The Emotion Few Talk About, But Many Feel

23:27Yeah. And I struggle with people who don't do that instinctively.

23:31Brené Brown:Yeah. Like, this is a logical error. Stop confusing the person for the action. And I think that's good leadership. And I think that can be really good leadership because a lot of times what I'll have to tell people is if we're doing a postmortem on something that went wrong, I have to say very distinctly, hey, we're looking for failures in systems, not failures, people as failures. We're looking for failures in systems. We're looking for failures in systems. We're looking for choices, you know, and shame proneness is two things at the same time. Very tough to lead someone that's deep into shame proneness because when they go down, they don't get back up easily.

24:15Brené Brown:Two, it is absolutely leveraged to get productivity out of people. And we'll talk about that in a minute about how shame shows up at work. So I think it's really important to understand the difference between shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment. I want to go back to the conversation where Susie, we debriefed with the teacher and said, help us understand what's happening. Talk about separating behavior from character, by the way. I mean, my first impulse, even as somebody who likes to do that and does it frequently, would have been to say, fire that teacher. Like no teacher who thinks it's okay to do that to a student should be employed in this profession.

24:54Brené Brown:I agree. You should not be trusted with children. I agree. And I mean, we do have, we have two things about teachers and administrators and coaches that are important. Don't hear one without the other. One, 85 % of all adults we've interviewed over two decades can remember something so shaming that happened at school. It forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners. Wow. Two, over 90 % can remember a teacher, a coach, or an administrator who absolutely helped them believe in themselves. So there is nothing we can draw from that except for the sheer power those folks have. Yeah, big time.

25:30Brené Brown:And more people use it for good. But shame can be used as a classroom management tool for sure. So when we asked the teacher, tell me what you were thinking. Tell me how you experienced Susie's response to what you said. And she said, she's so smart. She's such a good kid. She is not putting her name on papers. She's forgetting basic things. Do you know what happens to kids like her when they're held back in fourth grade? Do you know what chances she has of being successful? If she's held back in fourth grade, we cannot let her be held back in fourth grade. Wow, that teacher has a broken mental model of her job.

26:07Brené Brown:Well, I don't know that she has a broken mental model. I think she has a real lack of options for skills building. I think she has not thought through, I think she believed, probably similarly to how she was raised, but it's an assumption we didn't get into it. If I torment enough, and a lot of parents do this, if I torment enough, you'll change. As opposed to saying, I need to call an ARD. I need to get a specialist involved. I need to understand what's happening here. She cannot afford to be held back. Wow. But it's such a misdiagnosis of the problem, right? To think that, well, she doesn't care enough, and therefore I'm going to mock her in front of the class, and now all of a sudden she's going to feel so much fear of being in that situation again that she's going to be attentive to detail and careful.

27:05Brené Brown:How does that add up? You just described how marketing and advertising works across the country. You just described how social media works across the country. Like this is how the world in many ways works. We will humiliate, shame, and mock you into believing you are not worthy of connection. And then we will sell you the beer or the sweater or the eyeshadow that makes you lovable. So I don't know that her thinking, while the demonstration of it was one of the most painful things I have ever, and I wanted to run out and stop it, but you can't. we did give her some tools and she did end up calling the ARD, which, is that a national term, ARD?

27:48Brené Brown:Like bringing together a bunch of folks from the school administrators, school counselors, outside testing folks to figure out what was going on. I have to tell you that like, shame is how a lot of pillars of capitalism are built in work and certainly advertising and media. So interesting. I've never seen it through that lens at all. Yeah. I mean, if everyone, imagine what would happen in the diet, cosmetic, plastic surgery industries if today everyone woke up and looked in the mirror and said, I'm amazing. I'm worthy of love and belonging. I mean, industries would collapse within 24, 48 hours.

