“People who make the choice to study, work hard or do whatever they endeavour is to give it the max on themselves to reach to the top level. And you have the people who get envy and jealous, yet are not willing to put that work in, and they want to get the same praise.” – Evander Holyfield (Courtesy: BrainyQuotes)
In the fast paced environment that we live, everyone is considered as successful person in their own arena. Jealousy is a common factor that everyone has. We can be jealous about our friends’ achievement or for that matter anyone else’s. We all get a twinge of jealousy if we see that our friends or someone known to us, are successful in their own field when we wallow in our own problems. This success can be measured in the form of money, physical achievements (like body building/getting into shape) or an achievement in personal space and so on. We support them, say that we are happy for them and we feel proud of their achievements, but, only in terms of face value. But, have we ever thought that why does that envy exist? What can we do within our capabilities to eradicate that envy? Before beginning with the process, we need to ensure that we have a well-defined overall goal. The goal in our case is to eradicate the feeling entirely and then we must focus on the remedial measures that can be applied effectively, which is incidentally the sole purpose of this article.
What is this Jealousy?
1. Do you hate someone for no reason? Is that someone an achiever in their own field?
2. What made you to suddenly hate them?
3. Are their successes for real? What made them to achieve those?
4. How can you implement these factors in your own life?
First of all, one should understand that jealousy is an emotion as basic as love or hatred. It is basically a passing thought that make us to feel upset or to hate someone without any kind of reason. As long as it is a fleeting thought, it is absolutely normal. But, this jealousy should never be turned into an obsession. We should learn to control and curb this kind of feeling.
How to Stop Being Envious of Someone Else’s Success:
Before proceeding deeper into the topic, one must understand that a person is not going to gain anything by being jealous about some other person’s achievements. This feeling will never help the particular person to come up in life and will certainly not provide a better place in the society. Rather, it will only earn a bad name for you and will make other people to withdraw themselves from your vicinity.
Some persons are naturally gifted with certain exceptional qualities, whereas many of the achievers earn it through sheer hard work.
If you start thinking about these persons often, put a ‘pause’ button for that kind of thinking in your heads. When such a thought arises, divert your mind to something else, say, watch a serial or hear some music or go a long walk or play with pets and many such things.
Avoid the feelings of discrimination and jealousy all together. Try to curb them in little means first and slowly increase the intensity of stopping. This will be an effective aid for you.
Only motivation, strong determination and passion will only lead a person to achieve the desirable goal. On the other hand, being jealous will only make us to do intangible comparisons and will only indulge us in day dreams which will never turn into a reality. It will only create an aura of negative energy around us. Even after all those indulging, we are going to be the same person as we were before the other person’s actual achievement had happened. So, it is better to channelize our energy into something credible and at least achieve something in a smaller level, rather than whiling away our precious time. Let us now look at some tips which will aid us to overcome this feeling and ultimately de-clutter ourselves.
1. Analyze whether your feeling is envy; if so, admit it:
First of all, ask yourselves those questions listed above. If you have concrete answers to both the questions, then admit it you are envious about that particular someone. Admit it openly. By acknowledging your envy nature, you are also indirectly admitting your flaws and weaknesses. This will give you a chance to see where you lay back and where do they excel. This will also eradicate any irrational and baseless feelings that you have towards them and will portray the real reason behind their success.
2. Compare ‘Apples with apples’ and turn your pitfalls into compassions:
Counter action is necessarily important in this case. There is no use in the provocation of issues that expose the achiever’s shortcomings and play fiddle with those. For instance, One may have an expensive car, but, he is not good looking; whereas, I am extremely good looking and have a normally priced car. Sooner or later, someone who is well groomed having an expensive car will come and there will be nothing else to compare. Also, there will not be any growth if there is no comparison. It is only our own growth which is going to be stagnated if we remain adamant and non-comparing us with the others. So, it is wise to compare apples with apples and turn our shortcomings into compassions, so that we will find a way to overcome them gradually. The method is totally unbiased and no kind of favouritism is involved.
