How to Deal with Jealousy: Six Tips to Tame The Green Eyed Monster
By Anubhav Srivastava. (Register For His Workshop – Super Confidence For Super Success)
This article will teach you how to deal with Jealousy in a positive way. The unfortunate truth is that for most of us our happiness is relative. In other words, we tend to feel worse if the other person is doing better even if we are doing very well according to to society’s standards. The fact that the media is always feeding us with the lives of celebrities and friends and family are always comparing us to someone else doesn’t make things any better. It can create an unhealthy self image and jealousy even in those who otherwise used to feel good about themselves.
But do you know that the same emotion of jealousy can be used positively and to your advantage so that you can achieve all that you want out of life. Let’s take a look at some of the top ways in which you can learn how to deal with jealousy and even some ways in which it can be used productively and to your advantage.
1) Understand the truth is far different from what appears on the surface.
It is natural for most people to want to avoid presenting what really goes on in their life, the struggle, the heartbreak, the low self esteem, the doubts, the things gone horribly wrong and instead only present a version of themselves that appears flawless. This is particularly true for celebrities but applies to even you, me, your next door neighbour, your friends and your enemies.
Modern age has made it worse. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter all make it seem like the other person is living in heaven while we are rotting away in some sort of hell. The truth is that everyone is undergoing some sort of pain which they won’t talk about. Everybody hates some aspect of their life. The person you may see having a nice time abroad may be going through a real stressful time with his boss humiliating him daily. The person that seems perfectly healthy may have a horrible condition he refuses to talk about. People clicking photographs with their spouses as if they are in heaven maybe facing greatest marital discord or even be dealing with a cheating spouse/cheating themselves.
When you realize that truth is not what it seems, you will automatically be able to shift perspective and realize everyone’s life has a little bit of heaven and a little bit of hell. By shifting perspective you can learn how to deal with jealousy better. It is up to you whether you want to enjoy the heaven or complain about the hell.
2) Be Clear about what Success means to you
Forget about society’s standards of success. As mentioned before even someone who is mega successful by society’s standards may themselves feel like a failure for a variety of reasons. Why care about the world thinks success is when even the most “successful” people are often incredibly discontent, unhappy and even jealous.
Instead define your own success. Success means different things to different people. For some people success means earning a living that can support a lifestyle that an individual wants for himself/herself and their family. For some people success means being a good spouse, son, father, mother etc. For some success just means doing the best they can at their job while remaining happy and content, no matter how little they earn. In the end, however, personal happiness remains the best yardstick of success.
Once you are clear about what success truly means FOR you the chances of you having thoughts about someone else go down drastically and you learn how to deal with jealousy better.
3) Seek inspiration from those you are jealous of.
It is definitely possible to extract at least some learning or lessons from someone you are jealous of. They became what they became because of a few reasons or qualities. Even if they themselves might have something lacking in their life if they have what you want then there is something you can learn from them. So the key is to turn jealousy into inspiration.
See that person as someone to emulate. If they haven’t done something to make you absolutely hate them you can even and should see them as a role model of sorts. Stop thinking about the negative and complain about how they got lucky. This kind of thinking will never get you anywhere. Focus on studying their actions and replicating their success, if you indeed wish to have what they appear to have. In the process you will also improve your own ability of learning how to deal with jealousy. Start seeing the person as an embodiment of what you wish to achieve for yourself.
4) Turn Jealousy into Competition
Now I would emphasize that all competition should be healthy because if your motivation is to beat someone else to pull them down and not because you yourself want to become the best version of yourself, in the long run it is only going to harm you psychologically.
You can be amazingly motivated if you can learn how to deal with jealousy productively. Some of the greatest inventions in the world have been as a result of competition between brilliant minds or companies that envy the success of their competitors. Man reached the moon when USA got jealous of Russia’s initial success in the space race! Some of the most amazing things have been accomplished as a result of competition and healthy jealousy is can be one of your greatest motivators.
That being said please do not take this in a negative way. Your goal even if it is to outperform someone else should eventually be a productive one, not a destructive one. The basic thing you need to understand when learning how to do deal with jealousy is that you should never wish harm for anyone else. If all you seek is someone else’s destruction, sooner or later you the Law of Karma will catch up with you. What goes around, comes around.
5) Get to the root cause of what is causing your jealousy.
One of the best ways to learn how to deal with jealousy productively is to identify the root cause of what is causing your jealousy. If someone gets a big car or house or something, is it really their material possessions that bother you or is there something deeper that you crave. Going from this example you may analyze your jealousy and come to a conclusion to it may not be riches you want but maybe the respect and adulation from society that come along with it. If you go after the material possessions without knowing your true desires you may not be happy even if you get those material possessions.
If at the end of the day your basic desire is to get respect and love from people around there are a lot other ways you can get it apart from just buying up material possessions. Maybe you can contribute to the community and help out people. The genuine warmth and gratitude and respect you would then get from people then is far more than the fake respect you would ever get because of your money.
Thus one of the ways to learn how to deal with jealousy is to identify the root cause of it, identify your desires and then see how you can really satisfy that basic desire. You can then focus on superficial paths that you may think will get to your goal but really don’t.
6) Appreciate what you have
Here is the deal, the person you feel jealous of might be craving the exact same thing that you already have but just don’t see it. If you are someone who has a loving spouse and are craving the wealth of your neighbour, that neighbour may be craving having a loving spouse while their wealth means nothing to them. If you are someone who is jealous of someone’s athletic abilities or looks, they might be jealous of your brains or other skills.
The truth is that no one in the world is better than one or the other in all aspects. Everyone is a master in some thing and a rookie in another. Everyone has a few things others might crave and might never have. Focus and appreciate those things.
The root cause of low self esteem is when people judge themselves by what they don’t have or are not good at. When they finally shift their perspective and start identifying the things that they do have, they realize they are immensely lucky. Start appreciating things you have instead of crying over what you don’t!
Conclusion
I hope these tips have been useful to you and you will implement them and learn how to deal with jealousy positively. Every single person or an animal with a reasonably well developed brain experiences the emotion of jealousy at some point of their life. While it is one of the most basic emotions any conscious living being, the truth is that jealousy that gets out of control becomes toxic. Jealousy harnessed in the right way can lead to amazing success. We as humans are blessed that unlike animals we can take proactive steps to channel our jealousy in the right direction, so start exercising your human nature and become a master of your emotions, not a slave to them.
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The author of this article, Anubhav Srivastava is an author, motivational speaker and the director of Carve Your Destiny, a first of its kind inspirational documentary featuring some of the most famous personalities from diverse fields, who teach the viewers how they too can make all of their dreams come true. The movie itself has been seen on Youtube by close to 600,000 people. Anubhav has also been featured in numerous International and India Media outlets such as BBC , The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Rediff.com, Leicester Mercury and many others.
Email Anubhav Srivastava for coaching, consulting or motivational speaking queries at anubhav101@gmail.com.
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