28:35Brené Brown:It would be the airline post 9-11. Like a lot of things work because we've commodified what will make us feel less ashamed. So you're an outlier. Good to know. Thank you for calling me that. In so many ways. All right. So what do we do about it? I would love to learn how to be more empathetic and help people out of shame as a parent, as a colleague, but also how do you help people deal with it internally too? Okay. So shame resilience is really interesting. You remember Petri dishes? I do. Yeah. So if you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially into every corner and crevice of your life.

29:21Brené Brown:Silence, secrecy, and judgment. If you douse it with each of those, it will grow into everywhere. Can we call it silence, secrecy, and scorn? I just wanted to alliterate. Move on. Oh, yeah. I was like, wait, I'm trying to think, is that the same? Judgment is really dangerous for shame. Yep. But I appreciate the alliteration call out. Okay. If you have shame in a Petri dish, the same amount, and you douse it with empathy, you have created a hostile environment for shame. Shame cannot survive empathy because what empathy does is empathy first and foremost helps us believe and see I can be seen and I'm not alone.

30:09Brené Brown:And shame needs, shame doesn't do well when you wrap words around it. It doesn't want to be spoken. It wants to live kind of, you know, inside building, building, metastasizing. So empathy is the antidote. Let's start with, I think this is interesting, and I'll put a PDF up on the show notes. Let's talk about how we, the three kind of most common ways we deal with shame when we go into it. Have you ever gone into shame? I don't know. I honestly don't know if I have. It'd be unusual. I can think of feeling intense guilt and embarrassment. I don't think I can come up with an example of a time I felt it, shame.

30:51Brené Brown:I love it. Which is why I'm so useless when other people are feeling it. No, I... It's foreign to me. I mean, I don't... There are some ethics that I don't have a ton of experience with that I think I can get close enough to and understand. So I don't think that the lift might be bigger to understand. So three kind of ways we protect ourselves from shame. And this is... These are called... I love this. Strategies of disconnection. And they're from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Again, Linda Hartling's work. One, when we're in shame, we move away. We withdraw, we hide. Two, we move toward, we people please.

31:31Brené Brown:And three, we move against, we use shame to fight shame. Okay, so this is a version of fight, flight, or fawn. It is absolutely, it is absolutely tied to our defense mechanisms, 100%. So I'll tell you a very quick story that I've used for, again, forever, just to illustrate it. So very quick story. And I think it's interesting because a lot of my early stories were about navigating being a new mom in academics, where they're like, that's cute conceptually, don't look like a mom, smell like a mom, or act like a mom, right? I mean, we're from the same tower. So I got invited by the Nobel Women's Initiative, all the living Nobel Peace Prize winners, to be on their board and go to a meeting.

32:17Brené Brown:Charlie was only six months old. I was really afraid about. I was afraid to go. Ellen, I know this is not a big deal for a lot of people, but she was having her first swim meet and Steve and I were swimmers. Of course, that's a big deal. That's a big deal for me. I couldn't decide what to do. I talked to Steve and it was kind of a scary situation because Sharina Badi from Iran had just won the Nobel Prize and there was a lot of threatened violence against the summit. So I was like, oh my God, am I gonna go? Am I gonna miss Charlie? Am I going to miss the swim meet? Am I going to, is there going to be violence that we're going to have to, you know, like what's like, there was a lot of things.

32:55Brené Brown:And so Steve was like, you got to go. So I went. First day back in Houston, I'm in carpool. I see this woman walking up to me and man, this woman is so dangerous. I mean, she's just a, she's a hard person for me in every context. She's the kind of person that after she talks to you, you're like, I feel slimed or shivved one of the two. Wow. Yeah. So she walks up and I rolled down my window and she, I mean, this much. And I'm like, hey, we're in carpool line. She goes, where have you been? And I said, you know, and my thing that I say to myself, mantra, don't shrink, don't puff up, just be in your sacred ground.

