Episode 48: Are you motivated by shame?
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Hello, everybody. So before I dive into today’s episode on shame-based motivation, I want to invite you to my free one-hour masterclass that I’m doing live this week. I’m doing two sessions, a Wednesday at 6 PM Eastern and then also Thursday at 1 PM Eastern. And this masterclass will show you how it’s possible to eliminate your desire to drink literally within a few hours.
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by focusing on your natural instinct to take better care of yourself so that you can properly diagnose the real problem. There’s a reason why you’re drinking. And that is that you don’t actually know how to take care of yourself or what it is that you really need. If you are struggling with over drinking, or you have in the past and now you’re struggling with sobriety, if you’re struggling with alcohol in any way or alcohol-related topics and thoughts,
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The biggest mistake you can make is to believe that simply quitting drinking is going to solve your problem. There’s a good reason why you feel resistant to labeling yourself as an alcoholic and promising to stay sober for the rest of your life. Because underneath it, you probably realize alcohol isn’t the real problem. And if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life struggling with alcohol or thinking about alcohol or
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trade alcohol in for a new addiction or some other temptation, then you’ll have to learn how to resolve your subconscious cravings so that they go away, so that you don’t have to fight to control your own behavior. So grab the link in the show notes for my free one hour masterclass and get registered. Even if you can’t come live, I will send the replay. What you’re going to learn is how to be emotionally sober.
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so that you can simply trust yourself with alcohol, with food, with other addictive substances, with anything. The only rule you need to follow is your intuition. All you have to do is learn how to listen to it. So I hope to see you later this week. And now I want to dive into the concepts of shame and motivation. And so let’s start by defining what shame is.
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And I’m going to use it in context with the word guilt, just so we can get kind of a working definition of shame. This isn’t about guilt. Shame and guilt are not the same thing. But I think it’s easier to come to an understanding of what shame is in the context of guilt. Guilt is when you feel bad about something that happened. You did something or you didn’t do something. And it had a consequence that.
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If you could go back in time, you would have done it differently. That’s what guilt is. And it’s a healthy emotion, because it keeps us accountable, and it allows us to be reflective, and it helps us change and make decisions going forward. Guilt is fairly easy to resolve as emotions go, because even if you can’t go back and make something right, you could acknowledge that it happened and move on.
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make amends or promise to do better and just move on. Guilt requires some acceptance to process. Yes, that happened. It wasn’t what I wanted. It didn’t work out well. And I’m sorry. But then you can move on. You don’t have to carry guilt. But where guilt is an acknowledgment that something bad happened, shame in contrast is the internalization.
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that what was wrong or what is wrong is you. So it’s not the situation or the behavior that was bad, but that you are actually bad. And shame shows up generally in context with other people. We feel ashamed about who we are. We aren’t as good, we are not worthy, there’s something wrong with us. Shame is a very primal response.
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to our instinctual need to be in community with other people. Because, you know, if we got kicked out of our tribe back in the day and you were exiled, it would mean certain death. You can’t live alone, we can’t survive on our own, we need our tribe. And so shame comes up when there’s a behavior or something that’s happening that would put us out of alignment.
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with our tribe because it was much better to feel like there was something wrong with us and take corrective action than an attitude of fuck all y’all I’m going to go do my own thing because when we all lived in caves or you know on the plains if that was your attitude you were going to be somebody else’s dinner at some point soon. So shame is a very natural response to
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and it’s designed to get you to correct your behavior. So inherently, there’s nothing wrong with shame. It’s not a sign that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just a primitive instinct that we have for acceptance. Problems with shame arise because we don’t know how to interpret it. So because shame is a feeling that there’s something wrong with us, we have this natural instinct to hide our shame.
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because the subconscious belief that there’s something wrong with us, we’re not dealing with that. And so if there’s something wrong with us, well, we damn well better hide it, lest we get kicked out of the tribe and eaten by a lion for dinner. So I wanna be clear that shame is a normal part of the human experience. It arises up in various circumstances and it can be just simply a gut check. But because most of us
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are flinching every time we have a feeling we don’t like, we tend to suppress the feelings we have of shame. And so it is in the reaction to the shame that the problem comes up. Any subconscious emotion is coming from a deep-seated belief. What is a belief? A belief is a thought that we no longer think about. So at some point, there was an idea introduced to us.
