Episode 58: The Problem with Guilt and Shame

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think and that my friends is 100% awesome!

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode fifty-eight of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I want to officially welcome you to summer, I think we're there! Today in Phoenix, we hit 110 degrees and that means that Auggie and I are back to doing our walks at night after the sun goes down. And this might seem kind of obvious, but it always amazes me how the days just keep going. Time passes, it seems like I was just here, I was just going on walks at night to make it bearable for both of us. And here we are again, right back to summer, and it's just a good reminder to me that life is always passing. Seasons come, and go inexorably, everything passes, and before I know it I will be walking during the day again. And this week, I started thinking about the April that is going to be taking those walks six months from now, right?

How will things be different for her? What will I have created in six months? What will I be thinking about in six months? What thoughts will I be believing and enjoying the results of in six months? And what thoughts will I be practicing, and nurturing to create future results? I think so often, we think things are going to be different for us in the future somewhere, but we're scared to change things in the present. It's uncomfortable to change things in the present, and so we kind of just put up with the present thinking that it's going to be different someday. Surely it's going to get better at some point, but unless we really change our thinking, we're just going to keep getting the same results in our life.

So, I just recently changed my coaching program to a six month format because it gives me and my clients enough time to really learn how to question, and replace the thoughts that are causing so much mess, and so much pain. And then, really get into intentional creation what they want to create in their life, so to not just understand the problem of our brain, but to put it to work creating the life we want. And I am loving it! And if you want your life to be fundamentally different in six months, I want to encourage you to sign up for a free coaching session and see what it would be like to work with me.

And to just give you one other way to think about this, my orthodontist office recently reopened. It had been closed since mid-March because of the Corona Virus, and so I just barely got back in there, and got a new set of invisalign trays this week. And so my mouth has been so sore the last couple of days adjusting to a new tray. And I was thinking about how the last two months went by anyway, right? And my teeth didn't move, my teeth just stayed in the exact same place over the last two months. They were not getting any straighter, they were not adjusting, they were not moving, two months just went by right. And in so many ways this reminds me of the work that we do on our thoughts, and on our own minds when we aren't actively adjusting our thoughts and retraining our brains. They just kind of stay the same, right? They just get really comfortable in the pattern that they're in.

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And so, we just think the same thoughts we've always thought, they're just the default patterns we know and nothing changes. And if we get comfortable there, we don't make the progress we want towards the version of us that we want to be in. Either way, time is going to pass, and if I want to reach my goals I'm going to have to experience a bit of discomfort, and change the way that I've been thinking. And for what it's worth, having a coach to help me, little by little, adjust my own limiting beliefs, and straighten things out, has been life changing for me, and I want the same thing for you.

So, today on the podcast, I wanted to talk about the space between our decisions, and implementation. The space between deciding that we want to change something in our lives, and then the implementation, actual changing of our lives. Because this space between decision, and implementation is the space where all our dreams, and good intentions go to die.

So, I find that for most people we just hang out in this space for way too long. We've decided once and for all we're gonna get different results. We're going to be better mothers, we're going to get serious about our persona,l spiritual, practices, or we're going to lose weight once and for all. We're gonna stop overspending, we're gonna get organized, we're going to be consistent about exercise, right? Like we make all these decisions, and for most of us, we have decided one or more of these things several times in our lives. I did this for years and yet somehow between that decision, and our implementation we get stuck. We don't do what we've decided, we're going to do.

And we continue to hang out in the uncomfortable space between the decision, and the work. And so as I thought about this, and how to stop just talking about change, and deciding to change, and then not actually doing it. I realized that there's a step before implementation that we don't really think about, and I think it really holds a lot of us back. And that is eliminating the guilt, and the shame, that we have for where we are, and who we are right now.