33:40Brené Brown:So I was like, oh, I was out of town for work. And she goes, who took care of those babies while you were gone? And I said, their father, Steve. And she said, oh, my God, it must be so hard to let other people raise your kids when you're out of town working all the time. And so one of the things that's really helpful is people who have the highest levels of shame resilience, they can physically recognize shame. Because when you're in shame, you are not safe for human consumption. Do not talk, text, type, do not do anything. And so I know my shame, when I'm in shame, and you're gonna find this so interesting, time slows down, I get tunnel vision, my armpits tingle.

34:25Brené Brown:It is the exact same we have found in the research for 20 years, trauma response. Wow. Like if I'm driving down the highway and it's raining and the 18-wheeler jackknife's in front of me, time's gonna slow down. I'm going to get tunnel vision. My armpits are going to tingle. I'm in fight or fight. So I'm like, oh my God, don't sit, don't talk, text or type. Don't talk, text or type. And I said, like, I went into a totally scripted moment. I said, oh, I've got to pull up for the line. Nice seeing you. So I raised my window back up and the car in front of me had not moved. So I literally went up three inches and then did not make high contact with her while she stood right here.

35:04I was like, because what would moving away look like?

35:09Brené Brown:It would mean grabbing my kid, getting home, hiding from carpool, hiding from the other moms at the school, just disappearing. What would moving toward look like? I would say, oh, my God, I know it is so hard to let other people take care of my kids and you're the best mom ever. What is the risk? Throwing up in your own mouth. Then you've got moving against. And this is where I go. Yeah. I literally would have said, have you seen your kids in school? You should let someone raise them. You know, that's where I'm going. I kind of want you to have said that. I know. But the problem is none of those are me.

35:49Brené Brown:All of them would cause downhill shit show. So what did I do? So here's shame resilience. I got Ellen, put her in the car, got home, got her started on her homework, got her a snack, went into my closet, closed the door, called my best friend and started crying and said, why am I such a half-assed mom, half-assed scholar, half-assed wife, half-assed researcher? Why, you know, and, and she's like, you know, we just ended up laughing, which is normally often the case in those situations. But I reached out for connection. She responded with deep empathy and I was okay. But these shame shields, these kind of ways, patterned ways of, and they call them strategies for disconnection because you're disconnecting from the pain of shame.

36:44Right.

36:45Brené Brown:Do you have a strategy? But in the process, you're disconnecting from your own values. That's it. No, that, okay. Say that again. In the process, I mean, I don't want to say it word for word. I think what's happening is you're choosing to avoid shame, but you're also losing sight of your own principles. That's it. Because what if I would have been really shitty to her? You might have regretted it. I would have regretted it for sure. There is a part of me that wants to say, but just as a matter of justice, like you should be able to say something like, you know, I was always told that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and leave it at that.

37:20Brené Brown:I don't think, I think, okay. So, so help me, help me with this. This is Adam Kransky and Ray to help us with shame. We'll find out. One of the things that we've learned is that when you go into shame, you come out of your prefrontal cortex and you get very limbic. Right. Yep. So coming up with smart, fun things to say usually happens a day later. Yeah. You get the George Costanza jerk store moment. That's what I should have said. That's what I should have said. Yeah. And you, that's why I just do, I do, I borrow this from someone that was one of the first early qualitative researchers, research participants.

37:59Brené Brown:She said one of the things that she developed when she was in shame is to go like this pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. And she goes, am I crazy? And I said, no, you're really smart because you're bringing your prefrontal cortex back online. That is very smart. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, okay. So I guess I do have a way of, of doing this mostly to help other people when they encounter it. Um, what I like to encourage people to do is just to, to have a mantra, right? That will be a more effective way to connect to their values. My favorite one is I'm not going to let other people define my worth.

