Dealing with the Jealousy Alarm
If you are like me, you get jealousy when you see others getting the success that you want.
But I saw a tweet this morning that made me a find a path through it:
Authors, if you’re like me, jealousy worms its way into your soul when you see other writers finding more success than you’ve found.
— Carol Beth Anderson (goes by Beth) (@CBethAnderson) May 27, 2021
(And *someone* is *always* more successful.)
I was chatting with someone the other day, and she introduced me to a concept called “compersion.”
Compersion is the opposite of jealousy. Instead, it's all about feeling a sense of happiness for another person. In the article Beth shares, it is "earnest empathetic joy" or "a joy that has nothing to do with your joy."
I also love how the article describes jealousy as an emotional alarm going off and instead of reacting to it and running out of the house, we acknowledge and process it. Sure it may be bad, but we won't know until we assess it.
"We recognize jealousy as just another emotion...It's just part of life and part of processing and part of the emotional section of the human experience."
In a year where empathy and listening to others has been truly tested, the practice of compersion is a habit I can truly get behind.
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