The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - The Emotion Few Talk About, But Many Feel

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

From classrooms and locker rooms to workplaces and social media, Adam and Brené trace how shame and humiliation are used to control behavior and even fuel violence. They explore what causes shame, why our self-protective responses backfire, and how we can handle it more effectively. They also unpack the messy overlap between imposter syndrome and cultural pressures toward self-doubt. You can find The Curiosity Shop on ⁠YouTube⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠ (@thecuriosityshop). Chapter Titles + Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 2:10 - The One, Two, Threes of Shame 8:52 - The New Research on Humiliation 14:04 - What Is Humiliation? 18:30 - Why Don’t People Outgrow Shame? 29:09 - How to Help People Out of Shame? 38:05 - Reconnecting Your Prefrontal Cortex Post-Shame 42:55 - How Does Shame Relate to Imposter Syndrome? 50:10 - Biggest Takeaways About Shame, Guilt, Humiliation, and Embarrassment Why Feelings of Guilt May Signal Leadership Potential - Marina Krakovsky, 2012, Insights by Stanford Business (Introducing the work of Schaumberg)  Unwanted identities: A key variable in shame-anger links and gender differences in shame - Ferguson et al., Sex Roles Humiliation: Causes, correlates, and consequences - Elison & Harter, 2007, from The self‑conscious emotions: Theory and research  Healing Humiliation: From Reaction to Creative Action - Hartling & Linder, 2016, Journal of Counseling & Development Shame and Humiliation: From Isolation to Relational Transformation - Hartling et al., Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies Strengthening resilience in a risky world: It’s all about relationships - Hartling, 2003, Women & Therapy  Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome - Ruchika Tulshyan & Jodi-Ann Burey, 2021, Harvard Business Review How imposter syndrome can be your superpower - MIT Sloan Office Of Communications, 2025 (Introducing the work of Basima Tewfik) Unmasking the Impostor - MIT Sloan Office of Communications, 2025 (Tewfik, Debunking 4 myths)  Listening to shame, Brené Brown, 2012, TED The Power of Vulnerability, Brené Brown, 2011, TED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-Fer-Free at O-D-O-D-O-O-com. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? Scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce

you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip. They stay for hours. They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Welcome to The Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. We're glad you're here. Absolutely. What are we talking about today? Okay, we're going to talk, I'm going to tell you a really quick funny story. We're going to talk about shame. Oh, I've always wanted to talk about shame. Have you? Yeah, I've had a ton of questions for you about it. Okay, this is a really funny story. When I was first doing the shame research, this was probably 20 something years ago. We were running a group in a domestic violence shelter, piloting the curriculum. And like the third group we ran, the self-nominated leader came up and said, I've met with everyone in the group. We have a proposal.

And I said, okay, great. And it's always good to know who the emerging leader is in a group situation. And she said, we don't like the word shame. And I was like, oh, that's going to be tough because it's a shame resilience group. And she said, we would like to moving forward say, Shameh instead. And so for the next nine weeks, when people would be sharing or when I'd be talking about it or the co-facilator, who's actually the clinician, I was the researcher. You know, someone would say, listen, I was so that really put me into some really, deep shame.

And so, yes. That's hilarious. So you take the shame out of shame by mispronouncing it. Yeah, you know why? Because just the word shame can elicit, it's got a contagion to it that's hard for people. So. I can absolutely see that. Can you see that?

Yeah. I mean, frankly, I mean, did you see what happened in the Michigan football program last fall? Oh, yeah. Anybody, I grew up in Michigan. I went to grad school there. A lot of my family went there. I've been a diehard Wolverine fan forever. and it's hard not to escape the feeling of shame there.

But we won a national championship. So I'm feeling a little better. You did win the Natty. Congratulations. Thank you. What a, what a slugfest game against Yukon. It was a little ugly. Yeah, it was a little ugly, but congratulations.

Thank you. I will proudly say go, is it this? Michigan, is this the sign? I've never done that. Oh. I don't know. I'm big into the signs of the mascots. So we're going to talk about Shameh.

All right. I'm ready. Okay. So where do you want to start? You want to start with the basics? You're the shame expert. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

So I always start like with the one, two, three's. One, we all have it. Two, no one wants to talk about it. And three, the less you talk about it, the more you have it. So I am thinking about doing, again, this was two decades ago, doing grand rounds. At a hospital. At a hospital, psychology department, psychiatric department. And after.

the head of the psychiatric department came up and said, this is the first conversation. I've been here for 30 years that we've ever had on shame. And it's the number one presenting issue we deal with. No one is talking about it. And at this exact same time, I was having my PhD students do a content analysis to see in all of the primary texts that are adopted across psychology, social work, counseling, how much are we talking about shame? And at that time, which again,

it would have been 1998, we found one chapter and it was written by me in 70 texts. Wow. Yeah. This is one of those things that we have become very slow to talk about because of the contagion of the word itself. So when we talk about diagnoses or we talk about issues.