38:34Brené Brown:That's really powerful. God, but it's so fricking hard to do in the moment, right? Yeah, I don't, I actually think, would you agree that you'd have to be pretty squarely in this part of your brain to act on that? Not to say it. It could be the stepping stone from fight, flight, fawn. It might be. Or I think fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are all actually options because I think a lot of people in shame just, they just, yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. So do you think to say the mantra is step one of the neural pathway back to the front? It could be. Do you know what I'm saying? Like one of the things we do when we do, when we teach this work and facilitate this work is we tell people this is hard because you're building new neural pathways.

39:23Yeah. Yeah. And ideally, right, that then leads to a bigger internal dialogue or conversation with a friend around why am I putting weight on what this person thinks? I don't even like this person. Of all the people that I might hand over the power to define my value, she would not be high on that list.

39:42Brené Brown:I mean, that's it. You know, and people have, when I've told that story before about the mom at the school, they always say to me, why don't you, did you circle back and say, hey, I want to talk to you? And I'm like, hell no. That's an investment. Yeah. And I don't - That relationship is not worth it to you. That's not worth it to me. Have you heard from her since you've told the story? Did she recognize herself in it? No, I've never heard from her. Interesting. I think certainly you're bringing up something that's really important to understand, which is a lot of the research on shame now will talk about unwanted identity.

40:20Brené Brown:It's really the quintessential elicitor of shame is unwanted identity. And so one of the exercises we have people do is it's very important to me to be perceived as. It's very important for me to not be perceived as. Right. Because your shame triggers are the identities that other people might attach to you that you don't want. That's it. Any part of. That's it. Yeah. So I think it's unwanted identity is a really big part of it. And I think once you get into that work, you're in therapy. Like, I mean, like you're really trying to figure out where do these identities come from? I'm like, I'll give you an example from my family.

40:58Brené Brown:It was very shaming in my family growing up to be seen as high maintenance. Like three girls and a boy. I'm the oldest sister. Go figure. We had to be like baseball hat, no makeup, let's go. If you had to, if you're on a car trip and you had to use the restroom and you were like, can you pull over? And it was on the wrong side of the freeway, not the direction you're going. That's high maintenance. You know what I mean? And like, and so it took me 20 years to undo that. Wow. And now you say I'm complex. I am complex. And, but now still, I mean, like literally last weekend, Steve was like, we were driving from Houston to Austin.

41:39Brené Brown:He's like, I'm going to pull over at, you know, at the truck stop. And I'm like, it's on the wrong side of it. He's like, okay, you sound like your dad, you know? And so those things, unwanted identities are tough. That's powerful. Yeah.

41:59Okay. So this makes me think about imposter syndrome. Because in a strange way, there's an, it's not an unwanted identity, but it's an unearned identity or it's an unearned image. So how does shame relate to feeling like an imposter?

42:18Brené Brown:Not good enough. Just not good enough. Not smart enough, not good enough, not MBA'd enough, not experienced enough, not enough. And so when we talk about imposter syndrome, I always go to HBR articles, Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. February 2021, Rashika Tulsian, Jodi Ann Burry, like this article, I think it was the most downloaded article of 2021 on HBR. This is really important because let's talk about this. Let's get into it. I think imposter syndrome is real. I think people can feel like that for sure. and I think some leaders and cultures go out of their way to make sure people feel like imposters, then it becomes very dangerous when people internalize that.

43:10Brené Brown:Yes. Do you agree? Yes. I'm so glad you made that distinction because a lot of the discussion I saw about that HBR article, I thought missed something really critical, which is there's an MIT professor, Basima Tufik, who was one of our PhD students. And she's done these amazing studies. It's the most rigorous work on imposter syndrome, period, where she just surveys people on how often they feel those everyday imposter thoughts. I guess they're, sorry, let me say that a little differently. She surveys people on how often they feel like imposters. Okay. But it's not a syndrome, right? It's not I'm a fraud.

43:45It's maybe I'm not as good as other people think I am. Maybe I'm not up to the challenge of this big role or promotion that I've gotten. And she finds that when people have those thoughts more often, they actually end up working more persistently. They end up learning more from other people because this is related to our discussion of metacognition. They know there's a gap between what other people expect of them and where they are currently. There's a sort of a confidence versus expectation gap. And they want to work hard and learn as much as they can to close the gap. And it becomes motivating to say, okay, I've got to live up to those expectations.

