Let's reframe embarrassment

Very few people die of embarrassment.*

Embarrassment, most often seen as a purely negative emotion, can bring surprising benefits as you work to flourish your career.  So if you are someone who knows that fear of embarrassing yourself is holding you back from taking proactive steps read on for some tips on harnessing your embarrassment in service of your career.

From an evolutionary perspective all emotions have benefits and embarrassment has several:

• Commitment to the team.  Embarrassment serves as a social calibration tool, signalling to those around us that we understand prevailing norms and we have a desire to abide by them.  Our embarrassment will bring us into the inner circle of a social network.
• Accelerating trust.  Displaying appropriate embarrassment following a misstep will result in others elevating the level of trust they have in us.  This leads them to trust us with more responsibility.  Trying to hide embarrassment has the opposite effect.
• Supercharging motivation.  Using the discomfort of embarrassment to motivate improvement means we learn, put in more effort, anticipate better, and double down our efforts.  Masking our embarrassment truncates these improvement behaviours.

While embarrassment has its benefits it is debilitating when fear of it stops you taking chances or when it causes you to retreat and hide your talents because the remembered experience of it inflicts too much pain.

Overcoming debilitating embarrassment is something to sneak up on.  It starts with an attitudinal shift in which you reframe embarrassment as a learning opportunity rather than a personal flaw or failure.  Surround yourself with messages that extoll the virtues of embarrassment and let them sink in.

Be kind to yourself when embarrassment strikes.  Beating yourself up won't change anything.  Proactively tell that inner 'judgie' voice to get lost.  Give the voice a name (I call mine The Worm) and tell it that it is just not needed!

Remember that humour is embarrassments best friend.  Diffuse embarrassing situations by seeing and communicating the humour in them.  They make great stories of growth and resilience.  Start by telling the embarrassing story to the voice memo on your phone, then tell it in a funnier way, then make it even funnier.  Slowly start telling it to actual humans!

Talk your feelings of embarrassment through with trusted people who will listen without judgement and help you positively reframe the embarrassing situation so you can move past it.

Then get back on the horse quickly.  Take the learnings you gain from the embarrassing situation and put them into action.  Talk up in a meeting again, attend a job interview again, be creative again, reach out and have a networking meeting again... Otherwise that embarrassment has just been a waste of time!