Transcript

0:00
Going backup recording going awesome we’re underway cool welcome along lads and today we’re going to try and answer the impossible question how do I stop caring what other people think of me and This is-it’s kind of an ironic question because while I do believe you can significantly reduce how much thought and time and energy you give into trying to predict what people think of you and so on, I don’t think it’s possible to completely turn it off to become completely socially apathetic, and I don’t think it’s always harmful to care what other people think. What I do believe is harmful is when your opinions and predictions about what other people think of you harms you psychologically, emotionally. Where you look at someone, you think, “I think that guy doesn’t like me, and that hurts your feelings. This is this is what I want to help you work on today, because you know it’s it’s one of the the biggest most measurable changes in my life. When I look back in my past, see who I was, it was a guy who mostly spent his time very much caring what other people thought of him and being very fragile about that. You know, every time I got a hint, someone frowned while I was talking, or yawned while I was talking, or just turned away when I thought they were interested. If I got even a hint that somebody had some sort of negative thoughts about me, I’d get a massive emotional reaction to that, and eventually I led to a point where I numb myself, where I tried to stop caring about people in general, so that I wouldn’t care what they thought. You know, become quite sort of not hostile, but yeah, apathetic and almost psychopathic. None of that was a very healthy place to be, or very enjoyable or rewarding socially, and it certainly didn’t help with connections. And yet today, you know, I I know for certain that there are people who have some very negative opinions and feelings about me, and it’s mostly I just view it as information. It doesn’t particularly shift whatever decisions I was going to make. I’m able to make decisions that definitely will upset people now and continue through with those actions, even if they’re people I care about and hope like me. I’m able to do that, and that’s what I want to share with you: is how I was able to make that change, and how I believe anyone can make that change. So we’re going to be able. a look at shamelessness and how that looks in terms of an action and what the what the psychology is behind it. How you build up to a point where you can speak your mind freely and you’re not spending too much time trying to get inside someone’s head psychically to to to figure out what’s going on in there, and to use that as a factor in your decision making. So yeah, so that’s what we’ll be looking at today. Start with having a look at what is shame. We’ll have a look at the different types of shame. We’ll be having a look at how that relates to caring what other people think because shame and worrying what other people think are the same thing. We’re going to have a look at that. How someone who’s shameless will never worry what other people think. Someone who’s shameful always will. We’re going to have a look at that, and then of course at the end we’re going to get to the solution, which is very simple but painful to do. Put it that way. So we’re going to be building up to there. But I’ll be keen to hear from all of you as well. I open the door for you guys in this session to be bold. This is a chance for you to actually practice shamelessness if you want to. You won’t be forced to or anything like that. I’m not going to pull you out and ask you painful questions, but you’ll get a chance in this in this very call to practice what it is that will make you shameless. So let’s start with the definition. My definition of shame is that you attach the concept of wrong or bad to something you know is true about you.

4:24
Okay, so you attach the concept of wrong or bad to something you know is true about you to kind of kind of make sense of that. Like if I know that I ate eggs for breakfast, and I’m okay with that. Then there’s no wrong attached to me eating the eggs. It’s true that I ate eggs, but it’s also okay that I ate eggs. That is a shameless activity in my life, a shameless event. I have no wrong attached to that. And then I go and have coffee with my vegan. Friends and they give me heaps of shit about the the dairy industry and how eating eggs makes chicken suffer. And now suddenly my eggs for breakfast are wrong. After that conversation with the vegan, I’m now much less inclined to share what I have for breakfast with people. Now it’s not my vegan friend who has caused me shame. I’m the one who has taken what they’ve said and decided to translate that as my breakfast was wrong, and therefore I am wrong. That is the creation of shame as I know it. So you take something that’s essentially neutral, as all things are objectively, nothing is good or bad, right or wrong. It just is, and you add this story about wrong or bad to it. Now, whatever you’re ashamed of right now, not only will that story be attached to it, but you will really believe that story. You don’t think it’s right or wrong subjectively. You think it is right or wrong that things can be defined definitely like that. You know. I yeah. I was talking to a client the other day, and he actually no, I won’t say that because it might reveal who it is. Let me think of a better example. Ah, I I work with people who get bullied, right? This is pretty pretty common. Pretty much everybody’s been some form of bullied in their life, but there are people who really get bullied, bullying victims, you might say. And they will often attach whatever whatever it is. I talked about this in the latest podcast. Whatever it is, the bully picks on them for. As an adult, that person will say, “This is wrong with me. This is something I have that’s wrong with me. And what’s really bizarre when you get all these people together is quite often their so-called weakness as somebody else’s strength, like being tall. There was a kid at my school who got bullied because of how tall they were, and yet you go to another school and being tall makes you popular. It’s so subjective as to whether tall is right or wrong. So this is the kind of thing I want to open your mind to. Whatever you think is wrong with you, what must be hidden, what’s inappropriate or unprofessional to share, or you think will make people not like you or make them leave you. I want you to open to your minds to the idea that that wrong, bad story you have attached to it is entirely subjective. That there could be, put it this way, someone out there who would like you because of that, not in spite of it. You know, I know plenty of girls I met with. They’re like, “Oh, I’m too emotional. You know, I’m too too chaotic with my emotions, or words to that effect. And yeah, I love that in a woman. I don’t want a neutral, boring, safe woman. I want a wild, spirited woman. You know, so they think it’s wrong, but I’m totally cool with it. So is it right or wrong? Totally subjective. So really emphasising shame is when you attach a subjective concept of right or wrong to something that is simply true about you, or something you think is true about you, which takes us to an even deeper level. Now, how this relates to caring what other people think is based on prediction. There will be times when someone genuinely tells you some sort of negative feedback because of this thing you’re ashamed of, but most of the time you’re doing that in your head as a safe predictive measure. You’re trying to predict when that might happen, that negative feedback or negative consequence, so that you can avoid it.

