The Truth About Professional Jealousy with Hannah Isted and Lois Seco

Today on the podcast, I've invited two of my closest friends, Hannah Isted and Lois Seco, to chat about another vulnerable topic: dealing with professional jealousy. Last time we spoke, we tackled our fear of success, and this time we are diving into the messy feelings of comparison and envy.

I am sure everyone has experienced professional jealousy at some point, and honestly, I feel it pretty regularly. In this episode, we chat about how to extract useful information from your jealousy, why taking action is the best antidote to comparison, and the danger of letting the social media algorithm dictate your self-worth.

This is the perfect episode for you if you've ever experienced jealousy (which, let's face it, is most of us!)

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Key Takeaways:

• Jealousy is information: Jealousy often gives you information about what you actually want. However, sometimes you might realise you don't even want the specific thing someone else has; you are actually just jealous of the confidence with which they are showing up.
• Take action to shift the energy: Hannah shares how she felt jealous seeing videos of groups of girls hanging out, so she took action and started her own group, which now has around 200 people. Taking action is a great way to stop yourself from sitting and stewing in jealousy.
• The algorithm feeds comparison: Lois discusses how planning her "Creative Kin" events caused the algorithm to feed her content from everyone else doing similar things, which immediately made her feel like her own event wasn't good enough. It is important to remember that the algorithm doesn't know what is actually helpful for your mental health.
• A rising tide lifts all boats: Having successful people around you—even if you feel a pang of jealousy—is a good thing. If you choose to cheer your friends on, their success often opens doors for you and helps lift everyone up.
• You don't know the whole story: It is so easy to be jealous of someone's end result without realising the sacrifices, late nights, and completely different circumstances that got them there. We often quickly create our own stories around how someone's success came about, which aren't always true.

Episode Highlights:

• 02:00 – Recapping the last episode on the fear of success and introducing today's topic of professional jealousy.
• 04:00 – Liz's revelation: sometimes you aren't jealous of the thing, you are just jealous of the confidence.
• 11:00 – Hannah explains how taking action shifts the energy of jealousy, using her 200-person friendship group as an example.
• 15:00 – Lois talks about how the algorithm fed her comparison when she started her Creative Kin workshops.
• 30:00 – Dealing with competitive feelings and reframing th