16 undeniable signs someone is jealous of your success

People will meet your success with a variety of reactions. Some may praise you, congratulate and support you.

Others, however, will try to bring you down.

They give half-hearted congratulatory messages, bring up a failure in a time of a win, and ultimately seek to downplay the achievements you’ve worked so hard for.

These are people jealous of what you have achieved. Spending too much time with a jealous person can be toxic.

It will only serve to drain your energy and diminish the value of your success if you aren’t careful.

Understand these 15 signs of a jealous person to help you be aware of who to avoid.

1. They Tend To Do Exactly What You Do

It’s common to think it flattering when someone follows in your footsteps.

It can feel like you’ve made a positive change in the world and affected the life of at least one person.

Such copying, however, can come from a negative place.

When jealous people copy you, they aren’t doing it out of inspiration — they’re doing it to become you, to be a clone, to take away your individuality.

They copy anything from your attire, way of speaking, and even down to your mannerisms.

Instead of finding their own path, they’d rather do exactly what you do to keep up with the successes they haven’t achieved in theirs.

2. They Dislike You For No Apparent Reason

Not everyone is going to like us.

Our behavior and mannerisms might put others off.

Even if we think we’re being helpful with them, some will still find a way to grow resentment.

Jealous people tend to have low self-esteem.

This causes the presence of high achievers to make them feel in danger. It threatens them.

They have difficulty accepting the fact that they aren’t as good as they thought. So they cultivate a dislike towards you for no rational reason.

3. They Attribute Your Success To Luck

People say that they want to be successful but they aren’t willing to put in the hours of learning and growing to achieve it.

Because of this, they don’t understand the true, difficult reality of success.

Jealous people refuse to acknowledge that it was your skills and determination that got you successful; they’d rather pass it off as dumb luck or forces beyond your control.

It was because you were born in a family of means, not because you spent months hustling; or because your boss was just feeling good the day he promoted you, instead of the months of hard work you did.

4. They Try To One-Up You

Jealous people always see achievements as competitions.

They feel uncomfortable when someone is performing better than them.

They want to prove to others that they’re just as good — or even better.

They strive to outdo others to put the attention back to them as they can’t stand being ignored.

5. They Don’t Give Genuine Compliments

It’s natural to want to give others compliments for a job well done; we want to support the success of others.

What a jealous person does, however, is compliment someone half-heartedly.

This can be seen when they’re either showing a little too much support, or if the compliment has an insult folded inside of it.

If you’ve just gotten a promotion, they might say something along the lines of “Good job, but I’m surprised they went with someone who doesn’t have much experience.”

6. They Ruin Plans

When you’ve got a celebratory event planned, jealous people will always be the first to say what might go wrong or why it’s a bad idea.

They’ll also be too controlling of the event, telling people what to do and getting ahead of you to show that they could plan it better than you.

Jealous people just want the spotlight. They want to be seen as someone who’s got it all together.

They can’t stand it when they’re forced to follow another person’s plans, and they’ll constantly point out the flaws of the event on the day itself.

7. They Don’t Give Helpful Advice

When we ask for advice from other people, especially our friends, we expect that they know better than us — we’re seeking some kind of guidance, after all.

Jealous people, however, aren’t very willing to help another person out, lest they get knocked off their imagined social ranking.

So asking a jealous person for advice is fruitless.

They’ll tell you what you can do, but it’ll never be the best solution for your problem because the best is already reserved for them.

That’s why it’s important to be wary of the advice that you receive. Take a moment to pause so that you don’t blindly accept it.

8. They Like To Make You Look Bad

We’ve all made mistakes in our past; our younger days are littered with them.

Even though we’ve all moved past it, jealous people tend to still use a previous mistake as leverage over you.

They’ll always try to find a way to bring up an embarrassing story about you, sometimes even in inappropriate times such as when you’re meeting someone new.

What they’re afraid of is that other people might end up outshining them; they can’t have that.

9. They Gossip About You

Jealous people secretly feel like they aren’t good enough at what they do.

They worry about their skills, abilities, and above all, what other people think of them.

If you’ve achieved the success they didn’t, they wouldn’t want you to take all of the spotlight.

So what they do instead is to talk about you behind your back, almost like a political smear campaign.

They want to tarnish your reputation and bring you down; if they can’t succeed, then no one can.

10. They Aren’t There When You Need Them

Success isn’t achieved without failure along the way. It’s at those low moments that we often reach out to our closest friends.

One of the marks of a healthy friendship is when you’re there for each other in times of need.

When a jealous person sees that you’re having trouble, they’ll hesitate to help you — even if you’ve already helped them before.

So if your “friend” isn’t there for you when you’re always there for them, that might be a glimpse of their true colors.

11. They Enjoy It When You Fail

In times of failure, jealous people aren’t the ones to help you back up and say “I know you can do it, just keep going”.

They’re the ones that stand on the sidelines and yell “I told you so!” They like being right about your failure.

They believe that you’ll fail because they’re projecting their insecurities on you. Since they couldn’t achieve success, then should anyone else do it?

12. They’re Rude To You

Bullying can happen beyond school grounds.

Bullies in the workplace tend to put a spotlight on your flaws to deflect any attention on their own.

They also tend to have a specific target for their rude behavior.

This obsession with you comes from a place of insecurity and jealousy.

They want what you have but they can’t get it, so they hate and punish you for it.

13. They Don’t Care If You Succeed

In every success, there’s always going to be a jealous person that thinks that it wasn’t hard as you said it was.

They seek to invalidate the hours spent with your head down, on your path to success. They see success as so easy that anyone can do it; you aren’t special.

Instead of supporting you, they might say, “Of course you’d win that pitch. It’s easy.” What jealous people don’t understand is that it takes hard work to make it look easy.

14. They Drain Your Energy

Jealous people can have turbulent emotions, most of the time passive-aggressive when being with you.

They get ticked off by your smallest actions and launch into arguments not worth having.

Their harmful words will also suck the fun out of whatever you’re doing. It might eventually demotivate and discourage you from pursuing your dreams.

If you have a friend who’s constantly nagging you and telling you that you can’t do it, it might be best to keep some distance from them.

15. They Gravitate Towards You

Even though jealous people tend to hate you, they can’t help but be drawn to you.

They want to feed off of your energy.

You’re the person that they never became, so they see something inside of you that they desperately want.

They could even be obsessed with you, always wanting to know what you’re up to. It’s like a case of keeping their friends close but their enemies closer.

Being around jealous people could have its positives, however.

It can add fuel to your fire, which could motivate you to prove them wrong.

Their doubts and insults might help you work twice as hard to achieve success once more.

It could, however, go the other way.

If you aren’t careful, their words might become too piercing and discouraging.

This is why the possible best option for you, when surrounded by jealous people, is to keep focusing on your own life.