Dealing with Workplace Resentment: The Empathetic Way

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Steven Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome to the show. We've got myself, Steven Sakach. We've got Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Let's get rolling. So at the time we're recording this, we've just gotten through the holiday season. And for many people, that brings up a range of emotions, good and bad. The past several years, those family get-togethers have been especially tricky to navigate. You've got the aunts, the uncles, the cousins, brothers and sisters coming to the dinner table, and they're all sitting down with all the different opinions, all that past history, and suddenly the table starts turning into the airing of grievances, right? And then that turkey on the table ends up being stuffed with resentment. And so that's our topic today. It's resentment.
And it's a connection killer. It's an empathy killer. It's a productivity killer. And maybe if you pay close attention, there might be a business idea in there somewhere along the line. So we're going to talk about a couple hugely successful companies that were started off of that idea of resentment and turning a company's pain point into an advantage and an opportunity. But first, Tullio Nash, when you think of that sort of work-related resentment scenario, what are you picturing? Tullio, let's start with you.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:33)
Well, I'm picturing this sense of feeling really disempowered, really tied to what I call the ultimate victim consciousness, feeling like you've been wronged. There's a great sense of injustice. That you experience. And I've been there more than once. And all it does is just consumes that. You show up to work and that's all you can think about is how that person did this or that to you or how they wronged you. And it just keeps eating at you. And to the point where it almost feels debilitating.
But it's just an awful feeling. You just don't feel your full self and you don't feel motivated. You're just kind of going through the motion. And not exactly the kind of exciting feeling you would want to have showing up at work and being a contributor. So just not a good feeling all around.

**Steven Sakach** (2:40)
Yeah, I think that word like unfairness that you said is really one of the keys to how the resentment starts is something where there's just some bit of injustice or unfairness in there. Ash, what about you? What kind of scenario do you picture?

**Ash Maher** (2:57)
I have to piggyback off that a couple of words there. One, injustice, debilitation. Those are the feelings that you feel. But typically, I have a thought process here that comes from feeling threatened in your environment as well. If you have an environment that's focused on the results you drive for that business and you feel that everyone ties you to that result, and let's just say hypothetically speaking, you're not maybe achieving those results, but someone else is. When feelings of envy, jealousy start to come about because you're creating an environment where people's values determined on what they can produce, well, now you have an environment, now you're playing with fire a little bit. Because that person that has a positive attention, you may look at them negatively because you already feel threatened in your space regardless. So going back to those feelings that can come from that debilitation, that feeling of unfairness, you feel like that victimhood mentality, all of that really typically stems from a feeling of just not feeling safe in your environment.

**Steven Sakach** (3:55)
Yeah.
What reminds me, I had some friends that came to me recently were going through this problem where they had the sort of work life, family life issues where they couldn't find that right balance. So I picture like a working mom who's at work, and she wants to advance and do all those things, and at the same time has obligations to the family, and so the family sometimes may feel pulled apart, or if she goes home and someone else isn't pulling their weight, and they're depending on her to do too much, in addition to her career. Or you picture her friends who have the job of being a mother, but don't also have a career like her, and they want to do X, Y and Z. And I just picture like there's a whole bunch of ways that dynamic can come to play, and I had some friends who were kind of going through that, whereas that sort of tug of war of that unfairness in parenting and things like that, and how it had some impact on work, or how the work came home with them. So it's definitely this balance. That scenario just comes to mind just because it happened recently with some of my friends. Ash, what's interesting to me is, there's some neuroscience on the topic of resentment. What have you found on that?