8:55
So, for example, if I have some bully pick on me because of my height, I might slouch for the rest of my life just to look a little bit shorter, just to avoid some other bully potentially picking on me for my height, that kind of thing. So shame attaches to predictions and social situations where you look at a social situation, you go, how likely are they to a know about this thing I’m shamed of, see it, be aware of it, and then B, be thinking about it. Use it against me, punish me for it, etc. Okay. Now, this is where you get into a situation. You’re talking to somebody. Something about their body language says to you that they’re feeling an uncomfortable emotion. They’re having negative thoughts. This is all getting really subjective and predictive now. And your first guess is that it’s because of the thing that’s wrong with you. Let’s say you’re on a date and your date seems to look a bit bored. And you go, oh God! It’s because I’m an uninteresting person. So that little because bit you do in your mind, that is shame, and that is how shame relates to caring what other people think. You don’t actually know what she thinks, but you’ve already decided that it’s because of the thing that you’re already ashamed of. And I really want to emphasise this because you will predict that somebody dislikes you for a certain reason that you think of as just fact. You won’t even question it. You’ll be like, “Yep, she’s definitely bored because I’m a boring person. And this is how you actually identify your shame. That that because you give, the reasoning you give to somebody you you know you perceive as not liking you, is the thing you’re ashamed of. Now, even if they have directly said, “I don’t like you because of X, Y, and Z, if you think it’s right of them to not like you because of that, or you’re defensive about that, then you’re already ashamed of it before they said it. Okay. Now sometimes things are, you know, there’s some things that you can remember clearly a time when you weren’t ashamed, and then an event changed that. You know, you might have been like, I am totally cool with the fact that I enjoy doing drama, you know, drama and acting. And then one day he met a cool alpha dude at a party, party or something. He was like, “Drama? That’s fucking gay. And all of a sudden, drama’s wrong. The second before he said it, you were totally cool with it for many, many years, and then he says it, and suddenly your whole world changes. This idea that something can subjectively go from being very right to very wrong in an instant-this is often how most of your shame has been created when you were a baby, and you can. There’s a book called *The Philosophy of Babies* by Dr. Alison Gopnik. She shows that before about the age of three, babies are very confident and shameless. That everything they do, you know, she’s social scientist that studies babies exclusively, basically, she says, you know, babies don’t don’t they don’t feel any shame like staring into your eyes for hours at a time. They don’t mind like falling over in front of you and making big mistakes in front of you. They cry for what they want. They don’t care if you’re going to judge them for it. They they don’t have any concept of shame. They learn that as they grow up, so I want you to identify at one point in your life you weren’t ashamed of anything at all. Everything you currently think of as wrong or bad about you, you’ve learned. Sometimes it’s through a one-off incident, like the douchebag at the party embarrassing you in front of people about something you previously thought was okay. Other times, it’s you’re not really sure where you got it. There’s all these different bits of pieces. Something slowly, gradually became wrong. Sometimes it can be even an un, a non-specific sense of just being wrong as a person. You know, I know from my own experience, asking girls out a lot and then getting rejected a lot, I couldn’t really nail it down to any one characteristic that I had.

