12 Ways to Know If Someone Is Secretly Competing with You
The world isn’t always sunny. We think we know a person, and the next thing we know, we’re finding out they’ve been actively sabotaging our success behind our backs. It hurts knowing someone you thought was a close friend was secretly competing with you. But anyone around you could be secretly eying your success, and if you don’t figure out who, you could be in trouble. So here are some signs that show when a person is competing against you.
They Downplay Your Achievements
No matter how big or small, an accomplishment is an accomplishment and deserves appreciation. A genuine person will always appreciate your achievements and even hype you up. However, a person who doesn’t have your best interests at heart will downplay your achievements and try to portray them as nothing special, so you’ll feel small for even trying to celebrate them.
They Always Try To One-Up You
If you’ve got a colleague or an acquaintance who always seems to one-up you, chances are, they’re not doing this accidentally. A person who envies the successes of others will try to one-up them in hopes of achieving the same result. They’ll treat everything like a race. A promotion or a specific milestone doesn’t mean much unless they beat you.
They Celebrate Your Failures
Failure naturally puts us down, but being reminded of it again and again is devastating. If you know someone who likes to rub your failure in your face, even if they play it off as a mistake, it’s time to recognize their problematic behavior. They might be celebrating your failures because they’re secretly competing with you, and like that, you couldn’t one-up them, even if you weren’t even competing with them.
They Constantly Compare
Comparison is the thief of joy. We all have our insecurities, so when someone compares our strengths and weaknesses against others, it fuels those insecurities and puts us down. Often, people who are secretly competing with you will compare your accomplishments against the successes of others in hopes of making you feel less small. For example, if you got a 20% pay boost, they’ll mention someone else’s 30% boost to make you look small.
They Copy Your Ideas
Competition often drives a person to do extreme things. You’ll realize a colleague or even a loved one is secretly competing with you when they begin to do the exact same thing as you and try to pass it off as their idea brazenly. They’re also often clever with it; they’ll change small details so you can’t take credit for it, essentially putting you at risk of being labeled dishonest.
They Exaggerate Their Successes
A person who’s secretly competing with others will always be desperate enough to brandish their own successes. They won’t just stop at that – they’ll exaggerate every accomplishment and achievement so it’s much more significant and praiseworthy. For example, they’ll tweak small things like GPA or salary boosts to be much higher than they actually are.
They Avoid Acknowledging Your Strengths
If you know someone who’s always singing about your weaknesses like a canary but never mentioning your strengths, they’re secretly competing with you. Such people can’t accept the successes and strengths of others because it would mean accepting their own weaknesses. The only way for them to keep it together is to avoid acknowledging others even have admirable strengths.
They Sabotage Your Plans
A mess once in a while can be an accident. But when someone constantly messes up your projects or activities, you know they do it purposefully. Sabotaging someone else’s success is often one of the most extreme steps taken in pure desperation and envy. The person can no longer handle hearing about your successes, so they’ll actively try to sabotage your plans.
They Avoid Collaboration
Many people who secretly envy your success also fear being outperformed. Such people will avoid collaborating with you on any projects because they fear that others will only appreciate your efforts and diminish theirs. It’s also because they secretly know they cannot measure up to your skills, though, of course, that’s mostly because of their own lack of confidence.
They Highlight Your Weaknesses
You could achieve the biggest accomplishment in the world, and yet someone who secretly envies you would only point out what you did wrong. Envious people can’t handle the successes of others, so they’ll always try to nitpick their accomplishments. They’ll be keeping a thorough eye on you because they’re always searching for moments when you screw up.
They Gossip About You
Backbiting is one of the tell-tale signs of a person who envies you. They won’t be able to resist gossip about you and might even fuel fire because they know it’ll help boost any negative perception about you. These people will jump at every chance to paint you negatively, hoping to diminish your successes.
They Exclude You From Opportunities
If someone actively tries to exclude you from different opportunities, you know they’re competing with you and don’t want you to move forward in life. Such people aren’t only envious, they’re also insecure and insensitive, so they exclude you from successful opportunities because they genuinely don’t care.
More For You
Does it feel like your boss is always watching over your shoulder? Micromanagement can make you feel frustrated and less confident at work. It can show up in small ways or be really obvious, but recognizing it is important. Here are some clear signs to help you know if your boss is micro-managing you.
This article was first published at Rbitaliablog.
