Rewiring Jealousy to Enjoyment

My human brain is wired for jealousy. This reaction happens with people in the Social Sectors like me, and also people working in any professional field.  My negative default reaction when seeing someone else’s success is: 
“that’s fine for that person but they are in another category and that is not even possible for me”. 
“That person who has that house is just lucky, they didn’t do anything to deserve that success, it was handed to them, even if they made it themselves”
“I’m never going to be good enough, I might as well not try since this will never work out.”
“That person sucks and doesn’t understand my life and work. We could never be friends.” 

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Underneath that jealous mind-loop is fear. Fear of inadequacy and insignificance, lack of impact, and fear of missing out on love. These are self defeating, limiting scripts that live inside all of our brains. It sounds ludicrous here on the page, but this is the thought cycle in my brain, and in many of our brains, if we dig deep. This jealousy-fear cycle leads to procrastination, feeling negative, sending out bad vibes to others, and low human performance at our Social Sector work. The writer Elizabeth Gilbert describes this voice as a friend you took on the road trip who sits in the back seat telling you that everything is bad.  Her advice is that you can’t get rid of that friend, but you can never let them drive.

This is not a good way to live. We need to rewire these tendencies to do our best work in the Social Sectors and live a good life. This is simply a perception game. There is a clear mental model we can adopt to overcome this default fear and jealousy voice. 

Creating our own track
Creating our own track is the first step to breaking the fear-jealousy mindset. Defining for ourselves, with our own terms, based on our individual family and personal needs, what high human performance in the Social Sectors means to each of us. This includes developing a set of principles and a clear mission for your work and life, gives us a vision for what we want your Social Sector impact, and your life to be. 

If we are on our own unique right track, the fear and jealousy falls away because the actions, possessions and experiences of others don’t matter. Other people are out every day working on their track. We have to ignore their track and build our own. This is particularly hard for those of us in the Social Sectors where there is an undefined career path. When we diverge from the standard private sector world it can be lonely. I’ve felt this  difference acutely,  between me and my friends from college who are on traditional career tracks.

When everything is firing correctly and I see someone else’s achievement, house or snowboarding trip, my thought pattern looks like this: 

“Wow nice job, you’ve really put in some work and are building a great environment and life for yourself. Can I learn anything from your routine and mindset?”

“What you are doing is good for you but not relevant for me because I have defined a clear path for myself that involves bringing exponential improvement to disaster data while living and sharing peak human performance ideas for the Social Sectors. I can be happy for your since I am on my own track andy I’m happy with that track. ” 

See what’s happening here? We are actually switching from jealousy to enjoyment and learning. It is a lot more fun, and works better over the long run.

Finally, remember that what they have may not actually be that great. Have you ever wanted a new toy as a child, then finally gotten it, only to realize that your life is still the same and the dart gun that you had imagined to be so much fun was actually lame? This happens all the time to my 7 year old. The actual performance of the dart gun is never as much fun as  he imagined it to be. The ‘jealous me’ does the same thing with other people’s professional achievements, farm properties and snowboarding trips. What they have must be better. What I have is not as good. 

Rewiring the brain to become a happy striver
Being competitive is an advantage… sometimes. We know that a desire to prove someone wrong, or working with a chip on your shoulder can bring intense effort and performance. This can get us to a certain plateau. Eventually this approach will backfire because it lacks a higher purpose. Simply beating out other people or organizations is not a long term performance approach. It is ultimately, unsatisfying.

Another helpful mental rewire process is to recognize that if that item that we are grasping for  and feeling jealous about could be our if we wanted it badly enough. If we were willing to leave our current path and reposition life along those new lines, we could make that a reality. But is that what we really want? We might want some selected trappings of that life, but not all of it. 

Looking through the jealousy for a real potential learning point beneath the jealous default, can help us to incrementally step up our game.  Let’s all be happy strivers. That means we can use the desire to excel, push hard and improve toward our own unique mission in the Social Sectors and in life. Take that jealous fear and re-track that human urge into a performance framework that serves our mission well over the long term. Happily striving means defining our own track and connecting on an emotional level with our unique Social Sector mission. 

Happy trails!

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