13:26
I just thought me as a person was unattractive generally, you know, and that gave me plenty to worry about. If someone frowned at me, I’d be like, “Is my hair? Is it the way I’m talking? Is it my clothing? Is it the way I’m sitting? Is it because I mentioned that I liked heavy metal music? Is it because now suddenly everything was now potentially shameful and wrong, just because one person potentially sort of didn’t like it, maybe based on their tiny facial expression? Who here knows what I’m talking about here? This kind of experience. Okay. I want to point out at this point. I’ll try and bring you guys in for conversation when you want to. Any point you can either type a comment or a question in the chat box, or you can just kind of raise your hand and wave at me if I can see your screens there. If you want to jump in with either just sharing something or you got a question? So shamelessness is not the absence of shame. You’re going to have shame for the rest of your life. You can definitely reduce the amount that you have, but there’s always going to be a part of you that worries that something about you is less than awesome. Okay, shamelessness is not about having no shame; it’s about not hiding it. It’s about being unapologetic when you express it. It’s about. Making sure that it never stays in here, that it gets out. There’s more to it than that, but that’s actually all you need to know to become essentially shameless. To become somebody who is no longer controlled or restricted by what other people think or the imagined thoughts that other people have. So it’s not about getting to a point where you think everything about yourself is good. You’re allowed to be critical of yourself. In fact, sometimes you really should be. Right? If you want to learn how to live by your values, you you have to know when you’re not doing it. There has to be guilt there. You have to be like that shit was some fucked up shit. There has to be those times where you look at yourself in the mirror and you just go, “Damn, that was a piece of shit move. You shouldn’t have done that. That’s that’s a helpful part of your psychological makeup. That’s how you correct poor behaviour. But we have to make sure that that is based on actually you not living by your values rather than some dude’s opinion of you. That’s what this fine tuning is and shamelessness is about expressing everything that you’re ashamed of all the time, and in a long term piece of work, so that you get to the point where the only time you feel bummed out about something is because you didn’t live by your values, not because of somebody else’s opinion or somebody else’s subjective preferences or somebody else’s body language. Does that make sense? So before we move on to the different types of shame, I want to check in with you guys. Are there any questions or thoughts around what shame means and what shameless means? All good. Things we fear to express as shame. Yeah, sometimes we might fear to express something because the other person’s reaction could be harmful to us, and that can blur the line a little bit between shame and just safety fears. It’s about what we fear. The thing fearing disapproval, rejection, ostracism, being seen as not good enough, damaged reputation-that’s shame. Being afraid that if I reveal my bank PIN code to this guy wearing a ski mask, he will empty my bank account-it’s not quite shame, right? But I think it’s a pretty good. If until you get to the point where you’re pretty sure you’re shameless most of the time, if you’re scared to express something, start with the assumption that it’s shame, because it might not seem to be when you first look at it. The thought-you’ll be like, I can’t say that because it’s inappropriate. It’ll seem like the subjective fact in this situation. I’m not allowed to say this thing about myself, but it’s only fact to you. In reality, it’s totally subjective. You’ve just decided it’s wrong to say this thing.

18:13
Now, maybe even everybody in the room agrees with you it’s wrong, but that’s because they’re all ashamed, and can become very confusing, like in the workplace, the concept of professionalism. That’s a huge, like that’s a masterpiece of shame. Professionalism. These are the things about yourself that you’re not allowed to show somebody you work with. Why? Why not? What’s the harm in it? Well, we lost track of exactly why not a long time ago, but we all believe in professionalism. We don’t know why we can’t tell the person at work that we had a poor sexual performance with our wife last night, but we’re sure we can’t. We don’t even need to think about it. We just know that’s wrong to say, and yet it’s not written in our contract anywhere. There’s nothing in the legislation that says you can’t share personal details with workmates that you’ll get fired. There’s nothing even in the code of conduct. Nowhere is it written that you can’t share this information, and yet you believe it like it’s fact. So, Ashwin, what I’d say at this stage, I do agree with you on a simplistic term. If you’re afraid of expressing something, it’s pretty safe to assume it’s shame. Though sometimes it will just be sense. Sometimes I’m not going to give someone some information, not because I’m scared the information is wrong, but because I know this guy is going to do something bad with that information. Or sometimes, and very occasionally, it’s about respect. Like one example I use: I might be really attracted to a girl, but we’re at the funeral for her husband right now. She doesn’t need to know about my attraction right now. My attraction isn’t wrong, but letting someone. Is more important than expressing it, perhaps. But even that, as I say it, that’s the kind of example we’ll often use in our head to justify a time where we wouldn’t express attraction, even though there’s no reason not to, other than we’re ashamed of our attraction. So assume if you’re holding back on something that shame is involved, and work on that assumption. Just know sometimes you’ll actually be holding back for a good reason, but you’ll learn through expressing it when it was a good reason, when it was just shame. Okay. I guess the key way to define the difference would be: What are you worried will happen? And if it if the answer is anything along the lines of something harmful will happen because of this guy’s opinion about me, then it’s shame. If it’s more like something definitely harmful will happen because every time I do this, this objectively harmful thing takes place, and I know that through dozens of experiments. Then that’s maybe just rational thinking and safeguarding. Yeah. Sometimes it’ll be both. Like if you’re scared to tell your boss that you got high on drugs on the weekend. Partly, you’re ashamed of drug use, but also you know that’s probably going to get you fired because it’s in your contract not to do that. It’s a mixture. The fact is, you signed a contract that you weren’t going to obey. That’s the real problem in the first place, you know. But we’ll get to that sort of thing later. All right. let’s move on to the different types of shame, the different things you can be ashamed of, and I just wanted to bring this out so you can start to open your mind to what you might be ashamed of. And this may be a dark conversation, and may even trigger warning, and may even bring up some stuff for you. What I think is most important about shamelessness, more important than any other aspect of it, is being honest with yourself about it. There may be some things you never share with anyone else, and you’re totally-it’s totally within your rights to to treat information that way. You never have to express anything, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Myself included. You’re allowed to stay ashamed of something if you want to. Just don’t lie to yourself about it. Don’t hide it from yourself.

