No Need for Shame

My friend Alan sent me this Facebook post by Terra Vance and wanted my perspective on it. If you know me well, you know I grew up in but not of Appalachia, born and raised in East Tennessee but with both parents “from away.” And I very quickly realized that Alan and I had were using the same words but the words had different meanings.

One of those words was shame.

“Shame” by PinkMoose is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

For Alan, shame is the feeling you feel when you realize that you’ve done something bad, something that hurt someone else, a feeling of remorse and regret that motivates you to stop doing the bad thing and start doing something better. But for me, shame is much deeper, more existential. Guilt, for me, is the feeling that I have done a bad thing, and shame is the feeling that I am actually a bad person … and when shame deepens and festers over time, a bad person whose badness can’t be changed.

That’s a terrible feeling! I hope no one reading this post has ever felt that way!

And yet, when I think about teachers I know and love, I realize that far too many of us have felt that way. Far too many of us, especially when our professional identity says “I am, or am supposed to be, a good, experienced, effective teacher.” We discover something – something we didn’t know, something we don’t know how to do. Our professional identity tells us “But I am a good, experienced, effective teacher. I should know this! I should be able to do this!”

None of that is “bad.” But what comes next?

For Alan, “OK! Now I know, so now I can do better.” That’s a healthy and growth-oriented response. But sometimes we go in a less healthy direction. Sometimes we go from “I should be able to do this!” to “What’s wrong with me that I can’t do this?” And sometimes we go from there to “I must be a bad person after all.” And then shame – the kind I was talking about with Alan – comes along … and we know the rest of the story.

Good news: it doesn’t have to be that way! You don’t have to have “my” kind of shame. You don’t even need to have Alan’s kind, the temporary remorse and regret that leads you to make a change. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know, that you couldn’t do … but you don’t have to feel bad about that. In Robert Dilts’s language, you’ve discovered a behavior-level issue where you need some coaching, or a capacity-level issue where you need some teaching. Or maybe you’ve found an incongruency or misalignment at the level of values and beliefs, and you need some mentoring around that. You might need some sponsoring as you reground and reframe your professional identity … but whatever the problem was, it’s Fixable. Whatever the thing was, the thing you don’t currently know how to do, it’s Doable – it’s just that you don’t know how to fix it or how to do it by yourself. We can work on it together (and you know how to reach me on LinkedIn when you’re ready for that), or you can find someone else to help you.

In just a few days, here in the US, we’ll commemorate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King’s work was all about liberation … and liberation is a process, an ongoing process of coming to know better and deciding to do better.

And that’s what this is all about!