The Lawyer Life Podcast

The Secret Power of Jealousy

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Today we are unpacking the greenest of emotions - jealousy and I intend to show you how useful  jealousy can be in transforming our lives but also our relationship with ourselves. 

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Autumn G Noble (00:00.294)
You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast, episode number 25, The Secret Value of Jealousy. Your life is likely enviable to someone else, but jealousy can make you feel like nothing you have is good enough and that you're never going to be able to achieve what other people have. Anytime that we worry that we're being judged by others or anytime that we feel jealousy,

It is a neon sign showing us our own work. Hello and welcome back to the Lawyer Life podcast. I am your host, Autumn Noble, the founder of the Lawyer Life Collective. In the collective, we focus on life and career coaching for attorneys where we explore all things lawyering, including the good and the bad, to make your legal career as successful as possible.

If you ever find yourself struggling to juggle it all and create the success that you truly want in your life, in your career, you are in the right place. For those of you that have been listening all along, welcome back. I appreciate you so much.

Autumn G Noble (01:13.934)
Hello everyone with summer right around the corner and everyone in preparation of breaking out those summer bodies and all of the upcoming get togethers where people will be sharing their past years accomplishments and plans for the next. It seemed to make sense to me that we start unpacking that green emotion of jealousy and specifically what value does it have to us in our lives?

Before we dig into this topic, a few important announcements. For those of you enrolled in our current master series, Finding Fulfillment in Law, this topic today in the podcast will dovetail nicely with our most recent discussions on finding more peace and emotional balance. You have all been unpacking some challenging topics and this week's podcast will supplement that work and get you ready for our next meeting where we will explore how to transform the relationships in your life.

If you aren't enrolled in the series, you are missing out. This is truly the most cost effective way to access these tools and learn what coaching has to offer, not only for your career, but all aspects of your life. Check out all of the details on our Lady Lawyer Collective seminars by heading over to the lawyeralifecollective .com or checking out the links in the show notes. Next on the horizon for the Lawyer Life Collective is a total change of pace.

For many of you that have been working with me, what you have often said is that the work that we do on your career as women and as lawyers is so powerful that it's really something that so many more women in this world need to have exposure to and it's work that we all need to be doing regardless of our profession. Listen, I heard you and we are rolling out a seminar series that is geared toward all women regardless of their profession.

What I have found over the years of coaching hundreds of women all over the world on their challenges with their careers and their lives is that we're all struggling in the same kinds of ways, regardless of our profession. Our challenges are not unique to us as lawyers. And so I have distilled all of my learnings down to six key tools and skills that we as women need to change any aspect of our lives. That project is called

Autumn G Noble (03:35.47)
how to change your life. And it will meet six times over the course of seven weeks. And it is open to women of all backgrounds and all professions. So if you're listening to this and something that we've said resonated with you and you thought, gosh, my mom, my sister, my friends, my girlfriends might be interested in hearing this content, but they're not lawyers, this one's for you. Check out the details in the show notes and sign up to join us and see how these six tools,

can truly change any aspect of your life. I'm so excited to launch this and expand our reach beyond the legal community. All right, bringing it back to the topic at hand, today we're talking about the greenest of emotions, jealousy. And I intend to show you how useful jealousy can be in transforming our lives, but also our relationships with ourselves. But first a confession before we dig into the meat of the topic. I absolutely hated,

school. I did not enjoy anything about it. The competitiveness, the secrecy, being surrounded by all of these really impressive people. It just made me feel for the first time in my life like maybe I really don't belong. Maybe I'm not as smart as these other people. And I just felt like I was back in junior high and I was that nerdy girl again with braces and headgear.

trying to find people that would take me as I am and just feeling so out of place. That feeling of being out of place, it brought me back to my early years in college, as well as my time in junior high. When I went to college, I joined a sorority. And I think that insulated me from a lot of my otherness. My family, for the most part, did not go to college and I grew up in a very blue collar home.