We can find some comfort in us and them, but there is no us and them in shame. To be alive, you know it. Everyone's got it. No one wants to talk about it. The less you talk about, the more you have it. So I think that we were early. And there were people, Tangney and Daring,

great researchers really doing excellent research and compiling research. There were some folks in addiction who were talking about shame, because that's a really complicated relationship addiction and shame. So the one, two, three's. I think the big thing to know about shame is you can't talk about it

until you differentiate it from what we call the other self-conscious affects. So affect, fancy word for emotion, the other emotions that make us feel self-conscious or that are reflection on self. So shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment. That tracks. That tracks.

So far, so good. Yeah. So big difference in the ones we use interchangeably, shame and guilt. Shame, the best way I explain it, shame is I am bad and guilt is I did something bad. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. And so I always like this is because I came up teaching this in graduate school for social workers. I always like to say you get your paper back and you got a crappy grade. and the way we measure shame or guilt-proneness in a person is really by their self-talk.

So you get your paperback and you have a D, which is hard to kind of conceptualize. I'm like, I'm not liking this. You have a D for dude, do better. And your self-talk is, God, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm such an idiot. Shame. You get your paper back, you get a D, your self-talk is. is, God, it was really stupid to go out Thursday night and not study for this test. Guilt.

Guilt. Focus on, you know, behavior versus you. And guilt is adaptive. Would you agree? I mean, guilt is holding something you've done up against your own values and experiencing, I guess, what we would call cognitive dissonance, that psychological discomfort, that I did something or failed to do something aligned with my values. Yeah, or that hurt someone else. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's interesting, I think a lot of people push back on the idea that

guilt is useful because they've been on one too many guilt trips. Right. But I think the evidence is incredibly strong. We know that in romantic relationships, guilt is a driver of repair. You want to write your wrongs. You probably know Becky Schaumburg's research on leadership, showing that leaders who are prone to guilt are actually more responsible leaders, because they worry about letting others down

and they try to do the right thing. And I think it's, I think it's a much more functional emotion than most people realize. Okay, so let's pause here. And I want to, I want to talk about adaptive guilt versus I'm taking on shit

that doesn't belong to me. Yes, please do. Which can be gendered. Yep. You know, like I am responsible for everything and everyone, and I feel guilt that doesn't belong to me. And so I think we have to make the distinction on guilt as defined by taking self-responsibility for your choices and how they impact other people.

I think that's adaptive. Yeah, I think so too. Can we add one more layaround to that, which is, I think there's a difference between I look at my behavior and I recognize that it doesn't measure up to my standards or other people's standards versus somebody else is imposing guilt on me and trying to make me feel bad and manipulate me into then doing their bidding. Oh my God, that's huge. Yeah, that's huge. I think in the most, in the purest form of guilt being adaptive, it's self-reflective. It's self-evalutive. You know, I think, and this is a gender issue. I mean, I think women, you know, women carry a lot of things. Yes. And I think our, because we pick a lot of things up off the ground and because a lot of stuff

is shoved our way. Yeah, both. In equal measure. Yeah. And the reason we pick things up off of the ground, I'm going to have to say is also socialization. Okay, so we have shame and guilt. I did something bad. I am bad.

And you have to remember that shame is the feeling and belief that we are flawed to the extent that we are not worthy of love and belonging and connection. This is very survival-based stuff, which is why people have a hard time talking about it. So the other two, this is where my work is dramatically changed. So we have new evidence, and everything I said before about humiliation was wrong. It's different now. Wow, that's a strong statement.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And I'll tell you why. early on and aligned with other researchers looking at humiliation, we believed that the mediating variable between what could make somebody feel guilt versus humiliation was simply the variable of deserving. So I'm going to give you an example that actually happened when we were doing the research, and this was pretty shocking. We were in a classroom, I think it was fourth grade, and the teacher handed out, and they knew

while we were there. And so we had consent from parents, consent from the school district, handed out the papers and had one left and said, I've got one paper left and it doesn't have a name on it. Anyone here want to guess whose paper this is that doesn't have a name on it? And kind of people got very quiet and the students got fearful and said, Susie, did you get back a paper? No, Susie does not get back a paper because Susie doesn't have a name on it. Susie, I'm going to put the name on it for you. S-T-U-P-I-D. So I want to, I want to, I know, I know look on your face. I want to kind of pause us for a second, let us take a breath and walk us through a couple

things here. So we use that story as an example of several things. The first is the difference between shame and humiliation. So if Susie's self-talk is, God, I'm so stupid, why am I so stupid? Why don't I remember my name, shame? if Susie's self-talk, this is how we used to talk about humiliation, was she's so mean, she's the worst teacher ever, I did not deserve that, that would be humiliation. Right.

And we believed early on that humiliation was less dangerous than shame because there was a self-righteousness to it and you would report. Right. I don't own it. I don't own it. I don't own it. Right. I don't own it.

Also, as a caregiver or a parent, I'm much more likely to hear about humiliation than shame. because with shame there's nothing to report. I am stupid, I got called stupid. With humiliation, I'm not stupid, I got called stupid. And so it's really, and so that deserving piece was a huge part of how we thought about humiliation. But I want to go back and I have notes here because I want to talk through, and we'll come back to Susie in that example because it's harsh. This is what's changed my mind about humiliation. It's a series of studies.