22:36
At least know for your own benefit what’s true about the way you feel about yourself, because at least this way, when you’re worried what somebody else thinks, you know it’s really just you being ashamed of you, and it’s not really them, and that’s important information to have. It’s important to know the difference between guessing why someone doesn’t like you and coming to the assumption that’s because of what you’re ashamed of, versus knowing why they actually didn’t like you and realising it’s got nothing to do with what you think of yourself. It’s just their own preferences. If you don’t know what your shame is, it’ll be attached to every frown or rejection piece of body language that you take as negative, and yet most of the time, that won’t be accurate. Most of the time, when someone else doesn’t like you, it’s got nothing to do with what you think is wrong with you, but their own preferences, which are subjective, and they don’t even know what they are. They might say, “I don’t like you because you’re too tall, but they don’t even know that that’s why they don’t like you. They like you. They don’t like you for some other reason, but that’s the best they could come up with because they don’t even know themselves very well. You’ll never really know why someone likes or dislikes you. Just like you’ll never really know why you like or dislike someone. You’ll have a story attached to it, but it’s just a story. You know, have you ever tried to explain to yourself why you like a food? Like, have you ever said, you know, why do I like chocolate? And tried to explain that to yourself, so because it’s creamy and and sweet. Well, why do you like creamy and sweet? Oh, because it feels good. What does feels good? Why does that feel good to you? If you dig into it, you can never really explain why you like or dislike something. The story falls apart under questioning because you have to keep asking why all the time, and the same thing will happen with somebody else having a preference, liking or disliking you. No matter what you predict the reason to be, or what they think the reason is, odds are you’ll never know either of you. Sometimes you just don’t like a motherfucker. You don’t. You can’t even pin it to anything. You’re like, look on paper he’s fine, but every time he walks into this room, my skin draws. I just want to punch him in the face. I don’t know why. And that’s the most accurate way of understanding why you like or don’t like something. Is you just don’t know. You just feel it. There’s other times where it’s more obvious, like if you have strong race. You might feel repulsion by seeing somebody with a certain skin colour, and then later on, when you sort of cure that racism, you realise, hey, I would have liked that guy just fine if I hadn’t been racist. That can sometimes be more obvious, but even then, now you might actually like the person more simply because you’re trying to reverse your racism. You never know what’s really going on, and this is the point with somebody else. When you attach a story as to why they didn’t like you, even if that story is based on what they said, if they gave you direct feedback saying I don’t like you because, which very rarely happens, but even if they do, for you to even believe that story as a fiction. Okay, so I want to point that out now. Let’s have a look at the different types of shame, and if I’m missing any, I want you guys to bring it up and chuck it in the group chat there as we go along. I think the first and most obvious one is anything that you label as a weakness.

26:03
Okay, when you look at yourself and you label something as a weakness, lack of something, lack of skills. Like I was just in talking about being in the dance class. If you’re a beginner around people who are not beginners, you can have shame about that. I should be better. You tell yourself I should be better by now. You tell yourself. Ashwin, did you want to jump in there? Hang on a second. Unmute. Go ahead, man. Ah, ah,

26:33
no, I was just waiting at Peter. But yeah, that’s go as well, and there will be a lot of things that I would like to share eventually. I think I’m in. I do resonate a lot of things. I don’t know why, but recently, like everything seems like like even I’m reading everyone’s expression, which is of a disapproval to me as something that has to do with me. I’m like beating myself quite a bit now. Like every morning I wake up and I’m like, oh shit, yeah, I wanna I wanna make this day good, but I’m just I’m I panic right in the morning, and and then I read everyone’s any any expressions in in a way that is not approval as as as something to do with me. I just take that burden upon me. I don’t know why, and I can’t resist it.