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So, I think that so many of us come to self-improvement from a place of self -rejection, and disgust. We want to change, and grow so that we can change, and outgrow the person that we are. We don't like that person, we want to change it. And so we make the decision about what we're going to start doing, or stop doing, in our lives from the emotions of guilt, and shame of who we are. And that is a losing proposition every time. And so I think I'm actually going to divide this podcast up into two different podcasts both because, before we can do what we need to do to close the gap between decisions and implementation. I think we need to examine, and unravel, and remove the guilt, and shame for who we are when we go to make that decision. Because these emotions of guilt, and shame are the biggest hindrances to getting the changes you want, you can't get lasting change from guilt, and shame. It just doesn't work.

And so, that's where I want to start today. I think for almost all of us guilt, and shame are keeping you from really being the person you want to be. And this is super ironic, because your brain thinks that guilt, and shame are the way to be the person you want to be. Your brain thinks guilt, and shame are necessary to be the person you want to be. We think we need guilt, and shame in order to change, and that's the very thing keeping us from change.

So, first why does our brain offer thoughts that cause guilt and shame? These are some of the most common emotions we feel as humans. Well, the brain is only concerned about survival, and it thinks the best way to keep you alive is to not make any mistakes. Don't you know? And so, when you make a perceived mistake, right, when you do something, in other words, that you think makes you less acceptable to other people or to yourself, the brain offers you the thought that "You're wrong." And to the brain, being wrong is bad, being wrong is a death sentence. When we think "We've been wrong!" the body creates feelings of guilt, and shame which feel bad. And these negative emotions are designed to get us to stop doing wrong things, to change our behavior, so that will be acceptable, and we have less chance of dying. Simply put, the brain offers guilt, and shame, because it thinks it will change your behavior, and that will keep you alive.

But the reason that this isn't actually useful is that it doesn't change behavior, at least not long-term or not in meaningful lasting ways. And this is because as humans we are conditioned to avoid pain. That's why the brain gives us guilt, and shame in the first place, it's painful, and it wants us to change so that we don't have to feel guilt, and shame. But what most of us do is, instead of changing behavior is we avoid the entire experience of feeling guilt, and shame. We try to avoid that experience by not looking at ourselves, not evaluating ourselves, and just deciding we want to be different. We've associated changing ourselves with guilt, and shame which only makes us want to avoid change in general.

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So, I'm going to give you a couple examples of this to show you how guilt, and shame don't create the change we want. So David and I go to the gym every Saturday together, and every Saturday when we leave the gym, David says "I just need to do this more. This week I'm going to get up and I'm going to go to the gym before work." And he says this every Saturday, and nothing ever changes. And last Saturday, I said very helpfully, "You say that every Saturday but it never happens." And he said "I know, ughh, I'm so terrible."

Now, this was just a funny moment, and we laughed about it, but notice how underlying his desire to go to the gym during the week is guilt, and shame. On some level, he thinks that there's something wrong with him. That he doesn't get up, and go to the gym during the week, and he wants to change that, but he wants to change it because he thinks there's something wrong with him. He wants to change it, because of the guilt and shame he feels when he thinks he didn't go to the gym. And this never works, because when we have guilt, and shame we think we're bad, and when we think we're bad, we don't like to spend too much time looking at ourselves.

When David thinks he's terrible, and he feels guilt, and shame for who he is, and the shape that his body is in, then he doesn't want to look at it. He doesn't want to think about it, he doesn't want to examine it, he doesn't want to explore why this is happening, right? He can't be curious about why he doesn't go to the gym, because he's so mad at himself for not going, right? He can't be curious about why he says it, and then he doesn't. He can't ask himself why don't I go, because he has so much guilt, and shame for not going, it completely blocks us from examining ourselves and our behavior. We have so much shame, and guilt about our behaviors that we can't look at it long enough to find solutions to change it.

So, let me give you one more example. I've been working with my coach on selling my coaching program. And I was really, let me tell you, I was really resistant to getting better at selling. I told her "I don't want to sell. I want to coach!" And she said "Well if you don't sell, you can't coach." She said "You want to help your clients, and the only way to help them, is to sell them what they need." And so we've been working on my skills in this area of my business. And she asked me to evaluate every call that I have with my clients to evaluate, what went right, what went wrong, and what I want to do differently next time. And at first my brain did not want to do this, right? I didn't want to look at myself that closely. I didn't want to look at what I was doing well, I don't want to look at what I was doing poorly, and what I wanted to change.

