Ep #43: Jealousy and Envy

[0:00:09.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.4] What’s up brothers. Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud and I’m super excited about today’s topic because I’ve gotten a lot of request from you all to do an episode about jealousy and envy. Now, I think most of you call it jealousy but what I’m really going to be talking about today is both of these things because they’re related but they’re also very different.

It was super interesting preparing for this episode because once I stopped to think about it, I realized that I hadn’t done this topic. I’ve been talking about jealousy or envy because I don’t really have jealous or envious thoughts. They don’t really occur to me that this point in my journey, you know, as I continue to elevate my alpha and I’m able to teach and coach.

I love receiving episode request from you guys because then, I get to think back on purpose and my life and try to remember and I for sure used to have jealous and envious thoughts all the time and they were really intense and made me crazy. They made me into a crazy beta male, like I really manifested into this beta male behavior.

I figured out what changed, what was I jealous or envious of and why don’t I have these emotions anymore and that was super fascinating and so that’s why I’m really excited to share all of that with you. Now, some of the things that men are socialized. Again, socialization conditioning that beta condition.

Some of the things that men are socialized to have a lot of envy and jealousy about or around are things like appearance and wealth and women and status. That totally makes sense, right? It makes sense because number one, we’re socialized to think that our greatest value lies in our appearance or our social status or reputation or wealth or whatever that is.

Number two, that we need to have certain things to get love, right? To be accepted or to have happiness and then number three, we’re taught, the most erroneous of all things, which is to believe that men, each other, we, you and I are in competition for female attention.

[0:02:32.8] Check this out. If your appearance and wealth and social status are your greatest assets and you need to look a certain way and have these things and money to get women and love and be accepted and so on. And that’s what will make you happy and there’s not enough to go around so you’ve got to compete with other men to get it. Then how could you not be fixated on comparing yourself to other guys and how they look and how much money they have and their social status, right?

I mean, it’s completely normal. The cognition that creates jealousy and envy makes sense to me from that perspective, right? When we look at it from the beta condition, from this fear based scarcity survival perspective, it makes total sense, but it feels really bad, right? It makes sense but it just doesn’t feel good.

Now, fortunately for us, all those beta condition thoughts are lies. We know they’re lies. Okay, let’s get started guys, jealousy and envy. First of all, when I started writing about this and researching it, I was like, wait a minute. Are those the same thing? Jealousy and envy. How are they different? I want to start with how they are the same because you guys know how they are the same. Jealousy and envy are both emotions.

Let me even be more clear. They’re both feelings. Now, they could be a thought, right? If you think to yourself, I’m so envious that that guy earns 150k a year. Then that’s a thought and you go the word envy in your thought. But jealousy and envy in terms of when you feel that way, when you feel jealous when you feel envious. Those are feelings, right?

[0:04:03.1] They come from emotions. They are created by your thoughts and they are actually very different. Here’s the difference. By definition. Jealousy is when you fear that someone else is going to take away something you already have, okay?

For me, jealousy feels like anxiety. It’s like the resistance to fear. It’s like, I have this thing or I have this person and someone might take it away from me. Now I feel anxious about what the threats are, right? My brain is looking for the danger, looking for those threats. Envy is when you want something that someone else has.

With jealousy, it’s that you have it but you’re worried I could take it away from you, whereas envy is you don’t have it, someone else has it or some people in a general sense have it and you want it. For me, I had to really think back, right? To what envy was like, what it feels like and for me, it’s more like sadness because envy has this like sinking feeling whereas jealousy has this anxious feeling.

With envy I feel resigned like taken back, I feel cold and slow. Envy is like I want this thing and I don’t have it. With the emphasis with my brain emphasizing I don’t have that. To me, with that sinking, with that resignation, the closest thing I could think of is kind of like sadness. Here’s a real quick side note on emotions guys, emotions range in degree and kind and actually emotions range in kind whereas feelings range in degree.

[0:05:28.0] The variance in degree is much greater than the variance in kind so there are different anthropological theories about how many emotions there are basically and what the universal emotions that all cultures share. One theory is that there are five main kinds of emotion, right? There’s fear, happiness, anger, sadness and shame.

And any feeling we have is some kind of derivation or some kind of difference in degree or intensity of one of those five emotions. With jealousy or envy, I don’t think there’s a separate set of sensations in the body, there’s not a different emotion for jealousy or for fear. It’s just that there are different intensity.

Jealousy being a variation of fear when we’re thinking a thought that creates jealousy, what we feel in our body is actually a form of fear. It’s a degree or intensity of fear. When we’re thinking thoughts to hinge on envy, when we want something we don’t have, I think we feel a degree or variation of sadness, right? Which can range from a little bluesy to intense grief.

