Guilt and shame are not the same
If you haven’t yet seen Brene Brown’s “The Call to Courage” on Netflix where she shares the difference between shame and guilt, I highly recommend that you do.
In a nutshell, she explains that while guilt is a feeling attached to something we did wrong (ex: I forgot about my mom’s birthday, and that’s too bad), shame is a destructive feeling tied to our identity (ex: I forgot about my mom’s birthday, and it makes me a bad person). ⠀
⠀
Experiencing guilt is normal and sometimes even necessary, but shame is always toxic and has a huge impact on our lives.⠀
⠀
I realized that I’ve been putting shame labels on myself too. In my case, someone told me in high school (probably just once) that my essay wasn’t good, and I decided that I am a shitty writer. Since then I repeated it to myself and to others so many times, that it manifested itself into a 15 year-long resistance to writing. Now that I decided to give it a try (after working on my mindset for months), I realized that while my writing is not perfect, I am very capable of expressing my thoughts and ideas clearly – and that’s all that really matters to me.⠀
⠀
So thoughts like.. “I am a bad mom”, “My ideas are stupid”, “I am not a creative person”, etc. – are all destructive beliefs tied to our identities, and they have absolutely nothing to do with who we really are and what we are capable of. It’s so worth recognizing and reframing these thoughts by looking at specific facts and events in our lives, and questioning where these labels really came from.⠀
⠀
I wanted to share this because it’s one of my biggest breakthroughs of 2019, and I am now being very cautious when people I coach are putting such labels on themselves. I know that behind each statement is a limiting belief that can be unlearned and reframed into an empowering one - and this leads to completely different actions and results.⠀
⠀
“The Call to Courage” is on Netflix and about 1-hour long, and if you are not yet one of 45 million who watched Brene’s TEDTalk The Power of Vulnerability, you can find it on ted.com and on YouTube. Very cool stuff ✨
xo Olena