Seth Godin explains how shame gets weaponized against entrepreneurs and women, especially around failure and circumstances beyond their control. He argues shame should be reserved for real moral wrongs, and that recognizing it as an invitation rather than a mandate helps you stay sufficient while still growing.
Chapters
You, you touched on this idea of shame, and I've been thinking about this recently and seeing it a lot inside the Bootstrap workshop, which is wrapping up now, is people wrestling with at the same time trying to maintain the sense of sufficiency that they are okay as they are and where they are and being a work in progress progress, and at the same time striving to develop themselves, to develop their service or product or offer. And it seems as though shame is always kind of hanging around very close by, if not actively, um, attacking us in either of those moments. Talk, talk to us a little bit about ways that we can approach this idea that we can be simultaneously enough as we are and trusting the process that we can become better at storytelling, marketing, or what have you.
Brilliant. Love this question. So let's start with this. Shame is really useful, fantastic, and helpful at one thing: getting people to play by the rules of society. That it's hard to imagine a universally moral, in-sync culture if shame did not exist, because you don't need very many outliers to make the whole thing fall apart. You don't wear a clown suit to a funeral even if you're a sociopath, because you don't want to deal with the shame that would come with that. But— huge but— shame is used as a weapon, particularly among women, but among but at everyone to get people to feel badly about things they should not feel badly about, to use the cudgel of culture to get people to feel bad. So there are people who are ill, who feel shame about their illness. It's not your fault that you have an ulcer. It's not your fault that you have cancer. But we shame people. For that. Uh, and in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of shame associated with— I made something, I created something, it didn't work, therefore there's something wrong with me. No, there's something right with you because you had the guts to do something generous. Sorry it didn't work. Do something else. So one of the things that all of our workshops work super hard to do is undo that self-narrative of shame and failure being related to each other. They're completely unrelated. That shame should be reserved for bad moral cultural interaction. That's its only function. The rest of it is believing enough in the change you want to make in the world that you are willing to experience the twinges, because they never quite go away, on the path to making things better. And so being surrounded by people who are on the same journey as you is the best way I know to undo it, because I lived with it for more than a decade, and it took a huge piece out of me. It still does. And it took me a long time to realize that's not what this is, and we've been misusing it a lot.
That's, uh, really, really powerful. I, I like what you're saying about our misuse of shame really comes from the status quo trying to assert its hegemony over us and wanting to keep things the same when we're seeking to bring change to the world. And that's one of the things that I like to— the big pivot for me in this, the revelation about shame, was thinking of it as an invitation I didn't have to accept. Right, that it shows up, and if you can be aware of why it's showing up as opposed to what it wants you to do, right, it can be reframed as a gift, and you can thank it and move on. But you don't have to invite it in for tea and dinner and overnight, or—
yeah, it's a great way to say it. You know, the thing is, shameless and shameful mean the same thing. Yeah. We don't have a word for, oh, he realizes he's doing something important and he's going to live with the shame you're throwing at him. Yeah, we don't even have a word for that. It doesn't— that word is not shameless because shameless means shameful.