Envy is kind of like right in there in the middle somewhere. Jealousy and envy are descriptive emotions, we use jealousy to describe a degree of fear or anxiety that is created when you think about someone, maybe taking something away that you have and you’re jealous of them. And then envy being the version of the feeling of sadness that’s created in your body. When you think specifically about wanting something you don’t have that someone else has, that you want.

Little bit of side note on emotions, let’s get back to the episode. Jealousy is when you have something or someone but you think someone else can take it from you and you’re jealous of that thing that might get it from you. Envy is when someone else has something you want. In general though, I think idiomatically speaking, people tend to use those words fairly interchangeably.

[0:07:13.7] We kind of think of like jealousy and envy is the same thing but again, they’re very different, even though one of them is kind of like anxiety, like jealousy, right? One of them is more like sadness, at least for me, that’s how I experience them. Your experience may be different but they do have something very important in common. That’s really what I want you to think about.

What they have in common is this. This is the illusion. The belief that you need the thing or the person or experience that you’re thinking about to be happy. This is the classic beta conditional illusion, that your happiness, your emotion, your love or pride or confidence or any emotion comes to you externally by having, right, this thing, person or experience.

It could be that you have something or someone and you fear losing them or it or it could be that you don’t have it and you think you need it. But either way, the reason that jealousy or envy come up is that you are believing that you will be happy or happier with the thing or the person or the experience that you would be or are without it.

If it’s jealousy, you’re thinking, I need this thing to be happy and if it gets taken away from me, I’m going to be less happy. I need to be looking for danger and jealous of anyone who might take it away from me. That’s the beta condition trying to keep you safe, could you see that? Can you see how the beta condition is looking for danger?

[0:08:32.6] This thing makes me happy. I don’t want to be unhappy, if something takes it away from me, that thing is dangerous. The beta condition protects you, right? When it’s envy you’re thinking, they have that thing and I want it, if I had it, I’d be happier. That’s why it’s not so much fear, it’s more sadness, it’s like I don’t have this.

Now, that probably seems obvious and true to you that there are things that you’d be less happy if someone took away and more happy if you had. But remember brother, that is all the illusion of the beta condition that manifests into a beta male and all that comes with it, right? The suffering, the manipulation, the insecurity, the doubt, the fear, the blame, the anger, the hate, the complaining.

Your thoughts create your feelings, that’s it. What you have or who you’re with or what you own or where you live, none of that creates your feelings. I’ve been to over 45 countries in the world bro and I can tell you that there are people living right now in what you would consider appalling conditions and they are way happier than you are right now.

There are people who have everything that you could ever imagine, wanting in your life who are miserable, right? At any income level, in any life condition, there are people having different experiences, because their thoughts are different. When you feel jealous, it’s because you have something that you think you need to be happy. And, you think that there’s not enough of it to go around. If someone gets yours, you’re going to be unhappy and more than that, you believe your grip on this person, thing or experience is tenuous because when you think about it, you’re jealous, right?

[0:10:08.6] But check this out, if someone admires or says that they wish they had your beard, you’re not jealous. That doesn’t upset you. You’re not like my god, what if they get my beard, right? You don’t even think they can take it away from you. You know that your beard is yours. Even if they’re like, “I love your beard, I’m going to do whatever I can to get your beard”, even this creepy way. I mean, again, unless you were like tied to a chair in some weird basement and the person saying that was wearing a clown suit and they had a machete in their hand. That would be really terrifying.

If it’s just somebody saying that in normal conversation, you wouldn’t be worried. Because you know your beard grows out of your face and no one could take it away from you. But when someone admires or wants your partner or your job. Then you may feel jealous. If you do, it’s because you not only think that you need them or it to feel okay, right? To feel happy.

But you also think that they can be taken away from you. For example, if someone wants my job, I’m not worried, right? Because I know it’s mine. I created this job. I do it the way I do it because of exactly who I am. If someone tried to impersonate me, they wouldn’t be able to do this the same way I do.

No one can take that away from me. If someone comes up to me and says, I want your job, there’s no way I feel jealous about that, right? If someone says they want my wife, they want your wife, they want your girlfriend, you feel anxious and jealous. It’s because you think they have the potential to take that person, your partner away from you.

[0:11:40.9] Now, I get so many questions and calls about jealousy and they’re almost always from men who have wives or girlfriends and the same theme is always in them, right? It’s always like this. I have this partner, XYZ happened that she was texting or you know, I saw this dude hit on her and she was talking to this guy or whatever it is and now I’m so jealous and I can’t stop feeling and worrying about where she is and feeling jealous of anyone she spends time with.

