Letting go of shame

In October of last year a friend of mine was running Brené’s Daring Greatly programme, I was so excited that I booked my spot instantly. I wrote an email answering her questions on my motivations for joining the course “I’m very good at being vulnerable publicly but I’m struggling to be vulnerable in my relationship.” I couldn’t wait to get stuck in and then the opportunity to be a LinkedIn Learning author came along and happened to clash with the course dates. I was gutted but I knew if that had happened, it wasn’t the right time and so I reluctantly pulled out. Fast forward to March, six months later, the world is in a global pandemic and my relationship of two years was coming to its end. Emma emailed me to let me know that the course was now going online and again I jump at the chance of joining. This time when I replied to her email answering her questions on my motivations for joining the course I said “It’s been a very long time since I was vulnerable in my work and I don’t know where to start”.

I have been a long time fan of Brené Brown, her work and more specifically her TedTalk on ‘The Power of Vulnerability’. I can honestly say it played a part in my finding a bit more of myself and having a knock on effect on various areas of my life (more on this later). I have watched and rewatched that TedTalk so much I’ve stopped counting. The resounding message I was left with was “vulnerability is not weakness”. That for me was such an important lesson to learn, I had grown up with an ethos instilled in me from a young age to be strong, to wipe my tears away and to sweep my worries under the rug. Something that as an adult I came to realise was doing more harm than good. However what I spectacularly failed to understand in that TedTalk until I did the course was Shame. I had absolutely eclipsed anything she said in relation to shame. Having had a wonderful conversation with Emma, we discussed that sometimes people aren’t ready to hear and see Shame and I think that was very much the case because once you can see, hear and experience Shame you can’t go back.

I think form me the biggest eye opener of Shame was the simplest thing, actually understanding what shame was. I think part of the reason why it had totally gone over my head whilst listening to her mention shame a whole eleven times in her TedTalk, was that I didn’t really have that emotion in my vocabulary. One of the very first few exercises we did on the course was understanding shame. Understanding how it made us feel, which in my case was painful, breath-taking and scary. We then looked at our definition of Shame and this is when I had the big penny drop moment that I usually have when engaging in personal development, my shame stories were all tied into why I do what I do.

Come take a walk with me down memory lane and I’ll explain to you what the link between Shame and Authenticity is and why I’ve become so adamant of living an authentic life true to myself and encouraging others to do so too...

Childhood

I grew up with very strict parenting of how to be in the world. From everything to how I spoke, how I dressed, what I weighed, because all of those things meant something especially when you came from humble beginnings. The only problem with how we’re expected to be in the world is that we remove the opportunity for a child to find their own sense of identity because acting anything less is well, shameful. By doing so we reinforce the belief that we’re not good enough as we are and therefore “not worthy of love and belonging” as BB says. And most of the time these expectations can be societal, cultural, familial and get passed on or inherited throughout generations without the validity getting questioned but more importantly the damage it is doing.

School Experience

I was bullied at the age of eleven and then again at seventeen. Whilst the first was a truly horrifying experience where my life was actually in danger the second one was far worse because it was in the shape of public shaming via the use of social media. A friend had taken it upon himself to create a Facebook group where he invited the whole college and encouraged people to join him in uploading edited images of me and encouraging hate. I had experienced at first hand what it was like to be shamed and picked apart by not one but numerous people in an open forum. I had constantly battled both in the first and second experience to be the ‘odd one out’, the misfit, the ‘out of place one’ that just didn’t ‘fit in’.

Employment Experience

Work was different and yet not so different at all. I often found myself in companies with toxic cultures that felt like you could never truly be yourself or belong. I often didn’t fit in and had very few people I called work friends. I also had my struggle with mental health and I remember vividly trying to hide that I was suffering. I did my best to try and hold my shit together because I felt an overwhelming sense of shame of having a people role that required me to look out for employees when I was barely capable of looking after myself. I was also instilled with a dread of looking ‘weak’ when I felt like I needed to appear strong as a twenty four year old in a leadership position.

Current relationship

Lastly and by far one of the hardest pill to swallow was how shame showed up in my relationships. I’d grown up with a lot of shame because of where I’d come from and who I was told to be in the world, so why on earth would I choose partners that would make me feel shame? Well, that was it. I was actively attracting and seeking that same pattern of behaviour, shame, because well, what else did I know? I often felt like I wasn’t enough no matter what I did and again having to mould myself to what the other person needed versus feeling like I could truly be myself. It was a painful realisation that I was choosing to put myself in these relationships where I couldn’t be me.

So what have I learnt about shame? That I no longer wish to carry the shame that I have been passed on or inherited. That I no longer want to be in relationships whether romantic or friendships where I feel shame. That I no longer choose to work in environments that don’t allow me to be me. If my recent post about finally being debt free was anything to go by, we still have a long way to go on the topic of shame. Lastly I want to leave you with the definition of shame I came up with because when I wrote this, I realised that this is exactly why I do what I do. This is why I’m so obsessed with authenticity! This is why I want to encourage millions of people to live and authentic life true to themselves, because

“Shame is the very real and painful reminder that I do not fit in and I cannot be liked or loved but more importantly that I am not accepted for who I am.”

With love and care, 

#AuthenticAlex

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Emma is running her next Daring Greatly course on the 9th September, you can find out more here and get in touch with her directly. If you have any questions about the course, I'm happy to share my experience in more depth just get in touch.

You can follow more of my musings and antics here @imauthenticalex or sign up to my newsletter that covers topics such as finding your purpose, telling your story and growing your presence https://mailchi.mp/1d671953165c/authentic-alex-newsletter

About me: Hi I’m Alex, after experiencing a quarter-life crisis I decided to leave the corporate world and create my own definition of success. On the day I left that job I wrote a post that went viral on LinkedIn. 

Since then I've been named LinkedIn Top Voice UK twice and have worked with companies such as Deloitte, Shell, Dyson, BP and Fiverr all through building my own Thought Leadership on LinkedIn

By day I help people grow their presence on LinkedIn, helping them find their sense of purpose and tell their own stories. By night I turn into a superhero keynote speaker and blogger under the hashtag #AuthenticAlex, knocking down one stigma at a time! 

I'm also the co-creator of #LinkedInLocal, the biggest hashtag campaign on LinkedIn that created offline communities in over 100 countries and 1,000 cities.