And so when I went to college, it didn't occur to me how out of place I would be. But as luck would have it, my college was only about four hours from Chicago. So a lot of the women in my sorority came from what I kind of felt was another planet. And they taught me all sorts of things about designer purses and shoes and clothes and hair and makeup. You know, as a woman that had grown up on a farm with three brothers, like these were things that I just didn't understand.

Autumn G Noble (05:53.742)
but because they were my friends and they kind of took me under their wing, it really glossed over this otherness that was always boiling beneath the surface. But then fast forward to law school and I'm feeling it again. And then you get out of law school and you get your job. And if you're like me that didn't come from that white collar family or private schools or old money, it's a huge culture shock to join a law firm and become part of this world. And so not only,

was I feeling that otherness again and the discomfort that came with it. But while I was experiencing that, I was trying to figure out how to navigate this lawyering thing, not having a lot of resources available to me in my toolkit right out of the gate. I think about those times in my life because it was those moments that not only did I feel this otherness, but I felt this intense...

jealousy for these other people, for the opportunities they had, for the culture and the experiences that they brought with them to the table. Never mind that, but just the material aspects of their life that made them look the part in a way that I didn't. And that was a really hard pill to swallow, feeling that jealousy and feeling that out, that otherness on day one and trying to carry that with you while creating your own success.

It's so easy to overlook our value in the legal world. It is like being back in junior high and everyone is smarter or prettier or wealthier or just better suited for the job than you are. In the legal profession, many of our colleagues are well traveled, highly educated at the best schools and private universities. They're wealthy, they're well dressed, they're well spoken, and they also have loads of more experience than you do.

even if it's just anecdotally or through family and friends that have been through the rigmarole before. And instead, here we are showing up having no context and no support. It's hard not to feel like it's just never gonna work and you're never gonna be one of them. When you spend your days thinking about your colleagues in that way and admiring their accomplishments, eventually all of those observations of others,

Autumn G Noble (08:14.318)
will turn inward to a self judgment and self discomfort. And it will outwardly manifest as jealousy if left unchecked. I like to think about jealousy as a two sided coin with jealousy on one side and self judgment on the other because the two are so interrelated. And I think back to those times in my life where I really felt out of place and I felt.

like I didn't fit in and that everybody had all these other things and skills and tools and backgrounds that I didn't have. And I remember that push and pull of judging myself for not having those things, but also being jealous of them for having it all and trying to carry that polarity with you while creating your success. So today, while we are gonna be focusing on jealousy, we do have to spend some time also talking about self judgment.

and consider with respect to both because they are so interrelated, do these emotions have a role in our lives? And if so, what purpose do they serve other than the pain that they generate? But before we dig into the utility of these emotions, let's just set a baseline here and recognize that whenever we find ourselves reeling from jealousy or envy, or we find ourselves feeling

less than and comparing ourselves to those around us. At some point, we have to stop and recalibrate or we're gonna run ourselves into a nervous breakdown. We have to find a better way to use those emotions. And that is what I wanna focus on today. Where I often find jealousy and self judgment creeping into our practices are a couple of common scenarios. First, there's that feeling that...

no one else is struggling and that everything is coming more easily to those around you than it has for us. In that space, we're envious and jealous of our colleagues that always seem to get the good feedback and they seem to be able to understand the project and execute it properly the first time and they garner admiration of the senior attorneys and of the partners and we become jealous of their ability to seemingly handle it.

Autumn G Noble (10:31.246)
and figure it out while we're kind of sitting here feeling like just we're hanging by a thread and at any moment the axe is gonna fall and we're gonna be without a job. That feeling of it's coming more easily to them is truly rooted in jealousy. Jealousy that we're not able to do it the way that they're doing it, that it's not as smooth for us as it is for them. Then there's the other scenario that I see all of the time. And that's when we try to execute boundaries.

and tell someone that we don't have the capacity for more work or a new project. And when we tell our bosses this, they respond by judging our workload. Well, you only built 50 hours last week, or you're not that busy, or everyone's busier than you are, or you're at the bottom of the hours list right now. When that happens, we bristle because there is a part of us that wonders if their judgment is right.