Let's going to start Susan Harder and colleagues. examined the media profiles of 10 prominent school shooters between 1996 and 1999. Harder and her colleagues reported that in every case, the shooters described how they had been ridiculed, taunted, humiliated, and teased by peers. They were spurned by someone in whom they were romantically interested or put down in front of other students by a teacher or administrator. All events leading up to the shooting had a history of profound. humiliation. Not enough to move me yet. Then the report prompted a series of studies by Jeff Ellison and Susan Harder that found links for peer rejection, humiliation, depression, and

anger with both suicidal and homicidal tendencies. And this is really interesting because we talked about bullying from the South by Southwest stage, right? Their studies suggest that bullying alone does not lead to aggression. Instead, individuals who are bullied become violent specifically when feelings of humiliation accompany the bullying. Wow. So all of a sudden, in the research, humiliation is taking on a completely different color. Last, and this is a researcher I've followed for decades, Linda Hartling. She ties together a lot of the research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. She suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions,

including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, decreased self-regulation that ultimately lead to violence. And I want to share this quote from heartling with you. Humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations. It may be the missing link in the search for the root causes of political instability and violent conflict, perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age. Wow.

So I think what was news to me when I read these, and I changed course in Atlas of the Heart and kind of said, let me introduce the rethink here. I get behind that. You get behind that, don't you? Is bullying alone doesn't lead to violence, but the combination of bullying and profound humiliation? Support for the. the show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen

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Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing O-Doo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today.

That's a lot of progress. War, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR, PBS, and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling in a certain light makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president. Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situation.

I don't think about anybody. What's he doing coming up on today, explained from Vox? Okay, so talk to me about what humiliation is, because from that description, it sounds to me like just a combination of shame and embarrassment. So embarrassment, so that's really interesting because we're talking about the four self-conscious affects. Shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment. embarrassment, the hallmark of embarrassment is fleeting, often funny with time, but the real hallmark of embarrassment is when it happens to me, I don't feel alone. I know I'm not the first person to, you know, mispronounce someone's name or walk out of the bathroom,

a toilet paper on my shoe. So what I think is the definition of how I would think about humiliation based on these studies is internalized public shaming. Yep. Yep. So it's a combination of shame because I can feel shame alone. You know, I can try on an outfit and look in the mirror

and then have that warm wash come over and me and be like, the delta between what I thought I looked like and what I think I looked, what I actually look like is shaming. You know, or I can. You know, for me, a real example of shame as a public person

is when someone says something really hateful and personal about me, I don't feel shame about that. I feel shame when I think about someone I love reading it. Oh. Do you know what I mean? Yep. Like I hate that feeling. And then I feel I have that whole warm wash of small, want to disappear,

am I lovable, that kind of thing. And I've got a lot of tools now to get through that. So I'm not very shame prone anymore. I mean, Jesus, two decades. case of researching. That should be the ultimate armor, right? That's the big door prize. But I think that humiliation has a public belittling piece to it that shame doesn't always

have. Yeah. So that makes me think we're using the term wrong in sports then. And we talk about teams being humiliated by other teams. Usually that doesn't lead them to feel unworthy or unlovable, right? I think oftentimes they realize, okay, we, we, We were not up to the standard. We wanted to be at.

So they were humbled, but they weren't humiliated. I think it depends. Okay, so this is so interesting. I think it depends on how the narrative the team tells itself. Certainly, I had been with teams post trouncing in locker rooms where the feeling was humiliation and the coach drove that home. Yep. they drove they the coach drove home you are not worthy you are not worthy of that field you are not

worthy of this jersey you are not worthy of this franchise so i so it leads me to something else and i i want to not forget to go back to the susy shame the one thing that's really hard about the self-conscious affect shame humiliation embarrassment and guilt is that they're highly individualized So I tell this example often. If I forgot your birthday or Allison's birthday, like... How dare you? How dare, yeah, Adam's wife. Today, I would probably have a glimmer of embarrassment or guilt and say, hey, happy belated

birthday. Yep. I hope it was a great one and can't wait for what's going to unfold this year. If I forgot your birthday when Ellen, my oldest, was somewhere between zero and five, I would would have gone straight into shame. Because I was trying to balance being a PhD student, getting a position as an ABD, a marriage, and everything I failed to do

was a reminder of how fast I was. So what is shaming for me can be humiliating for you, can be mildly embarrassing for someone else. It's highly, so when you say, what language do we use to describe the sports team in the locker room, it depends on their narrative. Right.

That makes a lot of sense. Does that make sense? It does. Okay, so one follow question, because I want to talk about how to deal with shame and what do you do for Susie. I've often had a hard time relating

to people's experiences of shame. I've lived a lot of guilt and embarrassment in my life. But shame is pretty foreign to me. I get it when kids feel it because they don't know any better than to internalize. They haven't, you know, often they haven't developed a sense of self.

And so I did something wrong can really quickly bleed into there's something wrong with me. What I've always been puzzled by is why don't people outgrow shame? Like, as an adult, you should know if you're not severely harming other people or doing anything unethical. You're probably not a terrible person. Like, why is that so rare for people to realize that? I know it sounds like a ridiculous question, but it's a genuine one for me. No, it sounds like a genuine question and it sounds like an important question. And it's really important because you're not the first or 500th person who's asked me that question.