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And we accepted it. And we said, yes, that’s true. That’s legit. When we accept thoughts, ideas, opinions as true, then they get moved from the part of our brain that is conscious. And they get put in the archives, if you will. They get moved down into the subconscious. Because that’s how our feelings work. That’s what feelings are designed to do, is to guide us.
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so that we don’t have to think and rethink and make decisions about everything all of the time. Your feelings are just your body reminding you of truths that you’ve already accepted. So if at some point you accepted the belief that there is something wrong with you and you believe that is true, versus use an example where maybe you’re doing a job at work and your boss says, you didn’t do this right.
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You may not immediately go and say, OK, there’s something wrong with me. You may think, well, you didn’t give me the instructions. Or the program I’m using isn’t working. Or so-and-so dropped the ball. You don’t naturally just think something is wrong with you. You don’t take the boss’s criticism internally until you examine the evidence. But in other contexts, if you already believe that something is wrong with you.
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then you don’t stop to question the situation. You’re just applying the logic that, oh, this must have happened because something is wrong with me. So again, beliefs get pushed down into our subconscious. And then when we come up in a situation where we’re experiencing an emotion, that we don’t stop to examine the subconscious belief, pulling it into consciousness, and then deciding, is that true?
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then we get jerked around by our emotions because we don’t like to feel shame. We don’t like to feel other emotions. But if we’re not willing to resolve the words, the beliefs that are creating that emotion, then we’re simply going to try to control our environment. So maybe we’re consuming substances, maybe we’re seeking attention, maybe we’re buying things, maybe we’re moving, maybe we’re trying.
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to do all sorts of other things to make ourselves feel better because we are unwilling to look inside and soothe our emotions properly by examining the source of the emotion. Most of us are in the habit of trying to change our emotions instead of acknowledging and allowing them so that we can resolve them. And so this is how we end up getting motivated by shame.
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Now I want to be clear that none of our emotions exist in a vacuum. I will tell you a story in a minute here about how I’ve been motivated by shame, but that’s not my only motivation. I’ve also been motivated to genuinely be good and do good, and I’ve wanted to accomplish things. I’ve been motivated by compassion and kindness and curiosity. I have been properly, or I guess healthfully, motivated to do many things in my life.
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But so it’s not all or nothing. But shame has definitely been one of the big motivators that I didn’t realize was one of my motivators until after I quit drinking. How can you tell if you are motivated by shame? Well, it’s pretty simple. Because shame-based motivation is cleverly disguised. It’s usually when you’re telling yourself
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Moral reasons, when you’re seeing things as good or bad or right or wrong, for example, you want it to be good, you’re doing something because you want to be good, you want to be right, you want to be worthy, you want to be accepted, you feel like you have to prove yourself. That is where shame lives. Because the only reason you would need to prove anything...
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or to earn your acceptance from anyone is if you fundamentally believe that you aren’t already worthy and acceptable all on your own just for showing up. And just hearing myself say that almost triggers something deep inside me that says, yeah, but you do have to prove that you’re good enough. And this doesn’t necessarily apply in the competitive work market or in sports.
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You know, of course, we have, we live in a world where competition and proving yourself is important. But this is emotional. You know, we are not robots. And so when we have internalized that we are not worthy or acceptable as we are, then that’s where the emotional aspect triggers shame. A healthy approach to competition would look like
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Well, I’m going to do the best that I can, and may the best person win, and not being attached to the results. When you’re attached to the results, where you need something to happen or somebody to say something that validates you or proves your worthiness, that’s where you’ve internalized the belief that you’re not. So there’s a difference between proving that you have the skills or the intellect.
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or the experience to perform in a certain capacity in life and believing that when you fall short, there’s something wrong with you, that it’s not your performance that wasn’t good enough, it’s you as a person. That is shame-based motivation. And let me just tell you that that has fueled so much of my life. And quitting drinking really exposed that for me.
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Because in the early days of sobriety, I was shocked that all of the energy and the motivation to do new things and do all the things that I hadn’t been doing because I’d been drinking, that didn’t appear for me. In fact, I remember having thoughts like, I swear to God, it was easier to get my ass to a hot power yoga class at 8 o’clock in the morning.
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when I was hung over because I had something to prove. I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t have a drinking problem. I also wanted to earn my drink tickets for the following night. I had to keep going. I was very motivated to hide what I was going through, not just from the outside world, but also myself. And that motivation was fueling me. So when I quit drinking.
