4 Tips For Surviving Ambitious Colleagues
Work-related stress is one of the main causes of discomfort in the Western world. While this uncomfortable feeling can occur for a variety of reasons, one of the most important factors contributing to its increase is ambitious peers.
In the environment of modern companies, where teamwork is so necessary, it is very easy to feel unmotivated due to the strategies implemented by this type of colleague. Ambitious colleagues will do anything to always get along, even lie, so it’s very difficult to collaborate with them without looking bad.
So if you want to improve your job satisfaction and get rid of the stress that grips you so much, you will need to learn to manage the relationship you have with this type of person. The goal is to make sure they don’t affect you by learning to set boundaries and distance. In this article, we’ll talk about the best tips.
1- Be independent from your ambitious colleagues
The simplest way to survive ambitious peers is to do what their attitudes don’t affect you. If you are solely responsible for your own project, or if you have a work team made up of people you trust and respect, your toxic partners will have no power over you.
The problem with ambitious peers is not that they exist, but that you grant them the ability to affect your life. So if you get the chance, start your own projects yourself; or if you are a person who needs to work as a team, be sure to associate with people with whom you can establish an interdependent relationship.
2- Feel free to ignore them
Most people feel morally obligated to help others. When someone is in trouble, even if it’s something that doesn’t affect our lives, we tend to worry about that person and do everything in our power to improve the situation, even if it hurts us.
Ambitious colleagues know this perfectly well and are taking advantage of the situation. Since they don’t mind using others to achieve their own ends, they ask for help knowing they will receive it no matter what. If you want to survive this kind of person, the second step is to learn to say no.
While it is difficult at first to be assertive with your peers, you need to think about your interests and, above all, how you will be negatively affected.
3- Learn to control your emotions
According to cognitive psychology, what affects us is not what happens to us, but what we tell ourselves what happened. In the case of ambitious colleagues, the point is quite clear: the problem is not that they behave in an unpleasant way, but that we allow ourselves to be affected by them.
Your next task is to try to make sure their way of behaving doesn’t make you feel bad. For that, the simplest thing is to focus on finding the irrational ideas you have about how your coworkers should act towards you.
What we think most about an ambitious colleague is that “he should behave differently”. Maintaining this belief creates discomfort, after all, reality is not what you want it to be. However, instead of trying to change his behavior (which is very difficult to achieve), your best bet is to accept that this is the reality. This way you will notice that your negative emotions will quickly diminish.
4- Separate work from the rest of your life
The worst consequence that working with ambitious colleagues can have is to let their presence make your life more bitter, even outside office hours. This often happens when we are stressedor irritated by problems at work: we come home and keep thinking about it, making us not only feel bad at work but also feel bad at home.
To avoid this problem and to disconnect from the problems of work, you can play sports, some relaxation exercise or mindfulness. It’s about taking your attention away from the problems at work and learning to live in the present connected with yourself. While it might be a little tricky at first, these strategies will help you survive your toxic companions and feel better.
