I know shame a bit too well. As a child, societal norms and my upbringing cloaked me in a shroud of shame, causing me to tiptoe around what was expected and limiting my happiness.
I've learned that this deep-seated emotion can rot our self-esteem, catalyze anxiety and depression, and even provoke self-harmful behaviors.
You've probably experienced this, too, withdrawing from relationships to avoid that prickling sensation of shame. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Tune in to Unbound Ambitions as we remove the mask of shame, replacing it with worthiness because everyone deserves a life teeming with joy, connections, and meaning.
Enjoy.
I want to invite you to a conversation with me. You can book your complimentary spot here.
I know shame a bit too well. As a child, societal norms and my upbringing cloaked me in a shroud of shame, causing me to tiptoe around what was expected and limiting my happiness.
I've learned that this deep-seated emotion can rot our self-esteem, catalyze anxiety and depression, and even provoke self-harmful behaviors.
You've probably experienced this, too, withdrawing from relationships to avoid that prickling sensation of shame. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Tune in to Unbound Ambitions as we remove the mask of shame, replacing it with worthiness because everyone deserves a life teeming with joy, connections, and meaning.
Enjoy.
I want to invite you to a conversation with me. You can book your complimentary spot here.
Welcome to Unbound Ambitions. My name is Penelope Magoulianiti, and this is a podcast for success-driven women. I work with women who want to excel in their careers and relationships without struggle or I snot s s s s s a and I heart am I am I to to the heart the the problem and I'm not afraid to challenge my clients to face the truth. What I know about success and connection is that both require a new way of doing things. I coach Unbound Ambitions. Life have to be either or. When you change your perspective, your whole world will shift. It can happen easily, and this podcast is about helping you unbound Hello, yourself from limiting perspectives. Hello and welcome to another episode of Unbound Ambitions.
Penelope:
Today we will talk about shame, its complexities and why it's important to talk about it as a way to overcome it. Let me tell you a short story about how shame shaped my course in life, got in the way at some point and caused me lots of suffering until I decided to change the way I approached it. When I was around 17 years old, my dad went bankrupt. My whole life changed. I had people, because we used to live in a very small village with, you know, 5,000 population. I had people coming and threatening us, judging us, saying bad things about me because I was his daughter and all these things made me feel ashamed. Shame of who my father was. Shame because he was owning lots of money to people. Shame because we couldn't have the things that we wanted to have. Shame because we had the banks coming after us. And when I was 22, 23 years old, I remember it very clearly when someone asked me who's your dad, what's your surname, I never used my dad's surname again. After all these events started to occur. I will always referring to my mother's maiden name because I was feeling shame.
Penelope:
To live a joyful, connected and meaningful life, we must discuss the things that get in the way. Shame is a deep seated, painful emotion that arises from the belief that we are fundamentally flawed. Or in a decade and this is what I used to believe that because my dad didn't have money, lost all the money because he was owning lots of money to the banks. I felt like I was missing something. Something was wrong with me. We feel unworthy. We feel people don't love us, or we may feel that we don't deserve to be loved because we have flaws and we are not good enough. Guilt it's all about feeling bad for something we've done, and I want to distinguish guilt from shame. Guilt is all about feeling bad for something we've done. Shame is about feeling bad for who we are. It's a social emotion closely linked to our desire for connection and the fear of this connection. To live a joyful, connected and meaningful life and experience meaningful relationships, we must discuss the things that get in the way, and shame is one of the things we need to discuss. We must talk about shame, fear and vulnerability to live a whole life and approach the world from a place of worthiness.
Penelope:
Society has its share of how we feel about shame. Societal expectations impose certain standards and norms, meaning that deviating from these norms leads to feelings of shame. So if your lifestyle, behavior or achievements don't match what society perceives as acceptable, then you start having feelings of shame because you're different. And then we have to deal with our personal beliefs as well, what we have been taught from a very young age to believe as normal and acceptable. Our upbringing, our values and beliefs significantly influence our feelings. And let's be honest if there is an internal conflict between our actions or characteristics and these personal benchmarks, we might start feeling shame.