And there's a part of us that really wants to judge ourselves for even trying to set the boundary. Am I being lazy? Maybe I can't hack it like everybody else. They probably think I can't hack it. Everyone else is busy and they're not saying no to work. So why can't I figure this out? Why can't I manage it in the same way as everyone else? You can kind of see how those thoughts of initial self judgment very quickly will spiral.

into jealousy about everybody else's ability to seemingly continually take on more work and just be okay. Yet here we are trying to say no, and it's not working and people are judging us for it. And it causes us to question that boundary that at some point we decided that we needed. Their criticism and their questioning of that boundary, it hits a nerve.

because there is a part of us that is judging ourselves for not taking on the work and for not being able to do it in the way that everybody else seems like they can. There's a part of us that feels guilty for saying no, and their criticism calls to that part of us. That whole cycle of trying to set a boundary and having people question it, and then our self judgment is triggered, and then it becomes jealousy because other people don't need those kinds of boundaries to succeed, it just spirals out of control.

Autumn G Noble (12:46.734)
and it lands us in this place where others seem to be doing just fine and we're some weird outlier that's gonna be found out and fired. And so it ends kind of in the same place. And so you can see even in this simple day -to -day exchange of trying to set a boundary and having the boundary be challenged, it can really hit on and arouse our own self judgment and eventually spill over into jealousy.

Another scenario that I see all the time are women who are desperately wanting to leave law and revamp their careers, but they're really afraid of what their friends and their family and their colleagues would think. Their minds are filled with these worried thoughts of, you know, how could you walk away from all that money? And how could you leave all that prestige and all those years of schooling? How could you just walk away from that and go do something else? The majority of the women that I meet,

historically have given in to those pressures and judgments and they put their dreams on the shelf because there is a part of them that is similarly judging themselves for considering that type of a career change. They're agreeing with these judgments and questions that people are lobbing at them. At the same time as they're having that inner judgment and receiving judgments from others that they're kind of secretly agreeing with, they're looking around.

in jealousy towards other women who have done it, who have left, who have changed their career, who have done the thing that they're contemplating, but that they haven't accomplished just yet. And so it's almost like their own inner criticisms become this outward attack and jealousy towards the other women in their orbit who have done it. All of this is to say that our self judgments are not always explicit and easy to see.

They often hide underneath our worried thinking about what other people will think or under our own simmering jealousy. Most of the time, those self -judgments that are kind of hiding there will eventually boil over and create some form of jealousy that's not always that easy to see. And it often sounds like that imposter syndrome, right? I'm gonna be found out I don't fit in here like everybody else does.

Autumn G Noble (15:05.614)
Why does everybody have it come so easily to them, but not to me? That otherness is often a sign that there's some form of jealousy and self judgment going on as well. So this really leads us to our first takeaway. When you worry about being judged by others, it is a mirror reflecting back to you your own inner judgments. And what's more,

When you experience some form of jealousy and feeling like other people have it and you don't, or they figured it out and you haven't, it is a sign of your own self -judgments. And that's what I really want you to see. Worrying about other people's judgments is a sign of your own judgments. Jealousy itself is also a sign of some way that you're judging yourself in your life. Whenever you find yourself worrying about others' judgments about you,

know that those judgments bug you because there's a part of you that agrees with them and is just lobbing those same judgments right back at yourself. And that is your work to do. And that is what those emotions are trying to show you. It's a sign that you need to recalibrate your thoughts about yourself, your life, your worthiness. And that is what we often focus on in coaching. But I start this discussion today with self -judgment and the fear of self -judgments.

because it is the sneaky side of the jealousy coin. The other side of that coin is that our jealousy indicates our own self judgment. Whenever you experience jealousy, it's a sign that there's a part of your life that you're judging, likely unfairly. Our jealousy is a sign illuminating the life that we want and highlighting the parts of our own lives that we are unhappy with. But first, let me just own that.