44:23That, I think, is a healthy way of dealing with those feelings. What you're describing is something very different, which is making you feel like you're not good enough. and trying to use that as almost a weapon to induce shame and motivate you to become a more indentured servant of the organization.

44:42Brené Brown:Yes. It would be really interesting for, I would love to understand, I would love to see data, maybe it already exists. I'd love to see research on what are the variables that exist externally and within a person where the gap between confidence and competence leads to positive. Yes. And when does it get internalized and lead to shame, self-doubt, and underperformance? That is the question. That is the question. Yeah, I just know that I can tell you for me, early in my academic career, I had a lot of imposter syndrome and it was engineered. I had some of my own and I was aware of it, but some of it was very intentional to drive kind of fear in what it was really is to drive deference of tenured faculty.

45:53Wow. Right. We're going to put you in your place. Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's, it's interesting because when I think about that, you actually just resolved a puzzle for me, or you gave me, you gave me, you gave me an idea about how to resolve a puzzle, which is this, this article comes out and it talks about how, you know, women are constantly told they have imposter syndrome. Whenever I bring up imposter syndrome, people stereotype it as a problem that's more pronounced among women than men. But what I didn't get until just now is, but men don't internalize it the same way. I know when I felt like an imposter, I just look at that and say, all right, I'm not there yet.

46:35Let me go and put on a growth mindset and try to figure it out. Whereas a lot of the women that I've worked with will be in the same situation and say, well, this must mean that I'm not capable.

46:48Brené Brown:And what happens when you're in a culture like today, where in the military, you've seen black men and women, brown black women and men, women discharged from positions of duty when they're excellent military leaders, when you've seen black women systemically moved out of the workforce. So it's not just, wow I'm really insecure folks it's also like you've got cultural forces yeah that are beating you down yeah no wonder you feel like an imposter you've been told your whole life that you shouldn't be there yeah and then we've got you know an administration that is the ultimate an act of like cronyism and unqualified.

47:35Brené Brown:So like, so I think, yeah, I think I, I, I, the big takeaway for me is imposter syndrome, shame, micro macro lens. Look at both humiliation, you know, micro humiliation. We see it tied to violence, but look at humiliation from a macro. Look at the current administration in the U.S. humiliating every day for the last three weeks, Europe, our allies. Humiliation from a macro perspective, and I think this was Linda Hartling's, you know, thesis here when she said not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability.

48:22Yeah.

48:22Brené Brown:Like how long, how many times are you going to use your authority to tell people in other countries and of other cultures that they're less than, you know? I mean, I was just going to ask you what your biggest takeaway was and you just nailed it. I think my biggest takeaway on Chameh, on imposter syndrome. It's impossible not to laugh. No, yeah. Chameh. It takes all the wind out of the shame sails. It does. Chame, humiliation, imposter syndrome is understand what they are and look at them from both a micro and a macro lens. And I think all three of those have in common deep internalizing of things that don't belong to you.

49:14Brené Brown:And I think a great final note on internalization is Giselle Pellico, the French woman who has, you know, when that court case came about, about her husband, not only sexually assaulting her, but drugging her and inviting her 50 strangers to do the same. Disgusting. They said, you don't have to face them in court. You don't have to bring them in. And her response was so powerful. This is not my shame to carry. We will put this shame on the right people. This is not my shame to carry. So a huge externalization of that doesn't belong to me. Yes. Which is very powerful because it's so rare. because individual choices to not internalize are very difficult in a world where the social messages are so strong.