You know, and all of that. The reason all those thoughts are coming up is because you’re believing, this is your thought, you’re believing, I need my partner to be happy and this person, this other person has the potential to take them away from me. That’s why you feel jealous, you have something but you’re afraid of losing it. That’s why it feels so anxiety producing, right? That’s why jealousy is a derivative of fear. Of course, most of the time, no one has said anything about wanting to take away what you have. Most of the time, no one has expressed any desire to do that.

You know, no one’s walking up to you and say hey, I’m going to flirt with your wife to see if I can steal her from you. Nobody does that. But you still feel jealous because of your thoughts that they might. This is where jealousy connects itself, confidence and worthiness which is so interesting because I want you guys to hear this.

Because jealousy isn’t just about believing, that you need something or someone to feel happy. It’s also about believing that someone else can take it away and believing that the reason someone could take it away is because you weren’t good enough to keep it. I think this is why jealousy makes people feel so insane.

Because they start to think about what it means about who they are. If you’ve ever been gripped by irrational jealousy, you know it feels like you’re possessed. This is why otherwise normal boundary, respecting honest men end up four layers deep in their wife’s email in the middle of the night.

[0:13:30.0] It’s like they’ve come to and they don’t understand how they got there, right? It’s like being on a drinking binge. It feels so unmanageable because there’s three levels of an unmanaged mind going on, right? Three levels. Number one, you’re believing that you need something external to feel okay, right? To be happy.

Often times, it’s your partner. People do have jealousy stuff about work or money or whatever else but I think a lot of us experience this in the context of intimate relationships and friendships sometimes. I have had some jealousy over a good friend making another new friend in the past but you know, let’s just say relationships in general but you’re believing you need something external to feel okay.

You need that partner, you need that friend, you need them to act a certain way. That’s number one. That’s the light, number one. Number two, You’re also believing you can’t guarantee keeping it and it’s like triggers, the beta condition. The fear of losing, right? The fear based anxiety. I need this person, I feel like I’m going to die if I don’t have them and also, I can’t guarantee that I can have them.

For your beta condition, there’s like a recipe for disaster, right? Your beta condition starts running around in your brain with a blindfold on and a Ka-Bar in its hand and starts stabbing around like a pin the tail on the donkey game. Just wreaks havoc on your brain and your mental space.

Then, number three, on top of all that, you’re believing that if someone else gets the thing away from you, right? That person, the time, whatever, it will mean they’re better than you, that you’re not worthy

[0:15:01.6] So of course people get crazed by jealousy. It’s like the trifecta of the thoughts that make you feel insane and I need this thing to be okay, right? I feel like I need this thing to be okay. I feel like I can’t guarantee keeping it. There’s danger, someone else is going to take it from you and if they do take it from me it is because I wasn’t good enough. Like that is the beta condition in a nutshell and you can see how that thinking manifests into beta male behavior.

So to be clear guys, this is why jealousy actually has no relation to whether someone else wants something you have or you might lose it. See I want you to know, a lot of the times nobody else wants what you have. It is an illusion. It is in your brand. It is not that you’re partner isn’t amazing, right? I am sure your wife, I am sure your girlfriend is absolutely wonderful, but no one is actually trying to get them. It is because it is really about your thoughts about yourself.

And your ability to create your own emotions and manage your own mind. That’s really what’s happening, that is what is creating the jealousy. If you believe that you need something external to feel okay about yourself and then if someone else is better than you then they can take it away from you then you are constantly going to be hyper vigilant and anxious about any possible threats, right? Because that is what the brain does, it looks for danger.

Like a subordinate, like a new employee at work who seems smart and competent, you are going to be jealous of any recognition they get because you think it means that they are going to take your job away from you and then you are going to feel like a failure, right? Or how about the muscular guy at the gym who is flirting with your girlfriend or even just hangs out close to her like in her space. You know that can look like flirting to us when we’re in our beta condition.

[0:16:31.6] Just some guy standing next to our girlfriend, so do you think that confident people feel jealous very often? Like that’s a question bro, do you think that confident people based on what I just told you about jealousy, do you think confident people feel jealous? And the answer is no because we don’t doubt that we deserve what we have and that we can keep it like that is the mindset of confidence. We deserve what is in our life.

We feel grateful and blessed to have what we have and we deserve that it belongs to us that we can keep it. Now being confident in that way, it doesn’t save you from the other problem. I want you to know if you are confident but you believe that you need something or someone to be happy you are still going to feel anxious, right? You’re still going to have fear about losing it but the anxiety is not going to turn in the direction of jealousy, right?

