How to Conquer GUILT & SHAME for GOOD!

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have a special ability to create something amazing that can change the planet. So to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn about how to overcome guilt and shame. Rule number 4 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best.

Living guilty doesn't do anything productive. It doesn't help you to do better. It causes you to struggle more. Guilt drains you emotionally. Physically, it will wear you out. When we're guilty, we don't pursue dreams. We don't believe to overcome challenges. We get stuck. This is why the enemy works overtime in this area. He knows guilt will keep you from your destiny. There's nothing he would love any more than for you to go through life against yourself, focused on your failures, feeling unworthy.

Shame is far more likely to cause destructive behaviors than it is to cure it. What we know is that shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, bullying. It's not helpful to be ashamed for this reason, and I think this is really a core thing that we need to get our heads and hearts around as a culture. Shame corrodes the part of us that believes we can change. So to shame someone into changing is like saying to them, you are horrible and worthless and you're not capable of change. Get better.

The best way to deal with shame for people is to find what you're most proud of. You can't— you're never going to deal with shame. You have to overwhelm it with the good. It's kind of like if every day of your life you look around and you let it happen, news comes in and it's almost always these days something to scare you. If it bleeds, it leads, they say in the newspaper business, right?

Right.

So something to jar you. If you're going to have your life, you have to what I call stack the good. You have to flood yourself with the good. You have to say, what am I proud of in my life? What am I grateful for? And you've gotta literally think of 3 or 4 or 5 things, people, experiences. It could be something little you're proud of when you were a kid, something today. But if you do what I call an emotional flood, where you flood yourself with all the beautiful, proud things, things you're grateful for in your life, you'll find that'll overwhelm that feeling of shame and the shame feeling will disappear. But it won't disappear by analyzing it.

Right, right, right.

Then you just get more in your—

No, I like this idea of flooding it in.

Yeah, just flood it.

So a lot of people confuse guilt with shame. You say they're cousins. I say they're cousins, kissing cousins. Shame says there's something wrong with who I am. It's intrinsic. I can't do anything about it. Guilt says there's something wrong with what I've done. Or am doing. Or am doing. Yeah, so I feel guilty about it. Even people now feel guilty about what they think, you know, what they say. Both of them— well, shame is a little deeper. Guilt, however, is a wasted emotion. That's what I say. It's a wasted emotion because the minute you find that there's something wrong or out of alignment, you're out of order in what you're thinking or doing, do something else. When we know we cause hurt, harm, danger to someone, that will lead us guilt. We look at what we did and how it hurt somebody. Shouldn't you feel guilty about that?

Well, no.

I think you can make amends. And you can do better next time. What does guilt serve? It doesn't serve anything other than the ego, which is to take you out of the— So the acknowledgment that you caused hurt, harm, or danger— Acknowledgement. Acknowledgement that you caused that to somebody is not the same thing as feeling guilty about it.

No.

Acknowledge it. Ask for forgiveness of yourself first and then of other people if you can. And if you can do something to make amends, then do it. Then that will release— release you from the karmic tie to that action.

I have interviewed over 600 men and women now across the country about shame, and across the interviews, men and women with high levels of resilience to shame share 4 things in common. The first is they physically recognize when they're in shame, and they know what triggered it. So let's say something happens at work. I make a mistake or something happens, and that warm wash comes over me. You know that feeling? Yes.

Yeah.

We all know it.

Yeah.

Yeah. If I can physically say, oh my God, no, this is shame. I'm in shame. It's very helpful because we are not fit for human consumption when we're in shame. We need to pull away and get regrounded, take some deep breaths and figure out how to respond. One of the things that makes shame worse is normally when we're in it, We act out. For example, the mother that I interviewed, she fills her car up, she goes into the gas station, she goes to pay, her credit card's declined. The man shames her in front of the other patrons, makes her leave her— I think her wedding band and her wallet and leave with just an ATM card. So she's filled with shame. She gets in the car, she slams the door. When she slams the door, it wakes up her 3-year-old toddler who's in the back seat, who starts screaming. What happens next? What happens next? She starts screaming back, "Shut up! Shut up!" So now she's in the shame of having this credit card declined, being belittled in front of people, and now having to deal with the struggle of, "I'm a horrible mom, and why am I taking this out on my child?" So men and women with high levels of resilience recognize physically when they're in shame and what triggered it. Then they practice critical awareness. How realistic are the expectations and messages that we put on ourselves or that others put on us that tell us who we're supposed to be. The third thing is men and women with high levels of resilience reach out. We've got to share our story. So they talk about it. They talk about it. You know, we breathe through it, we recognize we're in it, and then we call and say, hey, Patricia, it's me. You're not gonna believe what happened. Can you listen? It's hard. And then we speak shame. You know, it's— I try to explain to people people the importance of using the word shame. And this is not just lay people. This is mental health professionals. You know, we've got to use the word. It's different if I were to call you and say, "Oh, Patricia, it's Brené. I'm so embarrassed." That would mean one thing, right? But if I were to call you and say, "Patricia, it's Brené, and I'm really struggling with some shame," that's different. It's a different conversation. Right. Shame cannot hold on when we name it. So it's not just, you know, academic pet peeve. I want everybody to get the semantics correct. Men and women with high levels of shame resilience use the word and talk about the emotion.