50:15I think that's so important. Yeah. I think my biggest aha as I think about this conversation is it connects to something one of my mentors, Sue Ashford, often talks about, which is past hauntings. And when you talk about, when you were explaining to me why people continue to feel shame about these unwanted identities that, you know, as an adult, they could know better. That's not me. So many of them are related to our past hauntings. Oh, yeah. That, you know, the things we were shamed for as children, those got internalized. And I think that just, that was a light bulb moment for me.

50:57Brené Brown:I mean, I mean, hugely, yes, past hauntings. And we didn't talk about this, but I think it's worth taking a minute because the past haunting brings up something for me about how shame shows up at work. Because we think of our personal and professional selves as different, but they're one integrated self. Past hauntings that are personal, and I love the framing that you're putting on this, also show up at work in professional shame. And so two things I want to say. One, the number one shame trigger at work across the board has not changed in our research over 20 years. The fear of irrelevance. Think about what that means in today's workforce with AI.

51:44Oh, my gosh. That's huge.

51:46Brené Brown:Right. The number one shame trigger at work is our fear of irrelevance. I'm so glad you said that, Brene, because you just answered a question that's been in the back of my mind since our South by conversation. What was the question? It was about the shame-based fear of being ordinary as the definition of narcissism. I thought that was profound. I haven't stopped thinking about it since you brought it up last month. And yet, it dawned on me, there are non-narcissistic reasons to have a shame-based fear of being ordinary. Yeah. Which is, I want to make the best and highest use of my time. I want to make a unique contribution.

52:20I want to add value. And the threat of not being able to do that from AI, I can see how that could lead to pervasive shame.

52:29Brené Brown:And I think that's what we're up against right now. I don't even think we're, I don't even think AI is presenting as a skills issue as much as it's presenting as a trust and agency issue. So the fear, the fear of being irrelevant. So is one way that shame shows up at work, but let me just list some others. Back channeling, comparison, favoritism is a huge shame trigger for people at work. Past haunting, a parent favoring. Oh my God. Or a teacher. I was doing work in a company that was switching from servers to cloud. And they literally named them like old school and cool kids. And the top leaders would always, in public stuff, associate more with the cool kids, the cloud kids.

53:16Brené Brown:And it was like people were calling in sick. People were leaving after 20 years. It's just favoritism. I'll tell you the other big shame trigger, hidden, gossiping, sarcasm, tying people's self-worth to their productivity to try to get people to produce more, teasing. These are all ways that shame shows up at work. And I always say, if you're looking for shame at work, it's like looking for a termite in a house. If you walk through a house and you don't see termites, you still have the inspection before you buy the house because they could be behind the walls. And that's usually where shame lives in organizations.

53:58Brené Brown:If you literally walk through an organization and you see shame, that would be like looking at a house and seeing termites on the wall. This is not good. And I'm gonna give you a great example of where this happens, finance. Every quarter, they post everyone's numbers. Then the person with the highest number packs up all their stuff and pushes anyone out of the office that they want. You know, so empathy is the antidote. Understanding, I think, your shame triggers your unwanted identities. Understanding the shame shields you use to self-protect because they move you away, you know, from, I think, who you want to be.

54:39Brené Brown:and then being able to share your story with someone who's heard the right to hear it and having an empathic response back is so powerful because shame dissipates the moment you know you're not alone, that you can be seen and cared for. Shame is like, shit, I can't hold on. The idea that shame shields are like a band-aid instead of a cure is another big aha for me. Oh my God, there's such - I didn't realize that. But you're protecting yourself in the short run, but you're not actually putting yourself in a position to deal with the experience in the long run. And my ha-ha too is I've never been able to articulate quite as clearly as you have in two decades of talking about shame shields.

55:16Brené Brown:They move you away from your values. So while they may offer temporary relief in the second that you fight back with shame or you people please or you disappear, downstream, they cause more damage and more need for repair. Well, you said it. You were saying when I do that, it's I'm not me, I'm not myself. Yeah. I was just reflecting it back to you. I like the reflection. Well, this was an amazing conversation. Yeah, it was. And I'm excited about the next episode. See you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

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