How to Make Envy Work for You (with Stacy Kim, PhD)

Hello, hello,

Stacey.

I am so excited to welcome you to Edit Your Life today.

Hello, Korean to Korean.

I'm so excited about this, Christine.

Thank you so much for having me.

I've been looking forward to this.

Well, I'm so excited about your new book.

I will have mentioned it already in the intro and I will link it in the show notes and encourage people to buy all of the copies.

So let's dive right in because I have some juicy questions for you and I'm hoping you can help us all flip the script as it were.

So most of us have been taught

that envy is bad, something to hide, something to feel shameful about.

You recommend a shift of lens that I think is really wonderful, that envy can be useful and a tool for change and growth.

Can you share why you believe this to be the case?

Yeah, I, well, as we mentioned, we're both Korean American.

I grew up in Korea and in Korea, there's a different attitude towards envy.

I think here in the US, we see it as something to be embarrassed about, shameful.

Many consider it a deadly sin.

And, you know, it's something to be embarrassed about.

But in Korea, there are two different words for envy.

And one is 부러움 and one is 시기.

And you never hear about 시기, which is the one that's more closely aligned to the malicious envy that researchers have defined.

부러움, however, 부럽다 or 부러워요, that's something that's aligned to benign envy.

and so social scientists have like kind of outlined or found two different types of envy and we here in english we don't have those two words and so when we think about envy we naturally think about like the negative type and we're not aware of the Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.