But notice, why? I didn't want to look, because when I looked my thoughts about myself were creating guilt, and shame. When I thought "I did it wrong." That thought created guilt, and shame in me, and then I just wanted to ignore it. I wanted to ignore the problem, I wanted to ignore the skills I didn't have. I didn't want to look at me, because of my thoughts about me. But, notice how I can't change, I can't improve, I can't get new skills, when I ignore it.

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And here's the part I want you to see, the guilt, and shame I was feeling was created 100% by my own thoughts. Because I thought being wrong was bad, and I thought that I was bad, and thinking that I was bad made it so I didn't want to look at it and see what I could do differently. Guilt, and shame were making it so I couldn't change. And it's the same for David when he thinks he's not showing up at the gym on weekdays makes him bad, he doesn't want to look at what he could do differently. That guilt, and shame makes him want to ignore it, not think about it, not look at himself, and the choices that he's making in his life.

And it's absolutely the same for all of us, right? Guilt, and shame keep us from looking at ourselves, and evaluating ourselves, and noticing where we can do things differently. They just condemn us for what we're doing, and they never invite us to look at what else is possible, or understand why. We just kind of hate ourselves for the way we're doing it, and ironically that only keeps us doing it the way that we're doing it. Notice, what's in the way, our negative thoughts about us right now, as we are, those negative thoughts are creating guilt, and shame, and they aren't changing anything.

And this applies to every area of your life, it applies to the way you think about yourself in every area. When you hate who you are, what you do in any area of your life, you make yourself bad, or terrible, or awful, for the way you're doing it. That guilt, and shame those thoughts produced, will keep you from being able to look at what you are choosing.

Okay, so, what do we do? Right? I want to give you a few tools today to help you drop your guilt, and shame, which are not serving you, which are keeping you stuck, so that you can move forward and get the change you want. So, the first thing that I'm going to offer you might be hard for some of you, especially for those of you who were raised with a strict set of rules, and commandments, right? But we have to drop the idea that doing things wrong makes us bad, okay? There aren't good people, and bad people, there are just people that do things that are just people that act, and those actions are a result of what they think, and what they feel.

And in the same way there aren't good versions of you, and bad versions of you. There's just you doing things, taking action in the world because of what you think, and feel. And the more curious we can get about that, and the less judgmental we are, the more we can explore what is creating our actions. So, I love the idea that I always have a good reason for acting the way I do, right? Seth Godin says "We are all rational, right? We're all acting. We all have a good reason for what we do." It doesn't mean that I always do the best things and it doesn't mean that there aren't always ways to improve and grow and do things differently. But this idea helps me not to judge my actions when I know that I always have a good reason for acting the way I do. Then I can be curious, and more open to exploring those reasons, and understanding the thoughts, and feelings that produced my actions. You are not the things you do, you are not even the things you feel, or the things you think, these things don't make you bad or good, because you are a being separate from those things.

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And when you can separate your wholeness, and your intrinsic goodness from the things you do, and feel, and think, then you have the power to change those things if you want. I think it can be really helpful the next time you catch yourself saying "I should do something differently, or I need to change this thing about me." To stop and ask yourself instead, "Why do I do it this way? I have a good reason for doing what I do. What is it?" Like if you're not exercising, assume that you have a good reason for it, and ask yourself "What it is? Why do I do it this way?" Maybe you think it won't help, maybe you think you'd rather sleep, maybe you feel intimidated. Asking why you're doing it, instead of condemning yourself, or doing it, or not doing it, is the first step to doing something differently. No matter what we're doing or not doing it's always because of what we're thinking, and feeling, and when we ask ourselves why, instead of beating ourselves up about it we get that much closer to change. We are a mess, but that doesn't mean we're bad. And when we can be okay with the mess we are without making it mean that we're bad, then we can give up the guilt, and shame.