27:43
a great example because what you can see is you you pre burdened yourself. Like in the morning, you’re already I’m something wrong with me, and then so as soon as you see anybody, it’s just confirmation of that. You know, somebody could be yawning because they stayed up all night, and you’d be like, oh, yep, I’m keeping, I’m boring them. Somebody could be frowning at you because they’re thinking about a problem that they’ve got in their marriage, and you’re like, oh yeah, I’ve upset them. You’ll start attaching you to everybody’s feelings and thoughts, but that actually happened before you saw anybody. You’ve already decided there’s something wrong with you before anybody else even gets involved, and that’s shame. Shame’s like a potential. It’s a, you know, it’s like the analogy I often use: it’s pile of wood covered in gasoline, just waiting for a match to be flicked at it. Right? It’s already prepared. Now the match might have nothing to do with you in a sense. Somebody, you know, somebody looking like they’re having a negative expression, they might just be lost in thought. They might be having a problem at home. They might actually be happy and have a weird, like, resting bitch face or something. You don’t know, but you’ll come to a very strong conclusion. Hey, that’s my fault. I did that to them because there’s something wrong with me. It’s important to notice this, to just watch it happen, to go look at me assuming that I’m the cause of everything. There’s a weird kind of arrogance and shame. Look at me ruining everyone’s lives. Like, wow, that’s some powerful shit, Hitler. Well done. Look at you. All these people have had like 30 years of experience without even meeting you, and you’re the one who can ruin their life. Wow, you know we’ve all got that kind of thing. Not only is there something wrong with me, it’s so wrong with me. I destroy people. I can I control their mood with my awfulness, you know. And it’s it’s and it’s important to just be aware of it, to call it out, and go look at me doing it again. There’d be so many times when I’d go up to a girl and I don’t know, ask her out or something. She’d say no, and I just watch myself go through a big story as to why she said no, because I’m this and because I’m that, because I didn’t do this and because I did do that. I’ve told this story before. I remember this one time a girl reacted. Negatively and actually stopped what I was doing and just said, “Well, look, I didn’t mean to upset you that much. Like, have I done something bad here? And she said, “No, I’m just-I’ve come from my father’s funeral. Being head-on’s the last fucking thing I want right now. I was just like, “The first time I clicked, I’m like, ‘Holy shit, that’s got nothing to do with me. How could it? Anybody who comes up and hits on here today is going to get the same reaction. Brad Pitt could come up and hit on her, and she tell him to go fuck himself. That was nothing to do with me, and that opened up. We’ll get to this near the end. It opened up a field of thinking where I realised nobody’s reaction ever has anything to do with me. At the most, I’m like 1% of the reasoning behind their reaction, because all reactions are subjective. Gets difficult is when you think everybody always reacts negatively to this thing that’s wrong about you, because you always predict that’s why they’re acting negatively. So for you, it’s 100% strike rate, but you’ve never actually tested it. You haven’t asked them. Is this why you’re angry? Every time, you don’t actually know what the percentage is. But sorry, I was mute you again there, Ashwin. But yeah, you raise a really good point, which is you you set yourself up for this shame thing. This caring what other people think. It happens before they have their Thoughts, you’re already prepared to be worried about it. They don’t need to do anything. You will misread tiny pieces of body language as being hugely significant because you’re already looking for it.

