I love this talk by Brene Brown that talks about shame. The first time I heard this talk was when I wasn’t in a great place. It felt dark and challenging. As I was struggling for confidence, I listened to this and later picked up her book on vulnerability and shame. What’s beautiful is that it extends to the experiences beyond what we are facing now. The definitions of vulnerability, and shame – the image of who we have to be! They all find their traces back to our history and life in general.
We all have a lot of expectations from ourselves about who we are and what we want to be. Sometimes these expectations prevent us from being vulnerable or feeling shame. My biggest fear was to appear wrong in front of a crowd. The only thing that this fear did to me was it made me an awful speaker. Even when I made mistakes, I wanted to quickly hide. This was because I was trying to feed into this image – I have to be perfect to be respected!
The labels that define shame
I don’t think the mistakes themselves are as bad. These mistakes help us learn and become better. The perfection mindset tells us that we can’t make mistakes. And even if we do, we can’t appear like that in public. Or else people will not respect us. In other words – only strength is respected, and weakness is not tolerated. After all, weakness is for losers right?! And perhaps this was the number one demon I was listening to – be strong, don’t appear wrong. In other words, being perfect is probably one of the biggest enemies of growth because it tells us a lie and prevents us from moving ahead.
Ergo, shame finds its way back into our definition. If we make a mistake, the shame says – we ought to feel bad about it because not only did we let someone else down, but also ourselves. As you can see, it is so easy to go down this route and start feeling guilty, sad and depressed. They all go hand in hand to take us away from the problem. The problem in this case is just how we define shame and react to it.
Shame makes harsh judgments, it compares us to other people and shows us how bad we are. Shame is not a bad thing on its own. It sends us a message that we ought to do something about it. The way we perceive this shame is where we can make a difference. It is an emotion trying to tell us something. We just have to be silent, listen and then do something about it. Forget the ego, the image that we have for ourselves. No one else in the world takes us so seriously. Why should we bother? Life is meant to be simple, the shame spiral adds an unnecessary complexity!
6 People Who Don’t Deserve Your Stories – Brene Brown
Brene Brown: 2 Things You Need To Be Brave
Shame destroying confidence
The unfortunate problem is – each time we make a mistake, this demon wakes up and destroys our confidence. It tells us – you are not good enough. The more we listen to this message, our confidence breaks. And very soon, we don’t try anything new in the fear of making a mistake. We will remain strong with what we know, but there’s no growth or advancement because we’re too afraid. The ego wins, but at what cost? We lose a lot of our ability to perform in the pursuit of feeding this ego.
What if we let this go and accept who we are – a normal human being? We will make mistakes, learn and grow. However, we make sure that we make better quality mistakes with time. We don’t shame ourselves for being wrong or falling short of our expectations. But, we will find a way to move closer and forward. We become more accepting of life as it happens and be kind to ourselves.
The point is not to blame the upbringing or culture which tells us that shame is bad – but to start figuring out how to deal with it. I just wanted to share this talk by Brene Brown and open a discussion about how this shame impacts us. We ought to feel fine talking about it – there is no shame in talking about shame. The more we hide things, the worse they get – we’ve got to find a way to embrace what we feel and listen to what they mean. Let’s go beyond this ego, our definitions of who we should be – embrace who we are so that we can live peacefully and love ourselves.