3. Learn from their successes:
Yes… this is an important lesson that everyone must learn before framing an achiever in a digressive way. From now onwards whenever you get to meet an achiever, please say this for yourselves,
“Wow..!! He/she has achieved a lot. That is really impressive! But, how do I get to their place? What do I have to learn from their successes?”
By making this into a habit, you can really feel happy for the other person’s success and you will start seeing them in a totally different light. It will enable you to reframe your parameters of comparison and will enable you to implement their success plans into your own field also.
4. Hold your chin high:
You heard it right… envious people are those who lack a supreme amount of self-esteem. So, hold your horses in a tight manner and start appreciating yourself for the small achievements of yours. Remember…that a confident you only will be the successful you. Groom yourselves well, carry yourselves well, be bold and do bold. Ever heard of the proverb, ‘Successful people don’t do different things; they do things differently’.
5. Take a walk in other’s shoes:
Before giving a fake smile and a half-hearted congratulations to the true achievers, stand back for a second and think the fact that how much amount of hard work was needed for them to become successful? That was not sheer luck or nepotism or a dumb chance that provided them the success they really deserve and the amount of man hours that were spent in the developmental process. If you start finding the answers to these questions, then only a sense of awe will pervade you rather than wallowing yourselves in jealousy.
Also, ask yourselves the question that if the tables are turned and if someone claims that you don’t deserve the success, will you accept it?
6. Deal with unfair justifications:
If someone kindles you with unfair comparisons and justifications, deal with it and try to avoid those kind of people as soon as you can and as long as you can because they are all like worms which will decompose a crate of apples. Stop thinking that you are someone else and their success is yours. No. It is not going to happen anywhere in the future and the onus of creating your own path lie with you and you only. The achievers can only serve as a guiding light. They cannot come behind you and carve your path on their own.
7. Count your blessings:
If you feel jealous at any stage of life, please follow this. Take a sheet of paper and start writing down that god has endowed with you in this precious life. Now, list down all those impediments that hold you from achieving something credible. By this way, you will know that your blessings are far more superior to the hurdles you possess and start taking the remedial measures for these hurdles.
8. Understand that everyone has ups and downs in their lives:
Understand the basic fact of life that it is never picture-perfect for everyone. If you look into the personal lives or for that matter any aspect of that achiever, you can see that their life isn’t perfect as it was perceived to be. They too have their own share of failures and for that case, everyone has and you will realize the fact that your life is also a blessing.
9. Have a positive outlook:
Always remain completely confident of yourselves. Try to pursue your own passion and dreams. Be positive and stay positive. Believe in yourselves first. Have a firm faith that you can also achieve the same degree of success in your own fields rather than comparing you with others unnecessarily. Do not succumb to false portrayals and jealousy. They will gulp your life entirely. Instead you are as better as they are.
10. Do not fear about anything:
Basically, it is said that jealousy stems from irrational fear. It is entirely based on the fact that we are unable or unfit to achieve anything in life. The more intensive our jealousy nature becomes, the more our flaws will be exposed thereby making us to feel low all the time and convincing ourselves that we are good for nothing. This will only leave us with a bitter resentment and hatred and will not allow us to appreciate even the small things in life.
Not every person who are closely followed by this world under the pretext of ‘achievers’ are absolutely flawless and clearly they too are no exception when it comes to successfully hiding one’s flaws. Though we have listed down all the tactics that can be utilized to curb the jealousy feeling of a person, it is quite difficult to follow these methods in real life and earn a good name for ourselves. In this digital age where everything is being digitalized and modernized, intentional upping of one’s abilities has become a standard norm. There are many social media agents present for these purposes exclusively. In this modern world, everyone has an account in all platforms of social media, right from the micro blogging site Twitter to having a full time blogs supported by many of the blogging platforms like Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger and so on. Everyone can have a blog, that is quite easy and thus, spreading words about someone like a forest fire also becomes easy. Therefore, it becomes highly difficult to stay calm and composed and to turn a deaf ear to all those external happenings that surround us. Jealously will only cripple us from inside and will leave a huge void in our lives that will become impossible to fill later on.