31:35
You know what you won’t realise is the times where you’re happy and go free and carefree and feeling good about yourself, you won’t notice that people are still yawning and frowning, and even like outright disapproving of you. But you’ll be blind to that, so you won’t be keeping track. You’ll think, “Oh, people like me as much as I like myself today. It’s like, no, they still hate you. Just you don’t hate you today, you know. And that’s what we’re going to be trying to look for today, trying to get more truthful. So, different types of shame, weaknesses, lack of skills. Compare. This is weaknesses are often a comparative measure. How do I compare to the other people in the scenario based on what’s a good thing to be in this scenario? If I’m around dancers, I need to be good at dancing. So, if I’m less good at dancing than the others, then there’s something wrong with me. Now, if I go to a wedding and I’m the only one who’s had any dance lessons and nobody else can dance something, I feel like, hey, there’s nothing wrong with me here. Something that depends on who you’re with. That’s a that’s a weakness shame. If you’re less than others, there’s something wrong with you? Weakness. One of the most bizarre ones, by the way. You know, it’s like you haven’t learned a skill yet, or when when are you going to learn before you get good? You know, knowledge. Feeling like you’re stupid in comparison to other people. Feeling like other people know more than you, that they’re more intelligent than you, Or weaknesses and understanding. You can get this in kind of context, like if you’re around, say, very socially adept people, and you feel awkward and shy, and you just don’t get it. You don’t understand why they can strive in this situation for you. It’s a struggle. This the sense that you are somehow missing a piece that everybody else got. This idea that you were like left behind, retarded in some way, slower, less functioning, and of course the big one failures, isn’t it? When you set an expectation, this is what I want, and you ended up coming short, and you go. That’s not good enough. That creates shame. So weaknesses is one of the types of shame. I want you guys to have a think about this. One of the exercises I’ll recommend after this, for those of you who haven’t already done a shame grid, is to simply list everything you think is wrong with you. Everything you think is not good enough and needs to be improved before you’re allowed to consider yourself to be a good person. Anything that goes onto that list, you can start with weaknesses, and you can use what I’m going to talk about in this section as kind of like prompts. So weaknesses is one of them: lack of skills, knowledge, understanding, and failures. Next one’s a complete opposite, which is bizarre. Strengths. It’s amazing how ashamed people are of their strengths, accomplishments, things that you won, you got the result. People often ashamed to share this because it looks like bragging or boasting, or that they’re going to make other people feel bad about it. Talents, something you’re naturally good at, and you think it’s a bit unfair on others that you’re naturally good at it. You might even repress it. You might, for example, if you’re hanging out with, like I was always academically gifted, but most of my friends were tradesmen. They struggled in school. Some got kicked out, and so when it came to say like reading something, I’d kind of dumb myself down a bit. I wouldn’t let them know how quickly I read it and how easily I understood it, because I was scared that I’d make them feel bad about themselves or that I was pretending to be a brainiac or something. Skills. Quite often we enjoy engaging in our skills, but we’re not so cool on sharing them. Bragging’s different. Bragging’s when you pretend you have more skills than you have, but just talking truthfully about the level of skill you have by being able to go to someone’s house and the oven’s broken and say, “I can fix that, which is true, you can. But being ashamed to say it in case it looks like you’re trying to brag.

35:43
Wisdom, so building up a wealth of knowledge over time, being very knowledgeable about something, people are less likely to be ashamed of this, but they still play it down. I mean, the reason I talk about strengths here is because I used to do job interviews, so I used to be the interviewer, and I used to just watch people just talk themselves out of the job. I’d be like, dude, I know you’re good at this stuff. I’ve seen it on paper. I’ve talked to your referees, and you’re trying to tell me that you’re not. You’re trying to like dumb it down and water it down so it doesn’t look like you’re boasting. You’re in a job interview. That’s the fucking place you’re supposed to. What are you doing? And yet, this is really common, especially in certain countries like New Zealand and the United Kingdom. You get kind of the opposite when you go, say, the United States, where people very much expand on their strengths quite happily. It’s totally cultural and subjective. But even interests and passions, you can be really into something. But if you either think that being passionate is wrong, or you think the thing you’re being passionate about is somehow socially wrong, then you won’t share that passion. For example, you know when I was really stuck in nice go syndrome, I thought it was there was something wrong with being too excited about something, so I used to actually repress that emotion. Like I’d be going to see my favourite band in concert. People be like, “How do you feel about it? Be like, “Yeah, no, not bad, not bad. I’m like, “That’s going to be the highlight of my year. I’m like, “Yeah, looking forward to it. Should be all right, yeah. You know, I saw this in England all the time. I was so weird going to the UK. People talk about everything exactly the same. So, so how was the funeral? Yeah, not bad. Not bad. Yeah. And how was winning a million dollars? Yeah, not bad. It was all right. Yeah. That’s how they talk about everything. There’s no like. I’m like, I have no idea how how you feel about anything. You know, because they just don’t want to like spike on the graph too much. They don’t want to go into a judgmental range of emotion. It’s bizarre. It’s like the whole place. I spoke to hundreds of people. They’re all like this. So weird. Or you might have an interest, but the people you’re talking to are against it. Like you’re really into heavy metal music, or you want to go to Comic Con, and you’re around people who are going to give you a lot of shit for that. When I first got into salsa dancing, it was the only time I the first time I went to a class was simply because I was doing my yes man year and I said yes to everything. A girl asked me if I wanted to go to a class, so I had to say yes. What I didn’t realise is how much I was going to love the class, and I went to salsa and I was joining teams. I was going hard out for like six months before I told a single friend that I was doing it from my sort of original group of friends because I knew what they were gonna say and they said it. You know, when I told my bandmates, they laughed so hard for like 45 minutes that there was no conversation. I just had to wait. They’re all like crying with laughter, and I remember my best friend. He was trying. He could see I was into it, and he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But he just so badly wanted to call me gay, you know. And he just he was just just struggling against this cheer not to do, you know. And I see this with guys like we’ve got quite a few IT related guys in in Brojo, and they’re into the geeky stuff. You know, they like the comics and the gaming and everything, but fuck, they don’t like to talk about it unless they’re sure they’re around their own peers. You know, who knows why? Memories from high school of that putting you in the out group.