And I think it's really important because the antidote to shame is empathy. And so when you don't understand shame, it can lead you to empathic failure with people who are in it sometimes, not because you lack empathy, but because it's like you're not, you don't really think this makes you a terrible, unlovable person, right? That's exactly my response. Right. It's actually worse. Like, well, that's just irrational. Like, this specific thing you did or the choice you made, like, why is that casting a shadow on your whole sense of self and character?

Yeah, I think that I don't know that I really have a great answer for this. I mean, I think for a lot of us who were raised with a healthy dose of shame so that being good and being right and being all these things felt conditional for love, I think shame is a very hard thing to overcome. I think the other thing is one of the most common and profound expressions or functions of shame is perfectionism. Perfectionism, like when perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun. Because perfectionism is the belief.

that if I can look perfect, do it perfect, work perfect, and deliver perfectly, I can avoid or minimize shame, blame, humiliation. And you know, you know how many adults struggle with perfectionism. Yeah. Right. And so I think it comes to the idea that, and I would not say it's just parenting. I would say we're learning more and more that it's hardwiring. I think that's another thing I've radically shifted on. That for a long time, we would all say those of us who studied self-conscious affect, parenting is the number one predictive variable of shame. I think it's definitely a variable. I think kids can come hardwired for a sensitivity of self-criticism.

What do you think? I mean, this has been probably my biggest revelation from reading developmental psychology and behavioral genetics in general is that I think overall we overestimate nurture effects and underestimate nature effects. 100%. Which anyone who's had a second child immediately realizes, like parents of one child are really strong believers in nurture. And then all of a sudden, number two arrives and you did, you think you did the exact same things, and they react really differently. And all of a sudden,

you realize, uh, there is, uh, there's a lot of pre-wiring that happens here. Yeah. And I'm one, you know, it's, I think about my own kids, like, what was it like to be raised by a shame researcher? Um, I can tell you that, that Ellen's kindergarten teacher called me one day and said, wow, I completely get what you do. And I said, why? And she said, we had the glitter center today. And I looked over at Ellen and I said, you are a mess. And she sat straight up and she said, I may be making a mess. I am not a mess. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. And so I think that. That's fantastic. I think that ability, and I've experienced it in you, like in whatever the research term is for shit ton. You have a tremendous ability to. separate behavior and put behavior on a table and dissect it without being emotionally are invested in that.

Yeah. That's my job. That's what I do. Yeah. But I also think it's your job and my job and anyone that does what we do to understand that that's probably more rare than it is common. Yeah. And I struggle with people who,

don't do that instinctively. Yeah. Like, this is a logical error. Stop confusing the person for the action. And I think that's good leadership. And I think that can be really good leadership because a lot of times what I'll have to tell people is if we're doing a postmortem on something that went wrong, I have to say very distinctly, hey, we're looking for failures in systems, not failures, people as failures.

We're looking for failures in systems. We're looking for failures and systems. We're looking for choices, you know. and shame-proneness is two things at the same time. Very tough to lead someone that's deep into shame-proneness because when they go down, they don't get back up easily. Two, it is absolutely leveraged to get productivity out of people. And we'll talk about that at a minute about how shame shows up at work.

So I think it's really important to understand the difference between shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment. I want to go back to the conversation where Susie. We debrief with a teacher and said, help us understand what's happening. Talk about separating behavior from character, by the way. I mean, my first impulse, even as somebody who likes to do that and does it frequently, would have been to say, fire that teacher. Like, no teacher who thinks it's okay to do that to a student should be employed in this profession. I agree. You should not be trusted with children. I agree. And I mean, we do have, we have two things about teachers and administrators and coaches that are important.

Don't, don't hear one without the other. One, 85% of all adults we've interviewed over two decades can remember something so shaming that happened at school. It forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners. Wow. Two, over 90% can remember a teacher, a coach, or administrator who absolutely helped them believe in themselves. So there is nothing we can draw from that except for the,

sheer power those folks have. Yeah, big time. And more people use it for good. But shame can be used as a classroom management tool for sure. Wow. So when we ask the teacher, tell me, tell me what you were thinking. Tell me how you experience Susie's response to what you said. And she said, she's so smart. She's such a good kid. She is not putting her name on papers. She's forgetting basic things. Do you know what happens to kids like her when they're held back in fourth grade? Do you know what chances she has? of being successful. If she's held back in fourth grade, we cannot let her be held back in fourth grade. Wow. That teacher has a broken mental model of her job. Well, I don't know that she has a broken mental model. I think she has a real lack of options for skills building.

