I was listening to an interesting programme on Radio 4 last week where they covered the topic of schadenfreude. What is fascinating to me is that we don’t even have an English word for this concept. The phenomenon it refers to – as shown in the painting above is, ‘pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune’, and a direct translation of the two nouns that comprise the word are “damage” and “joy”. My own reflections about it not being a word in English, is possibly that it is a feeling we might be ashamed of admitting to ourselves or others, and if we don’t have a word for it – it cannot be named! Yet it exists and the programme went on to say that during the pandemic, it was a much-googled phenomenon. What might your reflections on that be?

So -why bring it to a coaching story? I think the feeling of schadenfreude – can – if tuned into – give us clues about what we might be missing in our own or in our client’s lives. What is it that the ‘other has’ that is causing the feelings of envy. Is the schadenfreude purely that my client/ me are happy to see someone I perceive as ‘one up’ from me toppled? I suggest it is usually more complex than that.  The programme went on to say that we tend to experience the feeling more when we perceive the person as ‘one up from us’ and we are more likely to feel sympathy for other’s we see as having lower social standing than us. As a coach I think it is useful to know something about this concept as it can help us get closer to what might be really going on for our clients and us. By naming it and raising awareness of it – all be it a possibly difficult thing to own and acknowledge – we can start to work with it and unlock more of our own experience.