You are not going to be afraid that someone else would take it from you. You are going to be focusing your anxiety on something else like the person getting hit by a car, right? Because again, anxiety is fear. So you’ll still feel the fear it just won’t turn into the direction of that third party jealousy, someone taking it from you because it doesn’t have anything to do with you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are not going to be anxious. You are just not going to be jealous.

And I think the jealousy has to do with this belief that someone can take something away from us in a way that has to do with them being better than us. That is why when you elevate your alpha and really learn to create and use confidence, you don’t feel jealous anymore, right? It just won’t be as intense as jealousy because it is lacking the additional layer of attaching your self-worth to keeping the thing, right? So you will still have fear and anxiety just you will never fear jealousy.

[0:17:58.8] What about envy? So envy is different, right? Envy is the simpler of the two like the simple cousin because envy just means you want something that someone else has that you don’t and why do we want something that someone else has guys? Come on alphas, hit me with the answer. Shout it out, let me hear you say it. We only want something because of how we think it’s going to make us feel when we get it. We don’t actually want the thing, right?

We don’t actually want the million dollars or the fast car or the beautiful girlfriend or the six pack abs. We just want the way we think we’re going to feel when we have those things. We want the pride, the sense of accomplishment, the happiness, the confidence, that is what we want. When we want something we don’t have is because our brain predicts that we will feel better when we have it and that means really that it is a prediction about what we think if we have it.

Because how we feel is based on how we think. So stay with me on this, thoughts create feelings. If you are single and you are envious of men who have a wife or a girlfriend is because your brain predicts that you would be happier if you had a partner but why would you really be happy if you are? It won’t be because of the partner, right? It will be because of your thoughts. Right now, your thought about not having a partner or something like there’s something wrong with me.

I am unlovable. So your brain thinks that getting a partner would feel amazing because it would prove that there isn’t something wrong with you but that is actually what your brain is predicting is that it would like to think “Oh I am loveable” it is just that thought it wants to have and your brain thinks that external circumstances cause your thoughts when you are in your beta condition, right? That is the illusion. So your brain says, “Well if we want to think that we are loveable we have to get a girlfriend who loves us.”

[0:19:37.9] And that’s will what let us, that will give us permission to think that we are lovable but that’s not how it works, bro. That is never how that works. You are already loveable. There already isn’t anything wrong with you. You know these are thoughts, these are lies that your brain is telling you. Your brain always tells you, “If you just get this thing, I am going to let you feel good about yourself” right? I am going to give you permission to be happy but that’s not how it works.

If you currently believe that something is wrong with you, changing your external circumstances won’t change that. Your brain will continue to think there is something wrong with you. It is just lying to you and it says that it won’t. So when we are envious, we think that if we had what someone else has, we would be happier and it does relate to self-confidence a little in the sense that often the reason why we want the thing is that we predict we could think that we’re good enough, right?

Enviousness can be intense. It doesn’t feel as out of control as jealously does at least in my experience but it can be intense when it relates to self-confidence in that way and it can be very preoccupying mentally. Now one of the reason why I really love teaching in my coaching program the way I do and one of the reasons I teach the way I do is that there are men in all life situations. So there are men who are single and who are so envious of their dating or married friends.

And they are convinced that being married or having a girlfriend will make them happy and then there are my brothers who are married and they’re not happy and they might be perfectly happy in their marriage. It doesn’t mean they have a bad marriage but it has not solved all their problems and made them feel inherently worthy and loveable. You know they just are looking for some other thing to do that and most of them thought that they could get it from their marriage.

[0:21:13.9] And then they got married and it didn’t solve their problem and now they are looking for the next thing, right? Or there are men who are so envious of other people who have a lot of money and they think if I were rich then I would feel amazing, I would feel good enough. I would feel safe, I would feel secure. Then there are men who are in my program who have more money than the other guy has that has ever dreamed of and they think they need even more.

And then they would feel safe or they need a partner or whatever it is and of course this is completely normal, right? We see this all the time, they are lean, well-muscled, wealthy married successful men all over the place who are absolutely miserable, brother. If you know any of them, you know this but our brains tell us that if we just had what they had we’d be happy even though there is so much evidence to the contrary around us.

Check this out, when I was running my gym I discovered the secret that led me on the search for cognitive mastery. I watched over and over again, men and women come into my gym wanting to lose 100 pounds so they could be confident and love themselves and then go and lose a 100 pounds and look amazing and still not be confident and love themselves. Now I have talked about this on the podcast before but when I was thinking about envy, one of the things that really came to mind was one of the ways that I cured my envy of tall, conventional handsome men.