Jealousy is a very normal and natural human emotion. And our work is not to judge ourselves for being jealous. Our work is to try and understand what that jealousy is trying to show you and what it can teach you. Because if we don't try and find that kernel of useful information in jealousy, that emotion,

Autumn G Noble (17:18.702)
will destroy everything that we are trying to build. It will erode us from the inside out. I recently had a session with my coach about this very topic. And anyone who is an entrepreneur or who has explored any type of a side gig or anything like that, any type of a new endeavor, it is not hard to go on social media and find other people.

who are touting how simple it is, right? I mean, if you do a simple search for side gigs on TikTok, you will find so many influencers who are telling you, it's so easy to make $10 ,000 a month doing this and doing templates on Etsy or whatever it is. There are so many people out there making it seem simple to do the things that we want to do.

If you wanted to become a life coach, there are a million people out there who will tell you how easy it is and how much money you can make and how quickly you can get there and create this massive success. Same thing for lawyers and building practices. My point is that there is plenty of fodder out there for you to see and take home and think, why is it working so much easier for everybody else and not me? What am I not doing right? How could they have created this massive success while I haven't figured it out?

They don't even seem that smart. They don't even have a doctorate. They don't even, you know, we have all of these observations of them that confuse us and make it hard for us to understand why they've created this massive success and we haven't. So you can see where this is going. It kind of creates this simmering jealousy. And I always tell any entrepreneur that when you're starting something new, any type of a path, the last thing that you need to do is compare the beginning of your story.

to the end of somebody else's. There's a lot that happens in the middle before that success is created, if it is even real success. And I say this because I fell victim to that trap early on in my coaching practice. I went to my own coaching session and I said to my coach, and I just don't understand why it's taking so long for this to take off. And I don't understand how all these other coaches that just don't...

Autumn G Noble (19:36.526)
seem to be that good at any of these things and they're not that great as speakers and they're not great writers or whatever. Why can they create all the success and I can't? And I was just so upset. And I said to my coach, like, I'm just so frustrated that I'm even having this emotion. It's not helpful. And I witnessed myself doing it and I don't want to feel this way anymore. And she starts laughing and she looks at me and she says, do you really think it's possible?

for any of us to evolve so much so that we no longer experience the very human emotion of jealousy. And then we just started laughing because it was so ridiculous. It was so normal to get caught up in those comparisons, to see the end of somebody's story and their success and wonder why it's not happening faster for us. It's a very natural human response. And so,

We have to have some compassion for ourselves when we get swept up into those things or when we just experience normal jealousy and not judge ourselves for experiencing it. Instead, we see it as an indicator that there's something there to teach us and something to learn. Because if we don't look under the hood of jealousy and try and find something useful,

Jealousy is going to continually whisper to us that we're losing at this game of life. That there is this race towards something bigger and better and fancier and the majority of us are just losing in comparison to somebody else. Which is interesting because by that logic, all of us are losing in comparison to somebody else's metric for bigger, fancier, better. Everyone's idea...

of that material success is gonna be very different. And so jealousy kind of sets up this game of comparison that we're never gonna win. It's for that reason then that I always say that jealousy is a liar because it tries to tell us that we aren't good enough as we are, which is the cruelest form of self judgment. Jealousy tells us that we need to do all of these other things and achieve these material things.

Autumn G Noble (21:54.478)
in order for us to be good enough. And that alone is a toxic fallacy about our lives and our own innate value. What's more, jealousy will try to tell us that we've been treated unfairly by life and that others had it easier and that they didn't have to work as hard for what they got as we're having to work to get there. And that really sets us on this path toward bitterness and anger.

And I will tell you that the actions that are gonna come from bitterness and anger are only going to confirm that we are in fact lacking in some way. The actions that come from those types of emotions are never gonna create the type of success that you're wanting. In fact, they just serve to keep us farther away from those goals and isolate us even more. When you think to yourself, I wish I had their life, why can't I have their luck? Why don't those things happen to me?