I think she has not thought through, I think she believed, probably similarly to how she was raised, but it's an assumption we didn't get into it. If I'm, if I, if I torment enough, and a lot of parents and parents do this, if I torment enough, you'll change. As opposed to saying, I need to call an ard, I need to get a specialist involved,

I need to understand what's happening here. She cannot afford to be held back. Wow. But it's just, it's such a misdiagnosis of the problem, right, to think that, well, she doesn't care enough and therefore I'm going to,

to mock her in front of the class and now all of a sudden she's going to feel so much fear of being in that situation again that she's going to be attentive to detail and careful. How does that add up? You just described how marketing and advertising works across the country. You just described how social media works across the country at the country. Like this is how the world in many ways works. We will humiliate shame and mock you into believing you are not worthy of. connection, and then we will sell you the beer or the sweater or the eye shadow that makes

you lovable. So I don't know that her thinking, while the demonstration of it was one of the most painful things I have ever, and I wanted to run out and stop it, but you can't, we did give her some tools, and she did end up calling the art, which is that a national term, Ard? Like bringing together a bunch of folks from the school administrators, school counselors, outside testing folks to figure out what was going on, I have to tell you that like shame is how a lot of pillars of capitalism are built in work and certainly advertising in media.

So interesting. I've never seen it through that lens at all. Yeah. I mean, if everyone imagine what would happen in the diet, cosmetic, plastic surgery industries, if today everyone woke up and looked in the mirror and said, I'm amazing. I'm worthy of love and belonging. I mean,

industries would collapse within 24, 48 hours. It would be the airline post 9-11. Like, a lot of things work because we've commodified what will make us feel less ashamed. So you're an outlier. Good to know.

Thank you for calling me that. In so many ways. Okay. So what do we do about it? I would love to learn how to be more empathetic and help people out of shame as a parent as, you know, a colleague. But also, how do you help people deal with it internally, too? Okay. So shame resilience is really interesting. You remember petri dishes? I do. Yeah. So if you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially into every corner and crevice of your life.

Silence, secrecy, and judgment. If you douse it with each of those, it will grow into everywhere. Can we call it silence, secrecy, and scorn? I just wanted to alliterate. Move on. Oh, yeah. I was like, wait, I'm trying to think, like, do it. Is that the same? Judgment is really dangerous for shame. Yep. But I appreciate the alliteration call out.

Okay. If you have shame in a petri dish, the same amount, and you douse it with empathy, you have created a hostile environment for shame. Shame cannot survive empathy. Because what empathy does is empathy first and foremost helps us believe and see, I can be seen and I'm not alone. And shame needs, shame doesn't do well when you wrap words around it. It doesn't want to be spoken. It wants to live kind of, you know, inside building, building, metastasizing. So empathy is the, antidote. Let's start with, I think this is interesting, and I'll put a PDF up on the show notes. Let's talk about how we, the three kind of most common ways we deal with shame when we go into it.

Have you ever gone into shame? I don't know. I honestly don't know if I have. It'd be unusual. I can't think, I can think of feeling intense guilt and embarrassment. I don't think I can come up with an example of a time I felt it. Shame. I love it. This is why I'm, I'm so useless when other people are feeling it. No, I... It's foreign to me. I mean, I don't... There are some ethics that I don't have a ton of experience with that I think I can get close

enough to and understand. So I don't think that the lift might be bigger to understand. So three kind of ways we protect ourselves from shame. And this is, these are called, I love this. Strategies of Disconnection and they're from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Again, Linda Hartlein's work. One, when we're in shame, we move away. We withdraw, we hide.

Two, we move toward, we people please. And three, we move against. We use shame to fight shame. Okay. So this is a version of fight, flight, or fawn. It is absolutely tied to our defense mechanisms, 100%. So I'll tell you a very quick story that I've used for, again, forever just to illustrate it. So very quick story.

And I think it's interesting because a lot of my early stories were about navigating being a new mom in academics, where they're like, that's cute. Conceptually, don't look like a mom, smell like a mom, or act like a mom, right? I mean, we're from the same tower. So I got invited by the Nobel Women's Initiative, all the Living Nobel Peace Prize winners, to go to, to be on their board and go to a meeting. Charlie was only six months old. I was really afraid about, I was afraid to go. Ellen, I know this is not a big deal for a lot of people, but she was having her first swim meet.

And Steve and I were swimmers. Of course that's a big deal. That's a big deal for me. I couldn't decide what to do. I talked to Steve. And it was kind of a scary situation because Shirin Abadi from Iran had just won the Nobel Prize and there was a lot of threatened violence against the summit.

So I was like, oh my God, am I going to go? Am I going to miss Charlie? am I going to miss the swim meet? Am I going to, is there going to be violence that we're going to have to, you know, like, like there was a lot of things. And so Steve was like, you got to go. So I went. First day back in Houston, I'm in carpool.

I see this woman walking up to me. And man, this woman is so dangerous. I mean, she's just a, she's a hard person for me in every context. She's the kind of person that after she talks to, you're like, I feel slimed or shived, one of the two. Wow. Yeah. So she walks up and I rolled down my window and she got, I mean, this much.

