The Shame Game: How your mindset is hurting your career goals

May 10, 2019

The Shame Game: How your mindset is hurting your career goals

The act of saying your deepest desires out loud to others is terrifying.

What if you fail? What if you don’t make it? What if you fall flat on your face?

What if you seize opportunities that come your way and the world knows you didn’t make the cut?

When I was in elementary school I convinced myself I could be in choir despite not being able to carry a tune to save my life. Even though my entire family knew I was not going to make the choir, they still let me try out. And to nobody’s surprise, I didn’t get selected to be part of choir.

At first I cried. I was so heartbroken. And then guess what happened? I got over it. But what I didn’t anticipate was…the shame. Even in elementary school, it found me.

Everybody knew I didn’t make the choir. Here I was telling all my friends and family I was going to be in the choir…yet, I didn’t make it. I wasn’t good enough. Nobody wanted me.

The shame was real.

Too often we only talk about the success stories. We like to talk about how we overcame something difficult and became something better. But what about all the times we failed? The times we failed hard. Not just at choir, but at things in our life that had big impacts on our pocket books and our futures.

Which hurts more: the loss to our pocket books and our dashed dreams or the damage to our egos?

The worst part of shame is that it convinces us that we shouldn’t try things for fear we might embarrass ourselves if we don’t have wild success or even just sustainable success.

However, as I have grown in my career, I am realizing more and more that the people who are wildly successful and even those who are just mildly successful do it by ignoring their own sense of shame.

They stop fearing failure and start approaching it as just one part of growth.

What they are doing inevitably is re-positioning failure and shame’s role their personal success stories. Instead of shame and fear being the outcome, they are making it the obstacle they overcame to something better. In other words, they don’t give up when faced with failure, they keep on moving until they find success.

Real Life Example:

Mary is dreaming of one day being a consultant at an Accounting Firm. She works hard to develop her own personal brand, starts working on developing new skills, and starts networking and building relationships at her dream firm. One day, she gets the opportunity to interview for her dream role. She spends extra time doing interview prep with a trusted friend and thinks ahead of time of real-world examples of some of the most common interview questions she may encounter according to her new friends at the accounting firm. She’s ready.

She goes in for the interview and thinks she’s nailed it. Two weeks later she gets a call back that she’s not been selected.

She is crushed.

She put in so much work and didn’t even make it to the second interview. She just wasted so much time and effort trying to get her dream job and it was all for nothing. She now has to write emails back to her all her friends who were helping her prep for her interview and tell them she didn’t make it. She is mortified.

Option 1: Failure as the Outcome:

She writes those emails and then withdraws into her own shame. This wasn’t worth the outcome at all. She’ll never do that again.

Option 2: Failure as an Obstacle:

She swallows her pride and puts on a brave face. She tells her friends she didn’t make it, but that she’s not giving up. She makes a plan to busy her mind on improvement instead of dwelling in the shame:

She’s going to ask for feedback from those who interviewed her on what she could do differently next time. She’s going to tell them very kindly and directly that if another opportunity comes up, to please consider her because she’s very passionate about the position and the role.
She’s going to continue networking and make sure her name gets mentioned to anyone at that accounting firm so they recognize her before she comes into an interview.
She’s not going to stop pursuing her dream role at the accounting firm until she gets that job. She’s going to be relentless in her pursuit of her dream career.

Six months later, she gets the opportunity to come in an interview again. This time, she’s realistically optimistic. She’s confident and hungry, but not desperate. The interviewers love her. She makes it to a second interview, and then finally the job offer. She overcame the obstacle and got the job she wanted.

I can relate on so many levels to Mary. I have been afraid of failure. I have been more terrified of shame. But I think the real defining moments for me have been when I re-positioned shame in the equation of my success story.

When I think of all the times I have failed and had to shamefully admit my own failures, I’ve felt immediate relief from all the fear. People now realize I am not perfect and that’s okay. Because a huge part of my success story is all the failures I had and have overcome along the way.

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