Penelope:
In the early steps of my adult life, the norm was that for a woman to be worthy and good for marriage. I'm that old, sorry to say she needed to have a house in her name. My worthiness was bound to a property because that was how the society taught me back then. Crazy, it was crazy and I rebelled. I rebelled with this idea. I remember shouting and screaming and telling my mother there is nothing wrong with me to buy a husband. And yet, even if I was rebelling, even if I knew intellectually that it wasn't right, it was wrong to give a house to find a husband, I still felt unworthy. On top of that, I had to face the criticism, as I have already mentioned, because of my dad's financial mistakes and the bullying from people around me. I felt so much shame that there were times that it was unbearable. There were times that I didn't want. I didn't go to a party, I didn't even want to show up at work because I felt terrible. And this is another reason why many of us have shame later in adulthood.
Penelope:
If our childhood experiences involved criticism, bullying, or we neglected our emotions or our emotions haven't been recognized. For example, boys don't cry, good, girls don't do that, we don't talk about that, we don't never talk about what's going on in our house to others or we don't share how we feel. Never. All these neglected feelings, all these suppressed feelings can create shame later in life and unfortunately, shame affects our self-esteem and mental health, and low self-esteem leads to feelings of worthlessness. We don't talk about what keeps us eating until we cannot take it any longer, and then we hate ourselves. We are so desperate to numb the feeling of shame and take the edge off that we become anxious and full of self doubt and self-loathing. As Brenna Brown says, when we struggle to believe in our worthiness, we hassle for it. If we are experiencing prolonged feelings of shame that we never acknowledged or dealt with, we often feel anxious, we may become depressed and we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, and, if the symptoms are severe, even start.
Penelope:
Adopting self-harmful behaviors is possible, and unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. When we are ashamed, we often withdraw from our relationships to avoid being judged or exposed. We don't open up to our partners or share our experiences, and we may even be evasive when it comes to our past, keep it a secret or even lie about it. We become more defensive in our communication, making it difficult because we take everything personally. I know about this. I used to be like this and it was terrible. Every time my husband was telling me something, I was taking it as an attack. To me it has nothing to do with me, because we associate with our past and what we try to avoid. So everything they tell us is like a trigger for something that happened in the past. And I want to share another story with you to make this even more clear.
Penelope:
I used to be a perfectionist and I used to be proud of it. And I say I used to be because actually perfectionism never goes away. But nowadays I believe I'm close to 80% of perfectionism. So perfectionism means I try to make everything perfect and flawless so I don't have to deal with judgment and shame. My friends, shame loves perfectionism. So when I was creating or preparing a workshop or a speech and this was at the beginning of my coaching career I was getting so excited and then, as I was getting ready to take it out into the world, to start promoting, to start booking myself into different speaking engagements, I was finding excuses for why it wouldn't work out and why I needed to improve it. So I was going back to the drawing board, starting over, spending more time, and then the same pattern would occur. I can't tell you how many ideas are left in a drawer somewhere in my office, but what I can tell you is what it did to my morale. It brought shame. My mind was telling me I'm not cut for this, I'm not good enough. Who is going to want to work with me? I am a failure. And shame was becoming stronger and stronger.
Penelope:
We don't need to experience shame to feel unworthy or paralyzed by it. The fear, only the fear of experiencing it, is enough to paralyze us, and this is what's happening with me. And the less we talk about shame, the more we have when we live our lives in secrecy. It controls us. When we stay silent and when we judge ourselves, we are believing in our unworthiness. And it affects our professional lives as well, because it keeps us silent. Have you ever been in a meeting where you wanted to express your opinion by staying silent? This silence can be perceived as a weakness. Or maybe you don't say a thing.
Penelope:
When your supervisor comes to you and tells you to do something with half of the information that you need, and instead of asking questions, asking to be informed about what has been happening up to this point to bring you up to speed, you go on on your own to find out that information that it was all to be given to you in the first place. You're trying to find out more about the situation so you can deliver. How many hours have you wasted instead of just asking to be brought up to date? We hassle because we struggle to believe in ourselves, and when we hustle in life, life becomes so much more difficult.
Penelope:
How do we overcome shame, or even how do we deal with it? We start by practicing self-compassion. We start by acknowledging our feelings without judgment and being kind to ourselves. At the end of the day, we all have shame and we are all afraid to talk about it. The truth is that the less we talk about it, the more control it will have over us. So accept the fact that you are feeling shame. Examine the feeling of shame without avoidance. Treat yourself with kindness by being willing to listen to your own thoughts about shame, without judgment or fear of experiencing that shame.
