There is an aspect of personal and professional growth that we do not talk about enough.
Sometimes, as you advance in your career, your craft or something you care deeply about, your friendships change.
For a dancer, advancement might mean improving rapidly, being cast in significant roles, winning competitions, gaining professional opportunities or developing greater confidence in their artistic identity.
For a studio owner, it might mean growing a successful school, becoming more visible within the industry, receiving invitations to teach or speak, developing new projects, or becoming increasingly clear about the direction of their work.
These experiences can be deeply fulfilling. They can also change the social landscape around us.
Psychological research helps explain why.
Success happens within a social system
We tend to think about achievement as an individual process.
You work. You practise. You take risks. You develop your skills. Eventually, something begins to shift.
Socially, however, your development is occurring within relationships that already have established patterns.
Friendship groups develop their own norms, identities and informal expectations. People become accustomed to who everyone is within the group.
Then somebody changes.
They become more successful, visible, confident, ambitious or professionally recognised.
The friendship group may need to psychologically reorganise around that change.
Sometimes friends become genuinely excited. They ask questions, celebrate opportunities and take pride in watching someone they care about develop.
Sometimes something more complicated occurs.
Your success can become someone else’s comparison
Social comparison theory proposes that human beings naturally evaluate themselves partly through comparison with other people.
This means that when someone close to us succeeds, their progress may become information about our own lives.
Where am I going?
Am I doing enough?
Why hasn’t that happened for me?
What happened to the things I wanted?
These thoughts do not necessarily mean someone is selfish or a poor friend. Social comparison is a normal psychological process.
Upward comparison, comparing ourselves with someone who appears to be doing better in a particular area, can inspire learning and motivation. A dancer might watch another dancer improve and become curious about their training. A studio owner might see a colleague develop an innovative program and begin thinking more expansively about their own work.
Someone else’s development becomes information.
The comparison can also become psychologically threatening.
Why the success of a friend can feel surprisingly personal
Psychologist Abraham Tesser’s Self-Evaluation Maintenance model provides a particularly useful explanation.
Tesser proposed that our responses to another person’s performance are influenced by factors including how psychologically close we are to them and how relevant their area of achievement is to our own sense of identity.
This creates an interesting paradox.
Sometimes the success of a stranger is easier to celebrate than the success of a close friend.
Imagine two dance teachers who began teaching around the same time. They attended the same competitions, shared similar frustrations and regarded themselves as peers.
Ten years later, one begins receiving significant professional opportunities.
If professional recognition is deeply important to the other teacher’s identity, their friend’s success may create an uncomfortable psychological comparison.
Research associated with the Self-Evaluation Maintenance model suggests that superior performance by someone close to us can become more threatening when that performance occurs in an area relevant to our own self-definition.
Closeness, therefore, does not necessarily remove comparison. Sometimes it intensifies it.
What healthy friendship looks like around success
There is another pathway.
When another person’s achievement does not overwhelm our own sense of self, we can enjoy watching someone we care about flourish.
Research on capitalisation examines what happens when people share positive events within relationships. Active and constructive responses to another person’s good news, showing genuine interest, enthusiasm and engagement, are associated with greater relationship wellbeing.
Think about the difference between telling someone about an exciting opportunity and hearing:
That’s incredible. Tell me what happened.
and receiving:
Oh, cool.
followed by a change of subject.
The event is the same.
The relational experience is very different.
Over time, these small responses can tell us something about whether our growth has room within a relationship.
Envy deserves a more intelligent conversation
Envy is frequently treated as a character flaw. Psychological research offers a more nuanced picture.
Researchers have distinguished between benign envy and malicious envy.
Benign envy can contain admiration and motivation. Someone else’s achievement highlights something we also value, which may stimulate greater effort or development.
Malicious envy is associated more closely with wanting the advantaged person to lose their position or advantage.
This distinction matters enormously within competitive environments such as dance.
Difficulty arises when uncomfortable comparison begins to be managed by diminishing the person who triggered it.
Within friendships, this does not always appear as obvious jealousy.
It can be considerably more subtle.
There may be less curiosity about what you are doing. Achievements that once would have been celebrated receive little acknowledgement. Success may be attributed primarily to luck or connections. Humour can begin carrying a slight edge. Someone may become noticeably warmer when things go wrong. In some groups, distancing, gossip or criticism can emerge.
None of these behaviours in isolation proves that someone feels threatened by another person’s success. Human relationships are far too complex for that conclusion.
Patterns, however, are worth noticing, particularly when warmth appears to decrease as one person’s success increases.
There is another side to this
Growth can genuinely change us.
A dancer who becomes increasingly successful may have less time available. A studio owner building a significant business may become preoccupied with work. Professional opportunities can introduce new networks, priorities and interests.
Sometimes friends are responding to genuine changes in the relationship.
Someone saying, I feel like I don’t see you anymore, deserves different consideration from someone repeatedly diminishing your achievements.
Successful people also benefit from remaining curious about the impact their growth has on the people around them.
Achievement does not exempt any of us from relational responsibility.
Healthy friendships can tolerate differentiation
Perhaps one of the most important capacities within adult friendship is differentiation.
Two people do not have to remain psychologically or professionally equal for a friendship to survive.
One dancer can become professional while another chooses university. One studio can expand while another deliberately remains small. One person can become increasingly visible while another values privacy.
Healthy relationships have enough psychological flexibility for people’s lives to develop differently.
This becomes particularly important in dance because comparison is already embedded within the environment.
Dancers encounter casting, examinations, competitions, auditions and scholarships. Teachers and studio owners are surrounded by enrolment numbers, competition results, social media visibility, student achievements and professional recognition.
Without awareness, professional comparison can quietly enter personal relationships.
Emotional maturity does not require the absence of envy
You may love somebody deeply and still experience envy when something wonderful happens for them.
Both experiences can coexist.
The psychologically important question is what you do with the feeling.
Envy can become an opportunity for self-reflection:
What does their achievement represent to me?
Is there something I want that I have stopped pursuing?
Am I measuring my life against somebody else’s timeline?
What part of my identity feels threatened here?
We do not need friends who never experience insecurity. We need relationships where people have enough self-awareness to take responsibility for what they do with it.
When you are the person advancing
If you are currently developing rapidly in your dance career, studio, leadership, creative work or professional life, you may notice some relationships changing.
Resist immediately interpreting every change as jealousy.
Stay curious and look for patterns.
Notice who remains interested in you as a whole person. Notice who can celebrate your development. Notice who can also tell you when your behaviour has affected them. Pay attention to whether you continue offering that same generosity to others.
And notice the relationships in which you are allowed to evolve.
As our lives develop, friendships sometimes need to develop with them.
Some relationships deepen because there is enough security for both people to continue becoming themselves. Others reveal how much of the connection depended upon remaining similar.
There can be grief in discovering that. There can also be considerable insight.
Perhaps one of the quieter measures of a mature friendship is this:
Can I remain connected to you while your life expands in a direction that asks me to confront something about my own?
For dancers, teachers and studio owners working within highly comparative environments, that may be one of the most important relational capacities we develop.
Research informing this article
This article draws on Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory; Abraham Tesser’s Self-Evaluation Maintenance model and subsequent research on friendship and self-evaluation; research distinguishing benign and malicious envy; and relationship research examining interpersonal capitalisation and responses to positive events.