Awareness vs. Shame: Shame's Impact on Motivation

Progress is not linear. Part of why focusing on immediate action is more sustainable than focusing on outcomes is because focusing on outcomes makes us turn wins into loses or fall into habits of beating ourselves up if we don’t get a specific outcome even if we did a good job of doing all the actions that were in our control to do.

Beating yourself up for not getting a specific outcome is a mental habit rooted in shame that you can break with practice. It just takes time. Shame or beating yourself up might be an autopilot reaction, but if you cultivate awareness of it, then you can shift it to more productive reflections. Beating yourself up doesn’t help you learn anything, it just is beating yourself over the head with shame as a punishment. Maybe you were taught punishment goes with failure, but the psychological effect of extra punishments after failure tends to get in the way of learning. Being able to reflect on failures without shaming is key to learning how to learn from mistakes.

Awareness is simply identifying areas you can improve without shaming yourself for not already knowing something or having a skill. Identifying what to learn without shaming yourself for needing to learn and grow still.

Let’s say you say you had an interview and it went badly- how do you practice awareness of possible areas to improve without dwelling on shame? If you start shaming, what are some ways you can break out of it and reframe?

“[Helplessness] happens when your radius of awareness is wider than your sphere of influence”

–Eliza Day Light (Actor and Writer)

When you are shaming yourself, how much of what you shame yourself for was something you had control or influence over?

Also, How much is Social Media contributing to you comparing yourself to others and self-shaming?

When the amygdala is activated by anxiety or stress, it sends the urge to scan for danger and become a night watchman. Like how there used to be a night watch person for tribes scanning for any danger at night. This can be used to understand why people doom scroll on social media when stressed. We are looking for confirmation to validate feeling anxious. However, this contributes to comparing ourselves to someone else’s high light real and can be used to self-shame which leads to feeling demotivated. Additionally, it can raise our awareness to include things outside of our sphere of influence or control which can be demotivating.

Practice activity for cultivating internal awareness:

• Give your brain time and space to process the emotions, this does require stepping away from activity and doing a route physical activity or verbally processing it by conversing with someone. This doesn’t mean jump to the end of fixing it, but really analyze what all went into a situation turning out how it did.
• Jot down the experience of it or do a voice memo to replay later for reflection.

Reflection Questions:

• What do you think of the goal you tried to achieve? Was the goal set up to be actionable? What got in the way?
• Where does the desire for this goal come from? Was it more outcome expectations-oriented rather than focusing on present actions?
• If focusing on outcomes got in the way, what would staying focused on the immediate actions to take look like to try again?