Success Shame and Guilt

Hi, how are you? And welcome to this week's episode of Leadership Is Feminine. We're gonna talk about the shame that comes with success and why I think we allow ourselves to feel shame when we're successful. So let's dig into that. All right.

Hey, hey. Welcome, welcome. So I was having a coaching conversation with one of my clients, one of my Sage clients, and it was really profound for me to have this conversation with her because it revealed to me some of my own thinking as well, and I figure, well, if it's also happening to her, it's likely happening to others, if it's for both of us.

And so I wanted to bring it here to give you some perspective about what I see happen for a lot of women when it comes to success. I won't indulge all of the history, but we know that women are relatively new to independence and success and achievement on their own terms. And despite all of the advancements that we've made, there's still a lot of hangover social belief systems, inherited belief systems, generational belief systems that I think we're slowly, but surely, having to individually punch through as we arrive at new milestones of success.

And so success can be authority, power, size of organization, size of your bank account, your revenue line, your popularity, or your influence, your exposure, your notoriety, all the things, regardless of what we label that we'll just sort of put 'em all in a bucket.

But what was interesting about my client, she was very forthcoming in sharing her thoughts and that was that she had sort of this underlying belief that if she was too successful, if things were too good, then that meant something bad was gonna happen. Brene Brown calls this foreboding joy, right? It's looking at your beautiful baby in the crib and looking at them and fearing that they'll die. It's this need to believe we're not deserved of this deep, deep level of joy.

And I think actually what we replace that with is shame and guilt over our success. Because then we believe if we shroud ourselves in that shame and guilt, then we won't invite the bad thing to come. Right? We're like arming ourselves like, "Oh, no, no. I feel some level of shame or guilt about my success. So that means you can't come and take it away from me, whoever this is."

And maybe this is born out of, you know, some version of religion too, right? This All-Seeing God that watches you and has this idea that he or she makes a decision about whether or not you've had too much good, so now you're gonna get bad. It's all built out of that somewhere. It has to be, right? Or we just do that to ourselves because the truth is, things don't stay great and things don't stay awful. That's living.

Living is, you know, winning the lottery at 10:00 AM and then your aunt dying at 4:00 PM. Like, that's living. Your aunt doesn't die because you won the lottery. But we make that correlation and then we fear success. We make the correlation that our joy means we deserve our pain. And that is so fascinating because of course what that does is it takes away our ability in the moment to relish and savor the joy.

Because, if we over-relish, if we over-saver, if we really let ourselves dip into how gorgeous things are, how amazing they feel, how, how incredibly proud we are, how excited we feel, how, how joy filled we are, if we let ourselves do that and we believe that there's a boomerang, first of all, we'll look for it. And second of all, we dull the joy to protect ourselves from imminent bad, and the correlation that somehow you deserve something bad. Right?

Karma, I guess, is part of that somehow. But karma is also like you've done bad things, I think. I think you have to have done bad things to people for karma to be a thing. It doesn't just mean because you're great, your life is great. Now your life is gonna be bad. But that belief stunts your growth. It stunts your ability to savor your joy, and frankly, grow, have more success, shine, savor, because there will be things that happen that hurt. We will suffer loss, we will have success slip through our fingers in some way. There will be decisions that are made that have bad impact on us. Like, that's that's true. Yes. And that's awful.

And I actually think when things are really crappy and you feel really crappy, you should just let yourself feel that instead of trying to hide from that too. Feel sad, feel anger, feel resentment, feel betrayed. Let yourself feel. Feel all of it. Feel the joy of success, and feel the pain of a defeat. Let yourself feel, because then you're not controlled by it. Then you're not subconsciously control controlled to avoid any of it, because then what happens if you avoid all of it? Numb. No savoring, no real pain. The pain we buffer away. The joy we hide from. So we don't invite the bad stuff. Let yourself feel. Talk to yourself about how things feel.

My kids graduated this weekend. I've talked about that now a few times, and I have had all the feels. I've had the feels of pride. I've had the feels of fear. I've had the feels of honestly, euphoria. Like, "Oh my God, we got them, we did it. We got them through high school. Woo." Right?

And I notice how my brain's like, "Yeah, but what if there's a graduation party this weekend and someone gets hurt?" Like I watch how I do that. I know we all do. It's to prevent ourselves from feeling too much pain if something bad happens.

But what if we just knew we could feel pain? We could do all of it, and that's really what it means to be human, is to allow yourself to feel and not be afraid of a feeling, for what that feeling might mean about your life. It's just a feeling, and some are better than others to feel.

How is this relevant to leadership? It's very relevant to leadership. If you're running a business and you fear success because you believe that if you're too successful, you're inviting the boomerang of demise, you can see how that will affect the decision making that you have. That will block your ability to grow and have success. If you are that leader, you might be the devil's advocate every damn day.

You might see the negative instead of the positive possibility. You might encourage employees to do the same. It might become part of the culture in your company and you don't even know that you did it. It's very relevant. If we wanna really live a big life, we have to believe in the potential of huge wins. We have to also know that we can be resilient through the fails. They're all there for us, and all those emotions do is give us feedback on the thoughts that we're thinking about the moment.

And I do love to savor a joy-filled moment. It's one of my favorite things. I just recently posted on my Instagram, my daughter played her last soccer game and she stuck a PK and then she had this save that was insane.

And it's funny cuz I didn't really listen to the videos when I posted them. I just posted them. And then a few people commented on the screams, my screams. And I absolutely lost my mind and I didn't even realize it, so I went back and listened and it's so funny. But I think like, that's what I'm talking about is like just that moment of relishing her success and that pride I felt and how proud I was for her. It was so fun. I don't wanna steal that from myself and I don't wanna steal that from her thinking that if I over celebrate, I'm gonna jinx it.

So let yourself feel the joy of your success. There is not this grim reaper who's coming to steal it from you just because something great happens and then something bad happens doesn't mean you deserved it, doesn't mean that's the way it works. Bad and good. No, it just means that's a life. And yes, there are good things and bad things, but they don't go together. For every good thing, you don't get the equal bad thing. And same way for every bad thing you don't get righted the good thing. Although I don't think a lot of people think that, I actually just think they get nailed for having good stuff happen.

There isn't some all sourceful being who's gonna say to you, "Oh, you've had too much good, here we go. Take something from her." that's not happening, except in your brain. And because it's happening in your brain, you're perpetuating it.

Savor. In this summer of detoxing, let's let ourselves feel the amazingness, the pride, the joy, and let's let that guilt and shame have its moment. Let it pass through you, but don't hang onto it. You don't have to stay guilty or stay in shame to justify feeling good about success. No more. Let her go, right? Oh mama.

Hey, if we aren't working together yet, you probably wanna think about it. I'm gonna be going to Hawaii in September and you have to be a client to come to Hawaii. Don't you wanna come? We have so much fun. Can you imagine the kinds of conversations we could have? It's like this, but like, you know, two way. Any whos, I will hope that one day I'll get to meet you in person. In the meantime, I'll talk to you next time.

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