Penelope:
Shame is an emotion. The worst thing to happen is to feel it again, but this time you will allow it to exist, without you running away from it or pushing it down by trying to ignore the existence that caused it in the first place Because, guess what, the more you avoid it, the bigger the emotion will get. It's like a volcano Lava is boiling on the inside until it explodes. And you certainly don't want to keep it boiling inside, because this is when you start eating to numb the emotion. You start drinking more so you don't feel, or, every time you feel, ashamed, you spend money on yourself to feel better or to prove to the outside world that you matter. This was my go-to feel good for a fraction of the time. Addiction Journaling helps to process your thoughts and emotions.
Penelope:
Putting everything you think and feel on paper will help you see what's happening in your mind. It will help you see the pattern of your thoughts and realize that it is creating the life you're living right now. If you're happy with your life, keep living it, but if you see that it holds you back, you need to change it. Open communication also helps, and if you don't want to do it with the people that you know, if you don't want to talk at the beginning about your painful past with your partner, family or friends, then seek help, reach out to a coach or mentor, or even find support groups.
Penelope:
Shame, my friends, is triggered. Understanding these triggers will help you deal with them better. When shame kicks in, don't act on it. Give yourself time to understand the why. What triggered this? Most of the time it is based on past experiences or undelred situations that cause extreme shame in the past. And always remember that the feeling of shame is the result of a thought, so challenge that thought. This is another reason I love journaling so much and I encourage my clients to do the same.
Penelope:
By journaling you can see the pattern of your thoughts and normally it goes like this I ask my brain where is the evidence that this thought that it's telling me it's real? Remember, our minds love to create stories and the stories it creates aren't based on facts. Most of the time it's just the story based on fear or based on the effort of the mind to keep us within our comfort zone. Therefore, it's not real. So when you start asking where is the evidence to support this thought, you are forcing the mind to give you evidence. Most of the time it won't, because that particular thought was not based on fact, but probably based on the fear of what if? What if this happens, which is again another thought projecting to the future. Nobody knows what will happen in the future. We can think we know, but we are guessing and then talk about why shame happens. When we talk about shame, we start to develop resilience around it. We start to develop shame resilience.
Penelope:
The more vulnerable and open you become about how you feel, the more resilient you will be, the more you practice these techniques I've just shared with you. Let me go back and give them to you Journaling, it's one of them. Open communication, it's another. Questioning the mind, asking to provide evidence, it's another way to see if your mind is creating stories or not. This is how you start creating the resilience that I am talking about. So the more you practice these techniques, the more relaxed you will feel. And guess what? The more at ease you are. You will start be willing to share the parts of you that you kept locked for so long. The more vulnerable you become, the more authentic you show up, the more authentic you are, the deeper connections you will create. People will start trusting you more. It creates a ripple effect. This is how you will gain more confidence, show up more at work and become a better leader, and this is how you will shift your relationship status from a superficial connection to a deep, meaningful connection.
Penelope:
But first you must be willing to deal with shame. Self-awareness and emotional regulation help, but if the trauma is deep, find a coach to help you. A good coach will ask the questions you must answer to release the fear of shame. A good coach will go deep and find the root of shame and help you deal with it. Avoidance creates more of it. I would like to invite you to a deep conversation. Email me, ask me a question and book your appointment to discuss it.
Penelope:
Don't allow the excuse of I don't have time or it might be too expensive. The minute you allow these thoughts to win, you are prolonging your suffering. It's an invitation, not a paid session. And why are you working so hard if you don't have time for your health and peace of mind? Why are you putting others' needs ahead of yours? Why do you believe that others are more worthy than you? It's a pattern, a story you have on a continuous replay, and this is how years and years pass by without you releasing the fear. Book your call with meat ap enelopemagoulianiti. com/ agoulianiti com forward let's lets, and let's talk talk.. love. There are several myths and misconceptions that exist about women who want to have successful careers and maintain fulfilling and beautiful relationships, and this is what I love to do. I love to debunk these myths, to coach and guide women to a new way of thinking and doing. If you're interested in learning more about my work, I would like to invite you to a conversation. Go to to penelopemagoulianiti to topenelopemagoulianiti com/l pcom forward slash etst to alk book your call.