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All of a sudden, I didn’t have the motivation to do all the things that I had been telling myself my whole life or my adult life that I love to do, such as go to yoga, run, eat healthy, cook. All of those things, I was struggling just to do basic day-to-day stuff. And I first interpreted that, after it had been a few months, to be a symptom of post-acute withdrawal syndrome.
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And indeed, it is. But while post-acute withdrawal syndrome is a legitimate biochemical dopamine deficit, it also exposes our true motivations. The production of natural dopamine, I’m not talking about addictive substances that give us artificial highs, but the production of natural dopamine is very subjective. It’s produced based on what you like,
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want, what you want more of. And that’s based in large part on the reasons why we want more of it. So here I am in early sobriety, having solved a lot of my inherent shame because I was proud of myself for quitting drinking, only to realize I had no motivation to prove myself anymore. And there goes my motivation to do all the things that I used to do in a given day. I didn’t care anymore.
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And so I went into this period of my life where I kind of played chicken with my motivation. And I thought, you know, if I’m going to see what’s on the other side of this, I don’t want to be motivated by shame anymore. I want my motivation to come from a place of authentic joy and desire. I want to do things that make me feel good. And so.
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I had to be honest that at least for a while, my regular habits of exercise and cooking, you know, elaborate meals and keeping everything super clean and keeping all my boxes checked, I had to acknowledge that those things I wasn’t motivated to do anymore because I didn’t have anything to prove anymore. And as scary as that was, it was the...
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best thing I ever did was to allow this process. It’s kind of like I had to burn away all of the pretend performance aspect of myself and truly connect with what I really liked. And so I rebuilt my motivation one tiny action at a time, because of course, things like exercise and healthy eating do make you feel good.
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But because I had been doing it for the wrong reasons, or at least partially the wrong reasons, my brain didn’t respond to it anymore. And so after almost 30 years of thinking myself quite morally superior because I check all the boxes every day and I’m doing it all right, you should grab a notebook and take some notes and just ask me how I do it. I’d be happy to share that with you.
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I had been operating from the sense that I was proving something. I had to find some intrinsic motivation. So my first year of sobriety was kind of this turnover of motivation. Think about a pond turning over or something where I had to let go of all of my external motivation.
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Not all of it, of course, but I let go of all of those superficial reasons why I was doing things and allowed my intrinsic motivation to build. And I’ll just talk about in the context of exercise. So I used to teach Zumba and boot camp and yoga. And I was busy. I was a personal trainer. I was always running. I ran marathons. So I was always doing all of these things.
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In addition to proving that I could do them, it was also because I wanted to be skinny. And I wanted to be better than other people, I guess. I mean, I’m just being honest here. What’s really going on here? I wanted to validate myself as a human being. I can’t say that those activities made my body feel good. Not that I was all that in touch with my body. My crazy brain was driving the bus. But I can’t say that.
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I took a lot of pleasure from saying that I did them. I took a lot of pleasure saying that I was going to do them and that I did them and that perfectionistic mindset where I had something I had to earn and prove and I was getting my reward. It’s not like I never got a runner’s high or felt really good after a yoga class because of course I did. And like I said, it’s not all or nothing. There was just a lot of shame-based motivation included in that.
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And that became very obvious once the shame of drinking was resolved. And quite honestly, I think it’s just a beautiful experience of what I went through because I’ve coached people for years, trained people for years in physical activity, and really couldn’t understand why it’s so hard for some people. And then suddenly to find myself without the motivation to do anything.
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I had to learn how to build my motivation. And one of the foundational principles that I teach for emotional sobriety is to lean into discomfort. And so I had to force myself into small actions where in perspective of other things I’ve done in my life, there was no reward for saying I had done that.
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To get myself to work out, to build the habit of working out, I started with the tiny action of going down into my basement gym and laying on my mat, my yoga mat, and calling that a workout. I would go down there. I would say, OK, I’m going to do at least five minutes. I’m going to go down there. I’m going to lay on my mat, and I’m just going to meditate. And that was my workout. And this is coming from a person who used to be in the gym two hours a day. But that was all I could muster myself to do.
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But that was where I rebuilt the intrinsic motivation, where I had to learn what my body wants and to respect what my body wants and give my body what it needed. And in those moments where I had really low motivation, I had to balance allowing myself to not have that motivation, with also that kind of adult, adulting.
