Feeling envious about your successful colleague? That could be a good thing
A peer of mine has only announced on social media that in improver to her day job, she has released a topical non-fiction book, and volition before long be taking on another high-profile role.
But scrolling through the screed of congratulations that follows, my own felicitations seem to curdle in my pharynx.
How is information technology that this younger, sunnier, stupidly accomplished woman is propelling such a turbocharged existence? And while I should be congratulating her for marking off another (some other) major career milestone, I sense a miasma of bitterness descending and the greenish-eyed monster start to move in.
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Is professional person envy such a terrible thing? We all must inevitably compare ourselves to others, and in all likelihood we compare ourselves to those whose career paths might exist considered parallel to ours.
I don't envy brain surgeons, earth-saving environmental activists or Oscar-winning actors (much), but on the occasion when a colleague does publish a bestselling novel, writes a debut feature for the New Yorker, or lands a gig doing anything that seems more than interesting than what I'm doing, I feel a deep resentment start to hook.
Conditioned as we are – or equally I take been – to imagine ourselves on a timeline, hearing nigh other people's accomplishments and achievements are a vicious reminder of all those ambitions I have failed to chalk.
It'southward a feeling compounded when, equally a woman, one must slalom down the timeline while also scheduling the perfect moment at which to procreate: There exists a special sphere of green-eyed for those people who seem to hitting the markers while holding down relationships and raising several kids.
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Measuring one's achievements against others is a nasty occupation, simply it's ane in which nosotros all indulge. Especially at the moment, when opportunities appear more than plentiful – freeze your eggs, exist your own boss, starting time that side hustle – while our financial leverage is on the wane.
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Rainesford Stauffer examined the pressures faced past modern xx-somethings, and how the sociological markers that one time acknowledged one's passage into machismo – "finishing loftier school, inbound the workforce, moving away from habitation, getting married, and having children" – have irrevocably changed. Even though the irony that Stauffer herself is nevertheless in her twenties is somewhat galling, she elegantly dismantles the pop mythology that i'southward twenties are a "gilt age".
Likewise, Thanks For Waiting, a new book by Doree Shafrir, describes in somewhat countless detail the writer's experience of beingness a late bloomer, highlighting the tyranny of the timeline, and her preoccupation with ending upwardly alone.
Envy is corrosive, ugly and debilitating. Information technology's the opposite of charming or sisterly or generous, but information technology does at to the lowest degree let some honesty about where i feels ane's life should be.
In i of my favourite pieces on the subject, the writer Kathryn Chetkovich, perchance improve known every bit the "spouse equivalent" of Jonathan Franzen, writes of the gnawing resentment she felt towards her partner following the publication of The Corrections in 2001.
"I but didn't think I was cut out for this life together," she tells him not long later on learning that he has sold the British rights to his novel for a "whopping effigy". "What life?" he responds. "This life," she says with pathetic candour. "Where you lot're and then . . . big, and I'm so little."
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Incidentally, the couple remained together, which suggests that the articulation of one's envy, while humiliating, does at least allow yous to move forward rather than pickling in your own toxic bile.
Merely while I'yard wondering whether envy is the perfect fuel to fire our artistic or professional output, the psychotherapist and business consultant Naomi Shragai took my call.
"Envy is everywhere in the workplace," conceded the executive coach and author of the forthcoming book The Man Who Mistook His Chore For His Life.
"Only while it can exist healthy (if acknowledged), it can also be unbelievably destructive. Workplace green-eyed is only natural, as y'all are far more than likely to feel envy towards those people who are close to you professionally. But few people recognise that envy is what they're feeling, and so it manifests in other hostile ways."
Shragai, who generally consults with professionals seeking help with leadership didactics and dealing with toxic attitudes, was no fan of envious behaviour. "It can be catastrophic within an organisation," she continued. "The withholding of data, the failure to communicate, the refusal to assistance out with an introduction" – all these things can paralyse a workplace, yet are so subtle that even the assailant may not recognise the root from which the problem stems.
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Neither did Shragai accept much patience for the timeline, a set of targets that she says serve to make people "feel bad" about themselves. Which is only marginally helpful, as I would need a dozen psychological consultations to scrap abroad at a set of resolutions I now believe are cast in stone.
But I am going to try and embrace my peer's good fortune. She deserves it, even though, it seems to me, she is preposterously young. I hateful, does she worry she might be overstretched with all this boosted responsibility? Oh, who am I kidding? I'm nonetheless envious equally hell.
By Jo Ellison © 2022 The Financial Times
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/women/how-to-deal-with-career-envy-at-work-270521
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