This is FiveMinuteFriday episode number 250, Guilt versus Shame.
Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super excited, super pumped to have you back here on the show because today we’ve got an anniversary episode, episode number 250. We are a quarter of the way to 1000 episodes. Congratulations and a huge thank you for being part of this journey here with me and I personally can’t wait to get to a thousand episodes. It will take some time, but I assure you we will learn a lot of things along the way. And the topic of today’s episode might have seemed at the start on my, still seem to you as a bit dark when you clicked on it. It’s guilt versus shame. So don’t worry, there’s nothing dark about it is just associated with the research of doctor Brené Brown who is a highly, highly regarded quantitative researcher in the space of human connection, vulnerability, shame, happiness, and lots of other topics that affect our daily day to day lives.
Brené Brown, if you haven’t heard of her before. She’s got multiple books on these topics. She’s done dozens of years of research and she has two very popular Ted talks. Her first Ted talk called The Power of Vulnerability, has 39 million views as of today’s one of the top 10 Ted talks of all times. And her second Ted talk called Listening to Shame actually has 10 million views. So I highly recommend checking both of them out. I actually just re-watched them for myself two days ago. Very, very powerful Ted talks. And what triggered me to create or to pick this topic for today is what I heard Dr. Brené Brown say in an interview she had with Tim Ferris’s on the Tim Ferris’s show, which is another great podcast if you are interested in checking it out. This one was episode number 100.
There on the podcast she mentioned something that put, that gave me a perspective that I’ve never had before and kind of like came a threshold concept for me. So a threshold concept is when you, when you learn a concept that makes you look at the world from a completely, from a different perspective, and you never look at the world again as you did previously. So I had a mini, we’ll call it that a mini threshold concept, at the start of this week or a couple of days ago. And I wanted to share that with you. Maybe it might affect your lives as well, and maybe bring additional insights. So Brené Brown talks about many things and I highly recommend checking out her work, especially her main Ted talk, The Power of Vulnerability because she talks about vulnerability a lot and why it’s important and how we can be more vulnerable. What it means to be vulnerable, why, how it affects our lives and what social media has been doing to us, what the lack of connection means and why people are generally more unhappy than ever before and things like that. So I highly recommend checking that out, but we’re not going to cover that off in this FiveMinuteFriday episode, maybe sometime down the track, because it is an important topic.
But today we’re going to talk about specifically this concept of guilt versus shame. And so when I heard Brené Brown say this, first of all, you’ll find it might be a bit different to what you’ve heard me say on the podcast before. So I’ve, several times I mentioned that the feeling of guilt is a bad feeling it is triggered by maybe a person who’s in the victim mode that is affecting you right now that is triggering you to feel guilty.
Maybe you’re imposing that feeling on yourself. There can be many ways, but you want to get out of that feeling. It’s also one of the core feelings that people feel it when they’re in the Karpman’s drama triangle and you want to get out of the Karpman’s drama triangle and things like that. So in general, the feeling of guilt is bad. And you’ve heard me saying that on the podcast. However, Brené Brown puts it into a bit of a different perspective when she compares guilt versus shame. And that’s exactly what I wanted to share with you today. So according to Brené Brown, there’s two ways you can look at any kind of negative action that you might have done. And by negative action, I mean something that you later tend to regret or tend to feel that you shouldn’t have done it like that.
I shouldn’t have said that in a certain way. For instance, you’re having a conversation with somebody and then you get so angry and you can’t hold yourself back. You explode. And you might say something mean in the process or maybe you made a mistake somewhere at work that’s, you know, was an obvious mistake. You just needed to spend more time doing some quality assurance checks and you wouldn’t have made that mistake. Something like that. Let’s call it a mistake that you made that you’re looking back on.
So there’s two ways of looking at it. One is to say, hey look, I did this, like talking to yourself of course, look, I did this. And that’s was a very silly thing to do. That it was a dumb thing to do. That was a unprofessional thing to do. That was a harsh thing to do. I did that in the heat of the moment, that was not cool of me to do. You know, that’s a bad action that I did. Another way to look at it is to say, I am so stupid for doing that. I am so silly for doing that. I am, how could I do that? That is, that is completely unprofessional. I’m so unprofessional for doing that. I’m so, I’m so dumb for doing that. So there’s two ways of thinking about it, thinking about the action itself and how that was a silly action to do versus thinking about you as a person and the qualities, what qualities you must possess in order to have done that. And so the first approach when you’re thinking about the action that invokes guilt, you are feeling guilty about having done that said action or having said a certain thing to somebody else.