And I'm like, hey, we're in carpool line. She was, where have you been? And I said, you know, and my thing that I say to myself mantra, don't shrink, don't puff up. Just be in your sacred ground. So I was like, oh, I was out of town for work. And she was, who took care of those babies while you were gone? And I said, they're a father. Steve. And she said, oh my God, it must be so hard to let other people raise your kids when you're

out of town working all the time. And so one of the things that's really helpful is people who have the highest levels of shame resilience, they can physically recognize shame because when you're in shame, you are not safe for human consumption. Do not talk, text, type, do not do anything. And so I know my shame, when I'm in shame, and you're going to find this. so interesting. Time slows down. I get tunnel vision. My armpits tingle. It is the exact same we have found in the research for 20 years. Trauma response. Wow. Like if I'm driving down the highway and it's raining and the pick up and the 18 wheeler jackknives in front of me, time's going to slow down. I'm going to get tunnel vision. My armpits are going to tingle. Wow. I'm in flight or fight.

So I'm like, oh my God. Don't sit. Don't talk text or type. Don't talk sector type. And I said, like I went into a totally scripted moment. I said, oh, I've got to pull up for the line. And I've seen you. So I raised my window back up and the car in front of me had not moved. So I literally went up three inches and then did not make high contact with her while she stood right here. I was like because what would moving away look like? It would mean grabbing my kid getting home, hiding from carpool, hiding from the other moms at the school, just disappearing.

What would moving toward look like? I would say, oh my God, I know. It is so hard to let other people take care of my kids and you're the best mom ever. What is the risk? Throwing up in your own mouth. Then you've got moving against, and this is where I go.

Yeah. You want to. Yes. Where I literally would have said, have you seen your kids in school? You should let someone raise them. Wow. That's where I'm going.

I kind of want you to have said that. I know, I know, but the problem is none of those are me. All of them would cause downhill shits show. So what did I do? So here's shame resilience.

I got Ellen, put her in the car, got home, got her started on her homework, got her a snack, went into my closet, closed the door, called my best friend, and started crying

and said, why am I such a half-ass mom, half-ass scholar, half-ass wife, half-ass researcher, why, you know, and she's like, you know, we just ended up laughing, which is normally often the case in those situations, but I reached out for connection. She responded with deep empathy, and I was okay. But these shame shields, these kind of ways, patterned ways of, and they call them strategies for disconnection because you're disconnecting from the

pain of shame. Right. Do you have a strategy? But in the process, you're disconnecting from your own values. Oh, that's it. No, that, okay, say that again. In the process, I mean, I don't want to say it word for word. I think what's happening is you're choosing to avoid shame, but you're also losing sight of your own principles. That's it. Because what if I would have been really shitty to her?

You might have regretted it. I would have regretted it for sure. There is a part of me that wants to say, but just as a matter of justice. You should be able to say something like, you know, I was always told that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I should. I mean, I think, okay, so help me, help me with this. This is Adam Grant's getting ready to help us with shame.

We'll find out. One of the things that we've learned is that when you go into shame, you come out of your prefrontal cortex and you get very limbic. Right. Yep. So coming up with smart, fun things to say. Not easy. Usually happens a day later. Yeah, you get the George Costanza jerk store moment. Yes.

That's what I should. should have said. That's what I should have said. Yeah. And you, that's why I just do, I do, I borrow this from someone that was one of the first early qualitative researchers, research participants. She said one of the things that she developed when she was in shame is to go like this. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, and she goes, am I crazy? And I said, no, you're really smart because you're bringing your prefrontal cortex back online. That is very smart. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, okay, so I guess I do have a way of doing this, mostly to help other people

when they encounter it. What I like to encourage people to do is just to have a mantra, right, that will be a more effective way to connect to their values. My favorite one is I'm not gonna let other people define my worth. That's really powerful. God, but it's so freaking hard.

It's hard to do in the moment, right? Yeah, I don't, I actually think, would you agree that you'd have to be pretty squarely, in this part of your brain to act on that, not to say it. It could be the stepping stone from fight, flight, fawn. It might be. Or I think fight, fight, fight, freeze, and fawn are all actually options. Because I think a lot of people in shame just, they just, yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right. So do you think to say the mantra is step one of the neural pathway back to the front? It could be. Do you know what I'm saying? Like one of the things we do. do when we do when we teach this work and facilitate this work is we tell people this is hard because you're building new neural pathways. Yeah. Yeah. And ideally, right, that then leads to a bigger internal dialogue or conversation with a friend around why am I putting weight on what

this person thinks. I don't even like this person. Of all the people that I might hand over the power to define my value, she would not be high in that list. I mean, that's it. You know, and people when I've told that story before about the, about the mom at the school, they always say to me, why don't you, did you circle back and say, hey, I want to talk to you? And I'm like, how no, I, that's an investment. Yeah. And I don't. That relationship is not worth it to you. That's not worth it to me. Have you heard from her since you've told the story? Did she recognize herself in it? No, I've never heard from her. Interesting. I think, I think certainly you're bringing up something that's really important to understand, which is a lot of the research on shame now

will talk about unwanted identity is really the quintessential elicitor of shame, is unwanted identity. And so one of the exercises we have people do is it's very important to me to be perceived as. It's very important for me to not be perceived as. Right, because your shame triggers are the identities that other people might attached to you that you don't want any part of. That's it. Yeah. So I think it's unwanted identity is a really big part of it.