We often lash out at the people around us and we show up to our jobs and our relationships disappointed and wanting them to be different. We disconnect and we do the bare minimum. We don't take actions that would generate success or create the life we wish we had and think that we deserve. The net result is that we create a life that is not what we want it to be. Simply by carrying those angry thoughts around, we set ourselves up to fail.

We then create a life that is less than and create more reasons to continue judging ourselves and continue feeling like everybody else got a leg up at this game and that we're being treated unfairly by life. This is why I honestly think that jealousy is the cruelest form of self judgment because it's rooted in this kind of simmering anger that creates the exact opposite results that we're looking for.

the actions that will create the life that we want and the type of life that we could be jealous of won't be created from a place of anger, jealousy, and bitterness about your current life experience. So while we will all experience jealousy from time to time, we have to keep in mind that it's trying to teach us something about ourselves and we can't chase it and believe it because when we do, we get all those negative results.

Autumn G Noble (24:14.894)
Instead, we have to seek that kernel of information and let the rest of it go because jealousy is a liar. So instead, we have to ask ourselves, what is jealousy trying to teach you? Is it a lesson about what you really want or is your jealousy pointing you in the direction of a potential teacher? So first, what do you think your jealousy has to show you? Is it trying to show you the fallacy of the material chase?

Jealousy can be a reminder of how easy it is to get swept up into the comparison and material competition game. And it can simply be a reminder that like, yeah, you're a human and sometimes it's easy to get sucked into that race, even though intellectually we know that all of those material things are never gonna create the happiness that we're looking for. So sometimes when we find ourselves being jealous of others material gains.

it can be an opportunity for us to check in and say, you know, what are my real intentions? Do I want the material things or have I concluded that those aren't as important to me and that I want something else and more meaningful? And so it's an opportunity for us just to remember how easy it is to let jealousy persuade you that that's the right answer and that's the solution. On the other hand,

Is your jealousy trying to show you areas of your life that you've really been neglecting or that you truly want to improve, like your physical health? Especially with summer upon us and we're all going to be in those awkward situations where everyone's sitting around in bathing suits, looking at each other's bodies and you have those moments of jealousy about other people's physical fitness or other aspects of their bodies. It is often a sign that that's a part of our lives that we've been neglecting and that we want to do better at.

And so in that space, instead of letting our jealousy simmer and result in more judgment of our own bodies, we can instead see that as, okay, that's something that is important to me that I wanna recommit to and do something about. And that's what my jealousy is trying to show me. With that lens, we can find all sorts of useful data that the jealousy is trying to teach us. Is your jealousy trying to show you that you want more success or more money or better health?

Autumn G Noble (26:34.766)
That's really good information for you to have to decide how to move forward. Similarly, looking at who the target of your jealousy is and asking, is it possible that I could look to them for support and inspiration to achieve the same thing? One of my favorite ways to use jealousy is to see it as an indication of who your teachers are in this life.

Instead of looking at the lives of others and being jealous of their accomplishments or their possessions, why not look to them as inspiration? If they can do it, I can do it. I could do something like that. I'm lucky to have somebody like that in my life to inspire me and who can provide me with support to achieve the same things. From those thoughts, we can generate feelings of hope and motivation and excitement about the potential for our future instead of feeling jealous of these people.

And from that space, we can create anything that we want and follow in the footsteps of these teachers around us. In contrast to that, allowing jealousy to drive us closer to the people that we're jealous of can also allow us to see the reality of those whose lives we're jealous of. No one's life is perfect, but it's so easy to assume they are from a distance and that's where jealousy roots in.

It tells us that these people's lives are perfect and that they're amazing and they're good at all these things and everything is easy and effortless and seamless. But when we allow jealousy to show us who those people are that we're jealous of and instead we bring them closer, it can be a means to deconstruct our perfectionist visions of others. Up close, they might seem just as normal and boring and human as the rest of us.