And the good thing about guilt, even though as we discussed previously on the podcast, is actually a negative feeling we want to get rid of, but in this case as a matter of terminology. So, let’s segregate today’s episode from everything else as there’s been happening, just like think of it in Brené Brown’s terms, right? So matter of terminology in this case guilt is actually better because it allows you to, while you feel guilty about certain actions, you learn from them and you can avoid doing them in the future. So it’s not characterizing you as a person is characterizing the action that you’ve done and things that you shouldn’t do or shouldn’t do in the future. Whereas if you think about the same event, but in terms of that you are a bad person for doing it, that you are maybe dumb or that you are unprofessional or whatever else you’re thinking, then you’re all of a sudden characterizing yourself as a human being in a certain way.
And that is not something you subconsciously can think of as being able to change. That actually invokes a feeling of shame. You’re ashamed of who you are, none of what you did. You know, instead of being guilty of having a feeling of guilt for what you did, you’re ashamed of who you are, that is completely different. And that, so the feeling of guilt actually in this, again in this definition of Brené Brown’s definition, not the one we’ve been talking about previously on the podcast, but in this definition, it allows people to get better, to strive for, for not making mistakes, to learn from their previous the things that they’ve done or said or whatever previously to become better, better people. Whereas the feeling of shame makes you want to armor up more, makes you want to hide your emotions. Makes you want to hide from people and hide from yourself. Ignore that feeling and try to push it down. Try to run away from it. That’s where obsessive drinking comes from. That’s where gambling comes from. That’s not the only reason. But that’s the one of the places where it comes from. That’s where all of these distractions with social media come from. When, when people are ashamed and what shame means according to Brené Brown is the feeling that you are not worthy of connection, that you are a bad person and that’s something is wrong with you and that you are not worthy of love and connection from others. And that is one of the leading causes for anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and many other very bad things that are plaguing our society these days. And so what is the conclusion from all of this to make it shorter, of course, if you listen to Brené Brown you can find out more insights into this.
But for myself, like what was my main takeaway? My main takeaway was in terms of self talk and talk to others. So in the future when I’m going to talk to somebody and point out that they did in my view something that it was not worth doing or was incorrect, was a wrong thing to do, I will try to make sure not to say that they’re a bad person, that there’s something wrong with them for doing that, but rather than characterizing them, characterize the activity that they did and that way I won’t make them feel ashamed of who they are, but rather allow them to see it from a perspective, the action from a perspective and potentially learn and change that. Maybe even more important, for instance, let’s look at an example. If you have kids you can call, you can, once your child comes home with an A, you can tell them, wow you’re so smart, you’re intelligent, you’re a genius, and then when they come home with an F, what are you going to say? You’re going to say you’re stupid, you’re a failure. And so on. Well one comes with the other. Instead of doing either of those, it might be better to say, Hey, look you, that was a great thing to do. What a smart thing to do, what a genius thing to do. And when some child does something bad, might be better to say, well, that was a silly thing to do, that was a dumb thing to do. And characterize the action rather than the child themselves.
That’s one way. And of course the other thing is self talk, right? That’s probably even more important because we talk to ourselves all the time and it’s very common for people to think, oh, I’m so dumb for doing that, I’m so stupid, I’m an idiot for thinking that way. Or you know, for feeling that way or for saying those things rather than characterizing yourself for what you’ve done, rather characterizing who you are, don’t do that because that’s going to invoke a feeling of shame. And that is going to make you close up more as going to make you want to suppress those feelings and find distractions and social media and whatever other bad habits and things like that. Instead of doing that, characterize the action, say, Whoa, that was such a stupid thing of me to do. That was such unprofessional way for me to behave or there was such a rude way for me to act instead of saying, I’m so rude, it’s better to say that was so rude of me to say that to that other person. I shouldn’t do that in the future.
And that will actually do the opposite. That will inspire you to learn and grow and to be the better version of yourself because we all make mistakes at times. There’s no point in telling us how is that we are not worthy, that we are not good enough when it’s actually just some actions that sometimes happen spontaneously, sometimes happen for whatever reasons, emotionally and otherwise, through neglect and so on. That it’s the actions that we need to characterize and that will allow us to work on ourselves.
So there you go, it’s my take on Brené Brown’s work, please take it with a grain of salt. I highly recommend checking out her Ted talks. Both of them are amazing. Once again, the episode with Tim Ferriss we’ll link to all these resources in the show notes, which you can find at www.www.superdatascience.com/250. That’s www.superdatascience.com/250. But overall I hope this gave you some sort of idea, some sort of different perspective and maybe this will make your life a little bit better. And that’s, that’s the reason why I share some of these things that I find along the way. Find along the journey that I’m going through.
On that note, thank you so much for being here at episode 250 and on the SuperDataScience podcast in general. Can’t wait to see you next time. And until then, happy analyzing.