Okay, the second tool I want to give you goes right along with this idea. If we can make mistakes, and take action that doesn't serve us, and sometimes even hurts us, or hurts others, and not make that mean that we are bad, then we can drop into the idea of loving ourselves, loving all of us.

So, if the worst thoughts, and feelings, and actions, that we take, and think, and feel, in our lives, if the worst things that we do don't make us bad, then it allows us to accept those parts, and even love them. So, I want to invite you to love all the parts of you. Write the parts that take amazing action in your life, and the parts that let you down. And again, most of us when we hear this we're automatically resistant to doing this. You're like "If I love this part of me, I'm never going to change." But I want you to set your resistance aside for a minute, and recognize that hating yourself isn't working either. Hating yourself isn't changing you, so maybe let's just open up for a moment to another possibility. Loving you does not mean that you're done. Loving all of you, does not mean you don't have room for improvement. Loving all of you means that love isn't based on what you do, right? It doesn't mean that we're doing it right, it means that our feelings about ourselves are not based on whether or not we do it right. It doesn't mean that I approve of all my behaviors, right? It just means that I choose to love myself regardless.

So, many times we set up conditions to loving ourselves. In our minds, we each kind of have a list of things that we need to do before we can love ourselves. So, sometimes I do an exercise with my clients where I demonstrate this for them, and we make a list of all the things they think they need to do before they can really love themselves. All the things that they want to change, right? We start with their health, what are all the things they need to be doing? We talk about their relationships, what are all the things they need to be doing with the people that they love? We talk about their parenting, and their marriage, and their friends, and all the things they need to be doing better, before they can like themselves.

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Talk about church, and spirituality, we talk about work, and contribution. Talk about all the things that they think have to change first, and we make this huge list, right? The list fills pages, and pages, and it's kind of overwhelming in that moment for them to see all the conditions that they've put on loving themselves. And then I point out to them that even if they did everything on the list, their brain would still find ways that they were not measuring up, that they were failing things that they still needed to do before they could love themselves.

So a couple of weeks ago I was doing this with a client and I was pointing this out to her. And as I moved on to show her like we never get to the finish line with our brain, her brain then came up with ten more things that she had forgotten should be on that list, right? She was like "Wait, I need to do better at Come Follow Me, and family game nights, and family home evening." She's like "I need to have my kids practice the piano!" And her brain was just like "Oh we need to start a garden, and we need to fix things!" And if you try this exercise you're going to find the same thing. If you ask yourself what do I need to do, and fix, and change in order to love myself? Notice how long the list is, and I promise you even if you could somehow do everything on the list, your brain would just make another list. And the point is that loving ourselves has to be independent of the list, it has to be independent of conditions. We just get to love ourselves. Period. As a way of life, as a way of interacting with ourselves while we are alive, as a mode of living. It's just a choice.

Now, why would we want to choose it? Because when we hate ourselves or put conditions on our love for ourselves, we feel negative emotions, shame, and guilt, and then we act from those negative emotions. When we love ourselves, we feel love, and then all of our actions come from love, and everything we do is the right thing because it is fueled by love.

So, before I found this work I spent my life behaving in so many ways that didn't serve me right. My actions were to eat, and overspend, and get angry, and hold grudges, and keep score, and be a mother, resent my husband, and serve begrudgingly, and distance myself from God. And I hated myself for all of it. I told myself I was bad, I told myself I should do better, I told myself that no one deserved to live with someone so awful, and it never changed anything. I remember thinking my family would be so much better off without me. That I only ever made things worse, and thinking that only made me act worse. I felt so bad about who I was that all my actions were fueled by this disappointment, and shame, and guilt, and self-loathing. And you just can't act the way you want when you're fueled by that.