39:18
You know, I remember in high school the kids that used to hide and deblock up in the stairs so that they could play that little like Dungeons and Dragonsy thing that game, because if there are certain kids who saw that happening, they would get destroyed, you know, and they built up the shame. So, your strengths, being interested and passionate about something, is a strength. There are there are people out there who have no interests and passions, and they, their quality of life is pitiful. There’s nothing they’re really into other than maybe drinking and watching TV. So to have something beyond that means you’re actually engaged in life, and yet people will be ashamed of the feeling of passion and the thing they’re interested in. You. You’re ashamed if you hide it from people. So strengths is one of the kind of shames we can have. It’s one of the hidden ones. We’re often aware of that we’re ashamed of our weaknesses, but we’re much less aware that we have shame about our strengths and about even what you might call positive emotional states. Then there’s physical shame, appearance, health issues, anything about your body, anything that can be seen with eyes, fashion sense, even to extent like the the size of your house, or how rich you might look to other people, how poor you might look, the thing that people will see visually. Health issues is another one. There’s there’s people. I mean, everybody’s got something, but very few people talk about. It’s amazing. Do you guys ever watch that? What’s that fucking programme? Embarrassing Bodies. And you get someone go to the doctor with this thing on their neck, and you’re like, how the fuck did you leave it that long? Like the thing’s the size of a soccer ball, and you’ve been covering it with like six scarves for about a month. And it’s like, how did how did it take you this long to go? I would have gone when that was bigger than a pimple. How did you let it get to that fucking size? Shame. They didn’t even want a doctor to see it. They didn’t even want to know what it was themselves. They’re so scared of how wrong the thing might be that they don’t want to talk about it. Erectile dysfunction, cancer in your family. I have cholesterol issue issues. You know, there’s something a little bit of shameful in me about having cholesterol issues. Like I’ve somehow got a failure of a body. I’m allergic to things. I I burn like you wouldn’t believe. That’s like I’m allergic to sunlight. It’s bizarre. Like I’ve never had a tan in my life. There’s these things about your body, about what people can see, that you think there’s something wrong with me here. I’m less than others, and you’ll do what you can to hide it up. When I was in high school, I had a massive outbreak of warts, and it was detrimental to my confidence. I mean, warts in high school-like you can’t ask for a worse fucking thing. And I was covered in them. I had like 30 on my hands and another 30 or so on my feet. And I used to, I used to wrap my hands up in this really bizarre way that perfectly covered all of them. So it looked like I had some sort of like disability, but really, it’s just so nobody could see my warts, you know. And I used to dread going to like hand cash over to someone or whatever, you know. Or I had to go bare feet in gym class, and people could see them. You know, I was terrified of people seeing these things about me. Now, objectively, warts is a virus. You don’t choose to have them. It isn’t even anything to do with your talents or anything. I just happened one day to be bleeding in class, and when the bleeding stopped, there was a wart there. Somehow, I caught the virus, and then it took over.