You know I am 5’9”, 5’10” so my thought, my beta condition is that I was short. You know I used to believe I am a short guy and what I did to cure myself of that envy of that thought that I am not good enough because I am short is to use the thought all being suffers. Now especially when this guy, this person I was envious of when he had a conventionally beautiful woman because that was just more evidence for me because my brain was like, “well that’s it that’s the dream.”

[0:22:51.4] Like if you are 6’3” 225 pounds and 6% body fat and your girlfriend looks like she came out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog then you have no problems, right? Your whole life is happiness but of course that is not true, right? That is my old beta condition running lies in my brain and what I discovered running my gym is that all beings suffer. You see that guy, that Adonis who has money and success and status and power, he trained at my gym.

In fact, a lot of them did. I had a lot guys that were just like this. Some of them are married, some of them are dating, some of them have girlfriends that looked like they were underwear models, right? Now I trained with these men and I drank with these men and I counseled these men and every single one of these men was absolutely miserable. Brother I am telling you that external circumstances not your appearance, not your wealth, not your power or status.

Not the relationships that you have are going to make you feel good about yourself. It has to do with your thoughts. If your thing may not be appearance, it may not be the way your body looks or your height or your body fat percentage, you know mine was height. It may be money, it may be profession or maybe the family that you want or the trophy wife or girlfriend, whatever it is but if you think about it, you almost always know someone who has the thing that you think you want and they aren’t happy.

You think that if you had what they have, you would be happy but they have that thing and they are not happy. So I was constantly practicing thinking all being suffers consciously and intentionally. I was drilling that and discovering the secret changed my life because it was one of the first times I used cognition to determine my identity. The more I thought all beings suffer, the less I was envious and the more I became compassionate.

[0:24:25.1] Nothing outside of you will create happiness within you, brother. Nothing in the world will protect you from negative emotion or make you happy forever, but that is what envy is and I think envy is when we think if I had that thing then I wouldn’t feel bad. It is important like negative emotions is a part of life and both positive and negative emotion are caused by our thoughts. It is not your job, it is not your partner, it is not your money, it is not your hair or your face or your height or your muscles.

It is not your friends, it is not your style, it is not your clothes. Nothing you covet that someone else has, nothing you feel envious about creates their feelings or will create your feelings. All circumstances are neutral. You only want it because you think it will make you happy but happiness is available to you now through your cognition and the deepest irony of this whole thing is that the only reason you’re unhappy is that you’re thinking you need the thing, right?

When it comes to envy, you think the thing will make you feel happy when the truth is actually the thing that is making you unhappy because you think you need it and you don’t have it. Like there is nothing wrong with being single, right? And being single doesn’t actually cause negative emotions, negative feelings. What causes negative feelings is thinking I shouldn’t be single, “If I had a partner I’d be happy” you know we cause the dissatisfaction with our thought.

And then we think, “Well the only way to solve the problem is to get the partner” which is insane, right? It feels completely normal because it is the way we all live. You know we believe that the propaganda causes the dissatisfaction and then we believe the propaganda and then we try to act on it to solve the dissatisfaction. Are you guys following me? Okay, check this out. The only reason you feel bad is your thought that you need the thing to feel good.

[0:26:03.4] If you didn’t have the thought that you needed the thing, there would be no problem. If you stop thinking you needed the thing that you were envious of, you wouldn’t be dissatisfied. Then there would be nothing to cure because there would be no problem. You just wouldn’t want the thing. Your current thoughts are what are creating your unhappiness. If you change your thoughts that what will solve your problem. It is the only thing that will ever solve your problems.

Brothers, that’s what I got for you today. We are very close to our 30 minute cut off guys. I love you guys, you are amazing. Check this out, if you are out there and constantly comparing yourself to how other men look or what other men have, right? If you are scanning a room where you walk in and to see if other guys are taller than you or fitter than you or have more hair than you or whatever your body preoccupation is or if you are using income, wealth or education.

Or anything else to compare yourself or your worth to other men or other people, you need to come and sign up for the Indomitable Self-Confidence class 002 that starts in September. Brother, your worth, your amazingness has nothing to do with other people and it is total and complete right now. The indomitable self-confidence class is an eight-week course aimed at imbuing you with the skillset of creating and using indomitable self-confidence to drive massive action and get impossible results.

This course is a product of thousands of hours of coaching hundreds of students, brother. The results that you get from the indomitable self-confidence class will change your life I guarantee it. I would love to see you guys register for this course. Until next week, as always, my brothers out there, you alphas elevate, activate, use your alpha, you’re the man. See you next week.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:27:55.5] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.