from a position of self-assurance and power, you are coming from a position of thinking and feeling that you are inferior. In any business situation, that is a recipe for trouble.
You also wind up hurting those around you. Whether it is those you love, or business associates, the truth of the matter is that your slipping into jealousy hurts them as well. Entire books have been written on what jealousy can do to a relationship, so there’s no need to re-hash it here. In the business world, your jealousy may cause you to do things that will hurt the team. The ripples from that will spread to the organization as a whole.
The lie of jealousy.
In spite of all of this, the real damage of jealousy is not the physical results of you slowly going crazy. The real damage is that jealousy is you accepting the message “You are not enough”. It’s a terrible message and is very destructive. Heinlein said:
Also:
“To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self” – Joan Didion
If you are stuck in jealousy then the first thing that you need to do is to accept that the cause of the jealousy isn’t “out there”. Jealousy always comes from the inside, and although it is just one face of inner resistance, it is very, very sneaky.
When you are ready to move past jealousy, there are a couple ways you can go. If you want, you can work your way up the Emotional Guidance Scale and work like alchemy: Keep transforming it until it’s something that you want. Alternately, you can “confront” your jealousy, and really go after it. Look within and hold a conversation. Trust me, when you hold a conversation with Jealousy, it is interesting. First, there’s the obvious stuff that you’ve heard before. Then the jealousy starts to look really stupid. Then, the jealousy seems sadly misplaced.
(By the way, if you are wondering how to strike up a conversation with Jealousy, you can simply make it a character in your inner world. In a sense it is already)
Alternately, you can opt to let it go. That’s not done much in our society and most of us have forgotten how to let things go. I’ve mentioned a few methods I’ve used, and we’ll come back to those in a later article.
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***The November 2007 Challenge***
This is the badge for my two goals. There are two “points”: One for each piece of the challenge. (Living up to the “Blogging Promise” at right and maintaining a good, consistent meditation practice each and every day.) The challenge began 11-9-2007 and ends 12-9-2007. Comments, suggestions, and feedback welcome!