And I think once you get into that work, you're in therapy. Like, I mean, like, you're really trying to figure out where do these identities come from. Like, I'll give you an example from my family. It was very shaming in my family growing up to be seen as high maintenance. Like three girls and a boy, I'm the oldest sister. Go figure. we had to be like baseball hat, no makeup, let's go. If you had to, if you're on a car trip and you had to use the restroom and you were like, can you pull over it and it was on the wrong side of the freeway, not the direction you're going, that's high maintenance.

You know what I mean? And so it took me 20 years to undo that. Wow. And now you say I'm complex. I am complex. But now still, I mean like literally last weekend, Steve was like, we were driving from Houston to Austin. He's like, I'm going to pull over at, you know, at the, at the truck stop.

And I'm like, it's on the wrong side of it. He's like, okay, you sound like your dad, you know. And so those things unwanted identities are tough. That's powerful. Yeah. Staples' preferred business membership built for busy business owners because you've got bigger things to think about. With Staples Preferred, get free delivery. No minimums.

Staples Preferred unlocks up to 3% back. Plus 10% savings on print and exclusive wireless offers. One less thing on your plate. Actually, a lot less. Visit staples.ca slash preferred. That was easy. Okay, so this makes me think about imposter syndrome. Because in a strange way,

there's an, it's not an unwanted identity, but it's an unearned identity or it's an unearned image. So how does shame relate to feeling like an imposter? Not good enough. Just not good enough. Not smart enough, not good enough, not MBA'd enough, not experienced enough, not enough. And so I, when we talk about imposter syndrome, I always go to HBO article, stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. February 2021, Rashika told she. Jody Annbury, like this article,

I think it was the most downloaded article of 2021 on HBR. This is really important because let's talk about this. Let's get into it. I think imposter syndrome is real. I think people can feel like that for sure. And I think some leaders and cultures go out of their way to make sure people feel like impostors. then it becomes very dangerous when people internalize that.

Yes. Do you agree? Yes. I'm so glad you made that distinction because a lot of the discussion I saw about that HBR article, I thought, missed something really critical. There's an MIT professor, Basimit Tufic, who is one of our PhD students. And she's done these amazing studies. It's the most rigorous work on imposter syndrome, period,

where she just surveys people on how often they feel those everyday imposter thoughts. I guess they're, sorry, let me say that a little differently. She surveys people on how often they feel like impostors. Okay. But it's not a syndrome, right? It's not I'm a fraud. It's maybe I'm not as good as other people think I am. Maybe I'm not up to the challenge of this big role or promotion that I've gotten.

And she finds that when people have those thoughts more often, they actually end up working more persistently. They end up learning more from other people because this is related to our discussion of metacognition. They know there's a gap between what other people expect of them and where they are currently. There's a sort of a confidence versus expectation gap. And they want to work hard and learn as much as they can to close the gap. And it becomes motivating to say, okay, I've got to live up to those expectations. That, I think, is a healthy way of dealing with those feelings. What you're describing is something very different, which is making you feel like you're not good enough.

and trying to use that as almost a weapon to induce shame and motivate you to become a more indentured servant at the organization. Yes. It would be really interesting for, I would love to understand. I would love to see data, maybe it already exists. I would love to see research on what are the variables that exist externally and within a person

where the gap between confidence and competence leads to positive. Yes. And when does it get internalized and lead to shame, self-doubt, and underperformance? That is the question. That is the question. Yeah, I just know that I can tell you, for me, early in my academic career, I had a lot of imposter syndrome and it was engineered. I had some of my own and I was aware of it,

but some of it was very intentional to drive kind of fear in, and what it was really is to drive deference of tenured faculty. Wow. Right. We're going to put you in your place. Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's interesting because when I think about that you actually just resolved a puzzle for me, or you gave me, you gave me an idea about how to resolve a puzzle,

which is this article comes out and it talks about how, you know, women are constantly told they have imposter syndrome. Whenever I bring up imposter syndrome, people stereotype it as, you know, a problem that's more pronounced among women than men. But what I didn't get until just now is, but men don't. internalize it the same way. I know when I felt like an imposter, I just look at that and say, all right, I'm not there yet. Let me let me go and put on a growth mindset and try to figure it out. Whereas a lot of the women that I've worked with will be in the same situation and say, well,

this must mean that I'm not capable. And what happens when you're in a culture like today where in the military, you've seen black men and women, brown, women and men, women discharge from positions of duty when they're excellent military leaders, when you've seen black women systemically moved out of the workforce. So, so it's not just, wow, I'm really insecure folks. It's also like you've got cultural forces that are beating you down. Yeah. No wonder you feel like, going to be able to. imposter. You've been told your whole life that you shouldn't be there. Yeah. And then we've got, you know, an administration that is the ultimate active, like, cronyism and unqualified. So, like, so I think, yeah, I think I, I, I, I, the big takeaway from me is imposter syndrome, shame, micro, macro lens. Look at both. Humiliation. You know, micro, humiliation. You know, micro, we see it tied to violence.