And so we can use that jealousy to say, this is someone I'm jealous of, I'm gonna bring them close, I'm gonna learn to understand them and see this pedestal that I've put them on is real. And from there, we can change our whole perspective, not only on our lives, but these people that are triggering that nasty emotion in us. I firmly believe that the people we encounter in our lives are there for a reason. So rather than seeing people as,

Autumn G Noble (28:57.934)
more fortunate than we are, consider why are they in your life? What are they there to teach you? What are they there to show you or support you with? Maybe they are meant to be an example to you of what's possible and help lead you on your own path of growth. If so, you're missing a huge opportunity and a potential teacher by living in the jealousy rather than trying to see what it's showing you.

So how else can we leverage jealousy and how can we deconstruct the lies that it tells us? First, allow jealousy to help you get clarity around what you actually want, as I mentioned before. What is the jealousy trying to show you about what you're wanting more of in your life? What self judgments are related to that jealousy? And then using that information to chart your course forward,

and figure out the lesson. Next, maintain your perspective. Is your jealousy giving you tunnel vision? Jealousy sometimes develops in response to a partial picture of the truth. In other words, you might be comparing yourself and your own achievements and attributes to an idealized or incomplete view of somebody else, but you never really know what someone else is going through, especially when you're just looking at social media, which is why I say,

Allow your jealousy to sometimes push you closer to people so that you can get a clearer perspective on what is actually happening and the truth that you might not be aware of. Last, practice gratitude. A little bit of gratitude can go a long way. It can not only reduce feelings of jealousy, but it can also relieve stress. You might not have everything that you want. Most of us don't.

but you probably have at least some of what you want. Maybe you even have some good things in your life that you didn't expect. Even appreciating positive things in your life that don't relate to jealousy can help you realize that while your life may not be perfect, but whose life is, you've still got some good things going for you. Don't forget how far you've come. You're probably already living somebody else's dream and someone else is probably looking at you thinking that your life is

Autumn G Noble (31:16.206)
Perfect. Practice gratitude and try and reconnect with the truth of that statement. In sum, when jealousy prompts you to compare yourself to others, your self -worth can end up taking a massive hit. Your life is likely enviable to someone else, but jealousy can make you feel like nothing you have is good enough and that you're never gonna be able to achieve what other people have.

Anytime that we worry that we're being judged by others or anytime that we feel jealousy, it is a neon sign showing us our own work. Today, try to recognize where others' judgments bother you because it echoes the judgments that you hold for yourself. Similarly with jealousy, recognize when jealousy creeps in and see it as shining a light on aspects of your life where maybe you aren't as happy as you would like to be.

or maybe you're judging that part of your life. Practice using the jealousy in your life to get a better understanding of your relationship with yourself and what you want. And finally, consider utilizing that jealousy to show you the important people in your life that are there for a reason. What could you learn from them if you decided to get closer to them? What could they teach you? How could they help you? Recognize that jealousy is part of being a human, but also look under the hood and see what it's trying to show you.

It might be masking a teacher that is waiting to help you on your journey. All right, my friends, that is the end of our topic for today, but it is also the end of season one of the Lawyer Life podcast. We are taking a break for the summer, but don't worry, we will be releasing content and providing some hot takes from our prior podcast episode and hot takes from actual coaching sessions to keep you engaged in this work.

and providing you support over the summer in smaller bite -sized pieces. Be sure to check in. We will be launching again with season two this fall, and I hope that you will join us there. In the meantime, be sure to check out the show notes for all sorts of resources and tools to help you on this journey. And if we haven't met yet, please reach out, schedule a virtual coffee with me, schedule a free coaching consultation. You have nothing to lose and so much to potentially gain.

Autumn G Noble (33:38.798)
I can't wait to meet you and hear about your journey and your struggles and see how I can support you. Have a great summer everyone and be on the lookout for our first summer hot take coming to you in two weeks. Thank you all for joining me throughout this season. I appreciate all of the positive feedback and all of the positive reviews so much. Thank you so much for listening and thanks for sharing with your friends.