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perspective that, yeah, that’s fine, but you’re not going to sit on the couch forever, because that’s not going to feel good either. And so starting to look at what I was doing from the perspective of what my body needed, instead of what my brain was telling me, was a drastic reframe. But I tell you what, I now am in possession of a shitload of intrinsic motivation. I move my body.
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I don’t even call it exercise anymore, although it is. I mean, whatever. But I refer to it as movement. I’ve moved my body in ways that feel good. And I got to be honest, right now I’m a little on the fence about whether or not I even like yoga. Right now, I’ve negotiated with my body and we’re going one day a week. But if I can come up with another thing to do that feels good, I’m going to skip it. And this is such a shock to me because after.
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20 plus years of teaching yoga and breathing and all of the things that yoga is, I’m shocked that I may not actually enjoy it and that I might have done all of that for 20 years without ever checking in with my body to see if this is what I wanted. And in general, I do like yoga. I love to stretch. But I’m talking about going to the hot power classes. I don’t enjoy them.
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a connection and to allow my behaviors to be dictated by what my body needs and wants. And some days, you know, I need to push my body a little more because yeah, maybe I am feeling sluggish. And I know that pushing it will have a bigger reward in my brain. I’ll be rewarded for pushing it. You know, sometimes I have to negotiate with myself and okay, well, I’m just going to take a small walk.
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If that’s all I want to do, that’s all I want to do. And then a lot of times, I’ll end up going farther or doing more. But I give myself permission to do what my body needs, not what my brain is telling me I want. And the more I listen to my body, the more my dopamine response system is getting calibrated.
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so that listening to my body becomes its own reward. This does take a little bit of time and practice, but when you tune into the subtle messages from your body, it’s like driving a stick shift. You know when to push in the clutch and you know when to let it out, and you are just judging and evaluating your experience based on how it feels, not on what you think about it. I’m gonna say that again.
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Like when you start living from your intuition, you have to base your next actions on how you are feeling, not what you are thinking. Your body is this divine, biological powerhouse machine. And if you follow what it needs, it will reward you.
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and you’re not going to become some lazy sloth, if your body is tired and you give it rest, you will be rewarded for that. Self-care is not some rigid routine where you check all the boxes every day. Self-care is listening to your body and responding to it in real time, which means it’s always changing. That’s why I say literally that the path to recovery is
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listening to your intuition. Your intuition is the only rule you need to follow if you’re willing to listen to it. And as terrifying for those of us who are perfectionistic control freaks, as terrifying as it is to surrender to the truth of what your body needs, very quickly you will find massive amounts of intrinsic motivation and a wisdom
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the awareness of what your experience is actually telling you and how to make good decisions. When you start thinking about self-care as an investment in yourself, in your body, in the future, instead of a reward or an escape, when you start thinking of self-care as an investment and you’re willing to put in the time and the energy
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the support that it needs and to honor the body that is your companion from the moment you’re born until the moment that you die, you’re with your body. And here I was for, you know, 46 years just trashing my body, not only physically, but also mentally beating myself up because it wasn’t good enough and I was judging my body. When I made friends with my body and work
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I’m working together with my body to give it what it needs. It gives me what I need. I have not gained a bunch of weight. I am at my ideal weight. I make dinners on a regular basis. I move my body. I try new hobbies. I explore skills and I try hard stuff and I’m willing to fail because I’m no longer afraid and I don’t have anything to prove. I’m here for a good time, not a long time.
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And it feels really good to be on my own damn team. So just to land the plane here, I want to encourage you that if you are in sobriety or thinking about going into sobriety because you burned yourself the fuck out with the alcohol and running around like a chicken with your head cut off and doing all the things and you can’t do it anymore, I just wanna tell you that freedom is on the other side.
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And when you allow yourself to drop the extrinsic motivations and you trust the process, trust your body, that when you treat it well and you take care of it and you meet your basic needs, it will take care of you. You will not end up homeless and friendless and worthless. The best way I can describe the process
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is to use an analogy where motivation is like a pair of pants. My pants were on inside out. I was fueled by extrinsic motivation. I was chasing carrots. And in order to properly access intrinsic motivation, I had to take my pants off and turn them inside out, which means for a period of time, I was standing there in my panties.
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And I was scared to death and I was vulnerable. But I trusted and I got through it. And so can you. You know, this is the crux of emotional sobriety. And emotional sobriety is when you start living your life from the experience and being really honest and stop letting your crazy brain drive the bus. And emotional sobriety is the tool that you can use.