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My coach told me "April, love is always an option, even for you. Love is never dependent on what someone does or doesn't do. We never get to a place where we've done enough to finally love ourselves, we just have to choose it now." And then she asked me a question that shifted my thinking about loving me. She asked me "Is there ever a time when loving someone is not a good choice? And I thought about it. I thought about it, when might it be wrong to love someone? And I couldn't think of a time, right? I couldn't think of a time when loving someone would make things worse. I couldn't think of a time when loving someone wouldn't make things better. And so I just decided to try it. I just decided to love myself and my brain.

I'm telling you my brain did not want to do this, right? My brain wanted me to meet all the conditions first. So, I just started with the thought that it was okay to love myself. It was okay to love a person as flawed, and broken as me. The thought that I used was I'm okay with being 100 percent awesome, meaning I am okay with thinking that I'm 100 percent awesome. Even though I am also a mess. For me it started by thinking it's okay to love the part of me that gets angry. It's okay to love the part of me that is hard hearted. It's okay to love the part of me that is disappointing. It's okay to love the part of me that is self-centered, and petulant, and mean it's okay to love her, loving her can never be a bad choice and she is me. I am all of those things. I am a work in progress, and I needed to love all of it.

That decision was the most important decision I made in my journey, because after I made it then my life started to change in fundamental ways, because I wasn't carrying guilt and shame with me. It was like automatic, because when we change the feeling that is fueling our lives, it changes the actions of our lives, and maybe the most important change to loving myself was that I no longer had to be mad at all the people in my life who loved me. When I hated me, I couldn't stand the fact that they loved me, right? It felt awful, right? And so, then I punish them for that, and so many of us are in a fight with the people we love just, because we hate ourselves so much. So, we've got to love ourselves first.

Okay, and this last thing that I want to give you will kind of explain why. Why love is so critical to change? And that is the idea that shame, and guilt cause us to hide. The root of the word shame, means to cover, and so one of the best ways to combat shame is to shine a light on it. To shine a light on the things that are causing us shame, and take personal responsibility for what we are creating. And what I mean by that is that one of the most powerful thoughts you can use is the thought, I create all of my results, and without the first two principles that I just talked about here on the podcast this can be a very painful exercise, right? Like if we believe we're doing things wrong, and that makes us bad, and if we believe that we're unworthy of love as we are then we end up using the thought, I create all of my results against ourselves, instead of taking personal responsibility. It becomes an exercise in personal self-flagellation where we look at the results we've created, and then we just beat the heck out of ourselves. We look at the results in our relationship, and our help, and in our spirituality, and our work, and our money, and everything and we make these results mean terrible things about us and hate ourselves even more.

That is not what I'm talking about. When I say take personal responsibility, that is engaging in personal blame, which only creates, you guessed it, more guilt, and shame. But when we understand that we have good reasons for what we do, and then it stems from our thinking in our thinking and our feeling and our actions don't make us bad. And when we understand that we don't have to be anything different before we can love ourselves, then it's not scary to take personal responsibility because we're not going to use it against ourselves. Then we can set down our guilt, and shame, and just look with honesty at what we are doing, and what it's creating in our life.

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So, for me, and for many of my clients, this is such a revelatory experience, right? For so many of us we spent so much effort hiding from our actual results, because we're just so scared of what we're going to do to ourselves if we own those results, if we own the fact that we've created it. And so we never look at what we're creating, we want to put the blame outside of us, because we already feel so much guilt, and shame and who wants to add to that? Right? So we blame inanimate things like time, and politics, and viruses. We blame other people, and ourselves, we blame our commitments, or our schedule or our capacity, or education. We blame our kids, or husband, or their problems, or their humanness. We blame our leaders and our bosses and our neighbors and strangers right. And it just leaves us in such a powerless position. We can't change our results if someone else is responsible for it. We're stuck. We hate ourselves and then because we've blamed our results on everything, and everyone else there is nothing we can do about it.