Someone wrote in saying that they wake up in the middle of the night saying, 'I shouldn't have done that.' They feel guilty about eating that whole chocolate cake. They feel really bad about certain career choices, about certain clothes choices. Food choices, what are those kind of choices, right? And they are now turning on themselves. They say it's easy to forgive other people, but when it comes to themselves, they have a really hard time. What should they do? What's helped me along my journey is if I could turn back the hands of time right? If I could turn back the hands of time, ask yourself, would I change my past? I give you 5 seconds to answer. Okay, that's great. So you said yes, you said yes, you would change your past. Okay, let me ask you this: if I could take away all the lessons learned from your past Would you allow me to? 5 seconds. Okay, great. You said no. So you want the lessons, but you don't want the experiences. Oh boy. Can I get a hello? Okay. Okay. Okay. This is what's helped me to realize there are lessons learned, right? Everything happens for a reason. The next person that tells me that, what happens when people say that? Sometimes it feels really cringeworthy, right? Really cringeworthy, right? Do you know what happened to me in my past? Everything happens for a reason. Can I get a hello there? No, it really doesn't have to. It really doesn't have to be like that, right? That's what we tell ourselves. When I realized Lessons Learned was about not judging our past, right? When you don't judge your past, it's a lot easier to accept what has taken place. We are in disbelief. I can't believe it happened. I can't believe I got a scratch on that new car on the first day, in the first hour. When I was listening to "Let's party, can I get a hello there." Not my favorite song, for goodness sakes. It could have been the other crap one. But yeah, sometimes your house gets robbed on your birthday. Sometimes you buy a new dress and then you trip up and mud goes everywhere and now you feel like It shouldn't have happened. But it did. In dealing with self-forgiveness, which really is the gateway, the passage to becoming your greatest version, you gotta lose saying, "It shouldn't have happened." Instead, say, "It did happen.

And I'm gonna change how I respond to what happened." It's hard to defend yourself when the murmuring of the voice of accusation is stronger on the inside than the voice of all the critics on the outside. Guilt is not just about what others are saying about you. It is what you are saying about yourself. It is the condemnation that that comes upon you. It is the struggle that lives down inside of you that you say— have you ever said, what was I thinking? Have you ever looked back at something and you just wonder, what was I on to do that? What happened? Did somebody put something in my Coke? What happened that I went that far? You mean I— See, this, this one of the things that we do with guilt, because it is such a heavy burden to carry. It's, it's a heavy burden because it can only exist in places where you care. It can only exist in places where you care, so it becomes a heavy burden to carry. So what we do is we change the narrative of what happened to make the memory more palatable. We change the narrative of what happened to make the memory more palatable. We block out the parts we are ashamed of, and we remember how people responded to us without remembering how we elicited or initiated the response. Selective amnesia. Until you own what happened, until you take responsibility for it, until you, until you stop hiding from the guilt. See, because you're trying to tranquilize the guilt. You know why your daughter disrespected you. You know why she cursed you out. You know what she saw about you and the neighbor across the street, but you blocked out what happened between you and the neighbor across the street and talked about, I ain't going to let that girl disrespect me. She just lost her mind. When in reality, you— Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. You told me to go deep. You told me to go deep. I'm not thinking about them haters. I'm not a hater. That's not a hater. I'm hurt because you beat me like a dog and I'm telling the truth. That's not a hater, but you change the story. Because the weight of the matter might mean you admitting my son is acting crazy because I wasn't a good father and I really wasn't there for him and he saw things out of me. That I wish I hadn't have done, but at that stage in my life I did it. You have to stop telling yourself, "I don't know why that boy acting crazy." You do. You do know why he's acting crazy. And you're the only one who can fix it because you do know what's wrong with him. And you can't get healed, brother, as long as you tell yourself, "Well, somebody got in the way. Well, it's not my fault. He could have done—" You know what the problem is, but the weight, the weight of the guilt. You know that you cannot heal it if you won't own it. Are you angry about something you could fix? Guilt that leads to a change of behavior is a powerful thing. Guilt that grabs you by the throat and makes you call me on the phone and say, "Look, I'm sorry," is a powerful thing. It's a wonderful thing for you to be guilty enough to humble yourself, to pull your pride down, pull your images down, and pull all the lies you told to yourself down, and say, look, I miss you, and I'm tired of us fighting like this, and whatever I did to hurt you, I'm sorry. I'm man enough to look you in the eye and say I was wrong and I'm sorry. You'll never be healed till you can fix it.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know, what did you think of this video? What was the rule rule that most applies to you that you're going to immediately implement somehow into your life or your business, please let me know. I'd love to hear from you. Leave it down in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to Clark Kegley. Clark, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and doing the interview on your channel. I really, really appreciate the support, and I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book.

How do you find your passion, make money doing what you love, and stand out in an ever-growing noisy world? You distill everything down into one word.

So thank you guys again for watching. I hope you have an amazing day. I believe in you and hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.