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to reverse engineer your life, just like reverse engineering your motivation. We have been conditioned and in the habit of thinking that we won’t feel better until we achieve, we’re noticed, we’re chosen, we’re acknowledged, we’re validated, we’re proving ourselves, or when we get whatever it is we think we want, and when all the right things happen, that’s how we think we’re going to feel better.
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And so we’re all on a damn hamster wheel. And emotional sobriety, real authentic intrinsic motivation is when you flip that and realize that the way you feel in the present moment is the most important thing. Because that is what is creating your reality. Knowing how to live in the present moment and accept your life and your body as it is.
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so that you can take care of yourself right now. That doesn’t mean that you don’t want to lose weight or that you don’t want to quit smoking or that you don’t want to change certain things. But only by accepting that it is what it is can you love yourself where you’re at. It is what it is and it’s okay. It’s telling yourself that you are okay that allows you to feel okay.
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that allows you to access real motivation. Instead of denying yourself and punishing yourself because you think that you have to change and life has to change and all these things have to happen so that you can feel better, feeling better first is what allows you to do better. And if you’re in the early stages of this turning over of your motivation, you’re not going to have a whole lot of time
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where you do feel amazing. And so your goal is not to reach outside of yourself to change that, but to accept the discomfort of that, and then to lean in with what I call micro actions. What can I do in the next five minutes that’ll make me feel better? OK, I can’t work out today, but I can clean out my freaking silverware drawer and suck the crumbs out. What can I do in the next five minutes that’ll make me feel better?
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And then those little senses of accomplishment fire the dopamine in your brain. They are rewarded. Your body says, ah, I like my environment a little less cluttered. Or, ah, I like it when I get off the couch and move around a little bit. We don’t have to achieve all of these superficial bars, like a bar that we’re trying to reach. We can just do what the experience calls for in the moment.
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Trying to do better when you feel like crap, forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do, is the definition of chasing your tail. It is shame-based motivation. So if you are struggling and this episode is hitting home and you’re like, yeah, I’ve been operating on a shame-based motivation and you want to know what to do next, stop and acknowledge it. And make a commitment to yourself
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Abandoning yourself stop abandoning yourself with crazy hamster wheel goals Stop abandoning yourself in favor of unrealistic expectations that leave no room for you Stop abandoning yourself when you feel Shame or other negative emotions come up by reaching for substances or external things that are going to change you the way you feel Stay present with your body be on your own
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team, be willing to feel uncomfortable, accept that it might get worse before it gets better, and commit to seeing it through. Making a commitment to paying attention to yourself and staying present, that is the only action you need to take right now. That’s it. That is what is going to bring you through to the other side. Radical self-care is the path to recover.
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and I’m gonna leave it there. And I’ll finish with an invitation. This process of unlearning and relearning using emotional sobriety is a brutal full experience. And it is what I do in the next chapter. It’s a 12 week transformation where I train you to become emotionally sober. So that you come out the other side,
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in complete connection with your own intuition and with all of the tools and coping mechanisms and awareness and wisdom and experience of taking care of yourself so that you never again have to fear of making a mistake. Not because you’re never gonna make another mistake, but because you know that you have a connection with yourself and you have the ability to self-correct and to moderate.
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your own behavior because you’re listening and you’re paying attention. That my friends is an irreplaceable lifelong skill. And if you’re interested in taking that journey, if you’re ready, get in the show notes and either sign up for the masterclass because I do lay out the 12-week program at the end or I’ll put a link directly to the next chapter and you can sign up
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because you don’t have to figure anything out. You don’t have to figure out how to change your life. All you have to do is make one single decision that will change your life. And then sit back and let me plan the journey. So that’s it. Thanks for listening to my TED Talk and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, please take the time to rate and review the show so that other people can find it. I really appreciate it.
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and check out the show notes for any resources I’ve mentioned, including links to follow me on Instagram and join my private Facebook group where I connect with my tribe every day. I love it in there and we have so much fun. And finally, if you’re ready to redefine sobriety so that you can feel excited about quitting drinking, follow the link to my 10 days to spontaneous sobriety course where I will help you eliminate.
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eradicate, obliterate, cancel your desire to drink. Because looking and feeling your best is addictive too. I’ll see you soon.