Kris Krohn here with Limitless TV. And today we're talking about embarrassment
and shame. Oh my gosh! there's a pandemic in the country because then when we get
stuck in the cycle of shame and guilt and embarrassment, guess what? we
sometimes can't pull out of it and I've got guests mentor today
Marianne DeNovellis that is going to be sharing with you the number one secret
of how you exit embarrassment, how you exit shame. So that you can go on living
your life happy, excited, and fulfilled.
Let's talk about embarrassment. It's a word that we're all familiar with and
usually when you think of embarrassment you think, gosh middle school right?
Maybe you think something you did with the kid, as a kid. Maybe you think about
something that just happened yesterday. I want to talk about embarrassment and
shame why they get in our way and why they don't need to. You see, the embarrassment
and shame? they're kind of the same thing. In fact, if you look up embarrassment at a
dictionary, you're going to find the word shame. Here's my take on embarrassment
and shame, embarrassment and shame they're the same thing. Right? It's
because we care about what people think about us you know we get embarrassed
because of someone else's perception. They might think less of us if they knew
or saw this sort of thing about us. Let me share with you a story that came to
my mind when I thought about embarrassment. Okay so I'm a mom. I have
five amazing kids and one day my daughter comes home from school and says
this word that I didn't want to hear and it's not what you think. It's not one of
those four-letter words. We talked about that, covered that, no problem. But she
said a different four-letter word. You know what she said? lice. When I heard
that this whole flood of stigma just overwhelming and I thought, oh my gosh I
don't want to be seen as one of those families that's dirty and gross and how
can I get lies to go away. And I've heard stories and what are we going to do?
We're going to be the ostracized family, we're going to be shunned from our
community, we're not going to be able to go to our community meetings or church
readings or school meetings because we're the lice family right?
What if word gets out? what are people going to think? and so I got to tell you
I spent hours combing over my daughter's hair and looking for these little monsters
and their eggs and their nips and now I know what nitpick means because we get
nitpicky means you have to go through all of the tiny hairs on a person's head
and look for these little tiny grains of rice / lice that infect. And it drove me
crazy. but here's what I learned. I was at first I really afraid to share with
anyone what our family was experiencing. It's not a life-threatening thing it
didn't cause incredible amounts of pain and sorrow but it did have a stigma with
it it. It did have this weight just baggage with it and the first I really didn't
want to share anyone what we were doing but it got to the point where I had to
spend so much time focused on it that it occupied my mind all the time and I had
a choice to make. I could either become upset and feel
shame or I could just be okay. When it comes to embarrassment and shame the
reason we develop it is because we really have more caring about what
people think. The reason we become obsessed with it is because we care what
people think more than we do about what we think. You see when my daughter got
lice it became all about her. And as a mom, I could have easily said, you know
you're not allowed to touch. You're not allowed to do this. And imagine what a
daughter would feel like that imagine what a five year olds been interpret
when a mom says you're not allowed to do a B C and D and you have to be holed up
in your room until we know this is completely out of our system and if it's
you know two weeks into it and you have to start over then we have to start over
another two weeks. It could be totally condemning and shaming for them and in
fact when my other daughter got it, that's how she felt. She burst into tears
because she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to talk to her friends anymore.
She was afraid that she wouldn't be able to interact with people at all
because of this stigma that surrounds it. And I thought, you know what? No. I'm the
mom here. I get to be the one that facilitates this lesson. I get to be the
one that says you know what this is not the way you have to be because there's a
lifelong lesson that you're going to learn right here in this moment it's not
about the embarrassment it's not about the life is about who you choose to be.
And so I sat down with her and I asked her, girlfriend what do you want to feel
right now? Do you want to feel icky? do you want to
feel ashamed? do you want to feel bad? And she said, well no that's not going to
work for me. And I said, great what do you want to feel? because this is an
opportunity. Everything in your life that presents the opportunity is an
opportunity for shame and embarrassment or for stepping up your game and getting
real and becoming who you are to finding out who you're meant to be. So I asked
her. I said, what do you want to become of
this experience? She said, I just want to love myself. So this opportunity went
from an opportunity of shame to an opportunity where mom and daughter get
to spend hours together talking and relating and yeah this problem brought
us together but it wasn't really a problem because we made a solution out
of it. When it comes to pride and shame, here's the bottom line,
pride and shame are optional. They are optional. I've said it before and I'll
say it again, you don't have emotions happen to you. You select them. That means
you pick them out.
That means when a certain circumstance comes into your
field of view you could just decide what it means for you. I have a circumstance
am I going to feel shame over it? yes or no? I have this space between stimulus
and response. There's a book that I would highly recommend reading. Man search for
meaning by Viktor Frankl. And in there, there's a story of this man. Imagine
someone who is in World War two in a concentration camp stripped of his
dignity, stripped of his clothes, stripped of the food, stripped of his title. Maybe
you as a doctor maybe who knows but he was just down to bare skin and bones
quite literally. And here's what he said, there's a space between stimulus and
response. That is a space that defines a man. That is the space that defines you.
Maybe your your circumstance happens to be something that people would be
embarrassed about. What does it get to mean for you? That determines your
response. How are you going to respond when something shows up that could be
embarrassing? are you going to cow down and say, oh that was so embarrassing I
hope never to be seen in public again I hope no one ever noticed that with me I
hope that no one saw that because they might think I'm less of a person. Guess
what? it's probably happened to 90% of the people out there anyway and the more
you speak up about it the more comfortable you'll feel and the
more comfortable they're going to feel. We live in a society where taboos happen.
Where there's these hushed topics where you don't talk about it. Guess what?
if you don't talk, who's going to? If you don't stand up and say this is my
experience, this is how I grew from it, this is how I became better, then other
voices are going to talk instead. You know as a mom, I really want to be in
charge of how my child sees the world. Call it crazy if you will but I know
that there are some things about my children that I want them to learn from
me rather than from someone else. That gets to be your stand. You get to be the
one that decides what it looks like for you and give permission to all of those
around you to learn something better about a circumstance. This is your
decision time. I want to share with something with you about pride and shame
as it relates to each other. We talked about embarrassment before but pride and
shame, they're actually two sides of the same coin.
Shame says, I'm less of a person because of my circumstance. I'm less compared to
you. Pride says, I'm more of a person in my circumstance or because of my
circumstance and I'm more of a person because of you. There are two sides to
the same coin. So what is the solution? what's the solution to getting rid of
embarrassment? what is the solution to getting rid of shame? and what is the
solution to getting rid of pride once and for all? Let me give you the secret
key and I Got News for you it's not really a secret it's something that we
were born with.
The solution is love.
Call it crazy, call it hippie tree hugger, call
it whatever you want the solution is self-love and here's
what I mean by that. Love means commitment to my success. So when a
circumstance comes along how am I committed to my success in this
circumstance? Let's take for example you trip and fall and you're on stage in
front of 500 people or maybe you're in middle school and you take a hit. How do
I show up as my best in my circumstance? How do I show up as my biggest
cheerleader? That means I get up I stand on my own two feet and say, yep that just
totally happened and I still love me anyway.
Shame is a choice and now you have this option to give yourself permission to
choose out. Thank you so much for joining us today. Maryanne, high five! Thank you so much for
this amazing information. Friends, in a couple of days
you're going to see Maryann back here. She's going to be talking about the
effects of pornography on people and marriage and what you can do about that.
Tomorrow, we've got our real estate video come your way. So if you like today's
content, subscribe. We got more coming your way.