And then we just stay there for a while, and then occasionally it feels so bad we drum up a whole lot of guilt, and shame for some aspect of our life, or weight, or our money our spirituality or something and then we tell ourselves we feel so bad because we're terrible and worthless and we can't get it together. And then from this place we make a decision that we're going to do things differently. We set up budgets, we set up eating protocols. We say this week I'm going to the gym, we decide we're going to stop eating sugar, and we decide we're going to get up two hours earlier. We're going to set up a schedule for our kids and we do all of that from a place of guilt and shame.

And that is where most of us just end up making all these decisions about how we should start living from a place of guilt, and shame. And then we notice that we don't implement it or we implement it for a week or two beating ourselves up all along the way and then we give up and we think the problem is us. We think that we just can't get it together like other people, but the only problem is that we are fueled by guilt, and shame, and we never put them down. We never put guilt, and shame down long enough to understand ourselves that we create our own results.

We never put guilt, and shame down long enough to ask ourselves with curiosity how am I creating this if I didn't beat myself up for the answer? What actions am I taking right now that are creating this exact result? But this has to be done from a place of nonjudgmental shame, and guilt cannot be there or we never get to the truth, we never understand why we're getting the results we are. It feels confusing and out of our control and we start blaming but it's because we never look at it head on. We never look at it honestly, because shame, and guilt want us to hide, which hides our part in it our part in the creation from our own view.

Now I'm not perfect at this for sure but as I have worked with my coach she often asks me "How exactly did you create these results?" And I find that I can't even answer that question when I have guilt, and shame. I feel my own brain likes shying away from the answer not wanting to look at it scared to look at it. You can try asking yourself the same question, how exactly did I create these results? And if you find yourself cringing, or wanting to look away, or not wanting to face the answer, it just means that shame, and guilt are there, and you've got to set those down before you can answer the question. And when you do it will be life changing. Notice how if you feel no guilt, or shame, and you ask the question, How exactly did you create these results? Then you can look with honesty about what you're doing, and not doing. You can look at the thoughts that you're thinking you can see the feelings that you have driving everything you do, and then it gives you something to work with it shows you the truth for maybe the first time in your life. The more truthful I can get with myself without beating myself up, the better results I get in my life.

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So, I mean to give you a quick example of this here at the end. So during the quarantine I had this project to learn how to make croissants, chocolate croissants. And I had the thought that croissants were really hard and so I had to follow the recipe exactly. And so I did that, and my first batch turned out amazing, right. And so, then I was like cool. So I tried it again, and my second batch wasn't as good. The lamination wasn't as good and the butter kind of melted all over the place while they were cooking and they just weren't that good, right? And because it's just croissants and not my weight, or my relationships, or my business, or whatever, I didn't have any guilt, and shame about my ability to make croissants. Instead, I was able to ask myself "Okay, what was different? What was different about this batch?" In other words, what exactly did I do that created a less than perfect result? And batch after batch I asked myself "What did I do that created this result? What did they do that created better lamination? What did I do that created perfect browness on the top of the croissant? What did I do that created the perfect rise so they weren't all gummy on the bottom? As Paul Hollywood would say, what did I do to keep the dough cold enough as I was doing the turns? And on, and on, and because I didn't have any guilt, and shame about the chocolate croissants, I could just continually ask myself, how exactly did I create these results? And I learned so much doing it this way, right? I learned the elements that are really important to pay attention to and be perfect. And the things that don't really matter and I want to suggest that that learning process was made possible because I didn't have guilt, and shame, and it will be the same for you if you want to change the results in your life.

You want to make a decision to do things differently, I want you to do it without guilt and shame by recognizing first that the way you are doing things doesn't make you bad. You can love yourself no matter what you do, or don't do. And the real key to change is the truth. It's taking personal responsibility for the results you have created, and to get there, you have to evaluate your results, and your actions, and your feelings, and your thoughts without guilt, and shame. You do not have to hate yourself different, you do not have to use who you are against yourself, because the guilt, and shame for who you are and the way you do it are just keeping you from who you really want to be.

And here's the best news. Guilt, and shame are not required for change and that my friends is 100% awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your Earth life experience. Sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever. As your coach. I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay and that my friends is 100% awesome!