Mistakes Without Shame

I love this quote from one of my favorite speakers and authors, Brene’ Brown, because it speaks so clearly to the destructive nature of shame, especially when learning from our mistakes is what we need. It also speaks to an important part of what I teach, which is how to access the clear, confident, creative, and wise part of who we are as we work to create the life we want.

You see, the part of us that is capable of purposeful change is the purposeful part of the brain, or the neocortex (what I call the “Top of the Mind”). Unfortunately, when we make a mistake and find ourselves feeling shame as a result, we are being driven down to the lower 20% of the brain which is responsible for keeping us alive in situations that call for a fight-or-flight response. This, as Dr. Brown so eloquently puts it, keeps us from accessing our best, and even can convince us that we are not capable of change.

This can be especially true if we were taught to believe that when we make a mistake “we should be ashamed of ourselves.” Notice that the person who was trying to help us learn from our mistake didn’t say that we should examine our past choices and make better ones in the future… or that we should think about the best of who we are and determine to think, feel, and act differently going forward. No! The admonition was that we should be ashamed of ourselves, or ashamed of who we are.

Sadly, if this happened when we were young, we may have taken it to heart and believed that it was true. This then made it almost impossible for us to trust ourselves going forward, because we had learned that we were someone to be ashamed of. This had us then looking to everyone around us for validation and wisdom, which only continued to reinforce the fear that we were not someone we could trust to make good decisions.

Of course, I’m not saying that all mistakes are no big deal and that we should just say, “Oh well,” and move on. It is important for us to learn from our mistakes, but to do this, we must be able to access the part of us that learns and applies that learning to the future (the neocortex, or Top of the Mind.)

Therefore, if you find yourself crippled by shame or beating yourself up because you made some mistake, I suggest that you switch from a focus on punishment to learning, and ask yourself a neocortex question…”Knowing what I know now, how would I do this differently in the future?” And/or, “If my highest purpose was to help someone I love learn from their mistakes, how would I suggest they take what they learned and apply it to the future?”

This way you are accessing the part of the brain (the part of who you are) that is most capable of change, and allowing that part to inform your choices going forward. So much better than shame, don’t you think?