But look at humiliation from a macro. Look at the current administration in the U.S., humiliating every day for the last three weeks, Europe, our allies. Humiliation from a macro perspective, and I think this was Linda Hartling's thesis here when she said, not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes

of political instability. Yeah. Like how many times are you going to use your authority to tell people in other countries and of other cultures that they're less than, you know? I mean, I was just going to ask you what your biggest takeaway was and you just nailed it. I think my biggest takeaway on Shameh, on imposter syndrome. It's impossible not to laugh. No, yeah.

Shamee. It takes all the wind out of the shame sales. It does. Shameh, humiliation, imposter syndrome. is understand what they are and look at them from both a micro and a macro lens. You know, and I think all three of those have in common deep internalizing.

Yeah. Of things that don't belong to you. And I think a great final note on internalization is Jaselle Pelico, the French woman, who... has, you know, when that court case came about, about her husband, not only sexually assaulting her, but drugging her and inviting her 50 strangers to do the same. Disgusting.

They said, you don't have to face them in court. You don't have to bring them in. And her response was so powerful, this is not my shame to carry. We will put this shame on the right. people. This is not my shame to carry. So a huge externalization of that doesn't belong to me. Yes. Which is very powerful because it's so rare. Because individual choices to not internalize are very difficult in a world where the social messages are so strong. I think that's so important. I think my biggest aha, as I think about this conversation, is it connects to something one of my mentors

Sue Ashford often talks about, which is past hauntings. And when you talk about, like when you were explaining to me why people continue to feel shame about these unwanted identities that, you know, as an adult, they could know better. That's not me. There's so many of them are related to our past hauntings. Oh, yeah. that the things we were shamed for as children, those got internalized.

And I think that just, that was a lightball moment for me. I mean, hugely, yes, past hauntings. And we didn't talk about this, but I think it's worth taking a minute because the past haunting brings up something for me about how shame shows up at work. because we think of our personal and professional selves is different, but they're one integrated self.

Past hauntings that are personal, and I love the framing that you're putting on this, also show up at work and professional shame. And so two things I want to say. One, the number one shame trigger at work across the board has not changed in our research over 20 years, the fear of irrelevance. Think about what that means in today's workforce with AI.

Oh my gosh, that's huge. Right. The number one shame trigger at work is our fear of irrelevance. I'm so glad you said that, Renee, because you just answered a question that's been in the back of my mind since our South Side conversation.

What was the question? It was about the shame-based fear of being ordinary as the definition of narcissism. I thought that was profound. I haven't stopped thinking about it since you brought it up last month. And yet, it's on me.

There are non-narcistic reasons to have a shame-based fear of being ordinary. Yeah. Which is, I want to make the best and highest use of my time. I want to make a unique contribution. I want to add value. And the threat of not being able to do that from AI, I can see how that could lead to

pervasive shame. And I think that's what we're up against right now. I don't even think we're, I don't even think AI is presenting as a skills issue as much as it's presenting as a trust and agency issue. So the fear, the fear of being irrelevant. So is one way that shame shows up at work. But let me just list some other. back channeling, comparison, favoritism is a huge shame trigger for people at work.

Past haunting, a parent favoring. Oh my God, or a teacher. I was doing work in a company that was switching from servers to cloud, and they literally named them like old school and cool kids. And the top leaders would always, in public stuff, associate more, with the cool kids, the cloud kids. And it was, like, people were calling in sick. People were leaving after 20 years.

Like, it's just favoritism. I'll tell you the other big shame trigger, hidden, gossiping. Sarcasm, tying people's self-worth through their productivity to try to get people to produce more, teasing. These are all ways that shame shows up at work. And I always say if you're looking for shame at work, it's like looking for it's like looking for a termite in a house

if you walk through a house and you don't see termites you still have the inspection before you buy the house because they could be behind the walls and that's usually where shame lives in organizations if you literally walk through an organization and you see shame that would be like that would be like looking at a house and seeing termites on the wall this is not good and I'm going to give you a great example of where this happens finance every quarter

they post everyone's numbers, then the person with the highest number packs up all their stuff and pushes anyone out of the office that they want. What else? You know, so empathy is the antidote. Understanding, I think, your shame triggers,

your unwanted identities, understanding the shame shields you use to self-protect because they move you away, you know, from, I think, who you want to be. And then being able to share your story with someone who's earned the right deal.

hear it. And having an empathic response back is so powerful because shame dissipates the moment you know you're not alone, that you can be seen and cared for. Shame is like, shit, I can't hold on. The idea that shame shields are like a band-aid instead of a cure is another big aha for me. Oh, my God. I didn't realize that. But you're protecting yourself in the short run, but you're not actually putting yourself in a position to deal with the experience in the long run. And my aha, too, is I've never been able to articulate quite. as clearly as you have in two decades of talking about shame shields, they move you away from your values. So while they may offer temporary relief in the second that you fight back with shame,

or you people please, or you disappear, downstream, they cause more damage and more need for repair. Well, you said it. You were saying when I do that, it's, I'm not me. I'm not myself. Yeah. I was just reflecting it back to you. I like the reflection. Well, this was an amazing conversation. Yeah, I was. And I'm excited about that. the next episode. See you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brunay Brown, Education and Research Group, and granted productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning

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