This morning I decided to do what John Mace and I call the “shame exercise.” You identify an event where you felt shame, and then you go through basically three steps. Shame is a feeling of powerlessness. Forgiveness falls short in dealing with it long term. That sense of powerlessness is the feeling you get when you are penalized for breaking a rule you don’t understand. In other words, you don’t know what you did wrong.
As you can imagine, this happens a lot when we are small children. So we enter our teens pretty much with a lot of it (shame).
I went back to a time when I was applying for a job at an insurance company when I was 18. At the time, I was working, making phone calls, and talking people into going to a show room. One day, a man who thought I was really good offered me a job Continue reading