The foundation of an effective strategy to make more friends or become a better communicator at work is eliminating neediness from your vibe. I’m going to repeat and stress this point often because it’s really foundational, it’s really important to your success in the social arena.The absence of neediness is particularly important if you’re in a corporate environment as a junior positioning yourself to establish relationships with your seniors. No matter how well you’ve established yourself in your life independent of your colleagues, no matter how well you’ve done so far to eliminate neediness, when you find yourself in this underdog position, you’re by definition needy of something with respect to your seniors.Although the universe doesn’t see job titles, the people around you do and there’s an inherent neediness to the fact that your title is lower than those that surround you. After all, you rely on them for your paychecks and they determine the size of your bonus at the end of the year.I’ll take a moment to discern between who you are from the perspective of the universe and who you are from the perspective of the firm. This is an important distinction.It will serve you to separate your own sense of self-worth from your title. This is an important mental separation because it leads to the understanding that you have something to offer them. Using the universal perspective is helpful here, but don’t overdo it with that spiritual shit because job titles do matter from the perspective of your day to day life in the firm, and they certainly inform how you need to act with respect to your superiors.The truth is that you are whole and complete as a human being, equally as whole and complete as your senior colleagues, but lean on this frame too heavily and often and you will grow arrogant. Arrogance will cause you to fail. Use this universal truth to generate a sense of self-worth inside, but curb yourself with humility outside.An understanding of your self-worth will lead to a shift in the way you frame your senior colleagues: you will see them as your peers as human beings on the planet (rather than your superior officers) in the context of life. This realization evens the playing field because we can get lost within a firm’s hierarchy and mistakenly associate it with our existential worth, which, from the perspective of the universe, does not equate with truth, and leads to the belief that your self-worth is derived by virtue of external means.However, it is true from the perspective of your firm. Don’t forget that the firm is the field in which you’re sowing seeds to harvest success. That field does exist within the universe and will ultimately function according to the universe’s principles, but the universe works on a time span of…well…there is no time span because it’s infinite—you, on the other hand, are operating within a time span of six months to two years (how long do analysts hang around their first job nowadays?), less even, because you can get fired at any time. That makes your time span a monthly one. Get the shit can, and next month’s paycheck doesn’t arrive. Understand?The point here is that it’s a balancing act between a sense of internal self-worth and an outward humility. You have to play around to find the sweet spot for yourself.The first step to navigating the unfortunate reality of your temporary weakness is accepting the situation. Become ok with the fact that you are temporarily on the bottom of the totem pole. The very first rung of the corporate ladder, where all the shit resides. Realize that your starting position is no fault of yours and that it isn’t indicative of anything lacking within you. The seniority of your colleagues is a function of the time they spent in your firm, or their ability to perform tasks the firm deems worthy—not a function of their completeness as human beings.