42:51
But I thought there was something wrong with me because of the way people often reacted to it, and it may have been one of the catalysts for why I struggled with women, because for a few years I didn’t want to do well with women because I didn’t want them to get to the point where we had to deal with the warts, you know. So this is the kind of thing we have shame about your body, and we’ve all got something. What’s amazing is how often people have something that they’re ashamed of, but everyone else thinks it’s fine. Like a lot of people think they’re too fat when they’re actually a perfectly healthy weight, or some people think the very thing that some people find attractive about them is wrong. Like a brown guy might go, “I’m too dark, but there’s a girl who’s just totally into brown guys. Like, oh, I want the darker the better. You know, it’s just totally subjective. But you’ve decided it’s wrong. Another type of shame is mental, or shall we say, psychological. When you have thoughts that you really can’t believe that you have, thoughts that you really wish you didn’t have, thoughts that if you thought, “Fuck! If anyone knows I’m having these thoughts, I’m going to get locked up, or at least hated. Dark thoughts, painful thoughts, fucked up, twisted, disgusting thoughts-things that you wouldn’t choose to think if you had a choice, but you don’t have a choice. Those pop into your head: weird dreams, weird judgments about people, sick fantasies, beliefs. It’s very common for someone to have a strong belief and yet be ashamed of it. You know, especially in certain company of people who you know are non-believers in whatever it is that you believe in. I know atheists who are ashamed to speak about science in front of religious people, or religious people who are ashamed to speak of their faith in front of agnostics, or yeah, people who believe in I don’t know anything, really, isn’t it? There’s so many things that you believe in that when it comes to actually taking a stand on it, you go quiet because you know you’re in the company. Of the other team, and you think there’s something wrong with you, or at least there’s something wrong with the belief that’s not worthy of sharing. It must be hidden. Quite often, this brings up a key point of shame. It’s not that you think the thing is wrong; you think it’s wrong to share it. You’d be like, “I really am, you know, “I really do believe that the world is flat? I still want to tell these people because I can’t be bothered with the hassle. Well, that’s still shame. You’re not having shame about the belief. You’re having shame about believing in the belief. It’s the believing you have shame in. You don’t want to show people that you believe the belief you’re fine with. You just don’t want to show people that you’re on board with it. It’s still shame. You don’t want them to know and judge. It’s still shame because that means you’re knowing and judging before they do. Psychological issues. Pretty much every single person on the planet has some pretty significantly weird shit going on inside them, and yet we all like to pretend that we’re fine. We don’t. We like to pretend that most of us don’t have regular bouts of depression and anxiety. You know, there’s there’s there’s so much that almost every human has in terms of psychological issues. Put it this way: think about how many guys in the world have some form of nice guy syndrome that covers most of them, right? And the rest of the other end of the spectrum, like too arrogant or like unaware of themselves, very few people fall into some sort of healthy middle. We’re all something. We all got fucked up in childhood somehow, and then some people have more obvious ones: autism, schizophrenia, and then more subtle ones: obsessive compulsive thinking, overthinking, overworrying, poor memory. There’s all sorts of things we have going on internally that we think there’s something wrong with me. Therefore, I’ve got to pretend this thing isn’t happening. Can be as simple as just being nervous in a job interview. Think I’m always nervous when I have to talk about myself to other people.

47:07
But you don’t tell people that you’re nervous, do you? You think I’ve got to hide that. I have to pretend to be confident. That’s shame. And of course, problems. The fact that you struggle with something, that you haven’t solved something yet. There’s two different like levels of shameless. There’s being able to talk about something you used to be ashamed of, and then it’s being able to talk about something you’re currently ashamed of, and and you can talk about something that used to be a problem that you’ve fixed, and then there’s being able to talk about something that’s currently a problem that you haven’t fixed yet and you’re still struggling with. I learned that when I first started brojo. I used to think of myself as so shameless because I talked about all these things I used to have. You know, even if I was talking about say like erectile dysfunction, like you know, I used to struggle to get it up. Like, don’t anymore. I made it very clear that it was no longer an issue. What I wouldn’t, you know what later on I got to talking about was actually oh shit it happened again, I don’t know why it happened this time, or yeah I’ve got that sorted, but for some reason I cannot get my stress sorted. I just keep burning out. I’m burning out right now. That kind of level of shamelessness, right? So there’s that the mental one. What’s going on inside you? Remember, guys, jump in with questions or thoughts because I’ll just keep ranting. You know how I am. Emotional, emotional shame. Slightly different from I just separated from mental because mental is more the rational parts, like thoughts, beliefs, structures in your head, psychological issues over a long period of time. Emotional is how you feel right now. Emotional shame is when you’ve you know there’s a list of about seven to 13 emotions depending on where you go, and it’s when you think one of them or more cannot be expressed and shown, it should be hidden either just right now or always. Dark emotions. I really avoid saying good and bad emotions, even though I know that’s how people think of them. I don’t want to say that because that kind of highlights the shame. But some emotions are definitely painful and dark, and some of them are light and pleasurable, but people are most often ashamed of the dark ones. Anger, disgust, confusion is a huge one. Fear, depression, sadness. These are dark emotions. People are often pretty okay with people knowing that they’re Happy, calm, you know, content, curious. But even then, depending on the situation, have you ever been being told off and you find it funny and you try not to laugh? You know, the fact that you that you’re having a humorous emotion becomes shameful. Or when you’re really. Excited about something, but you don’t want to make a big deal about it, so you just sort of calm yourself down a bit. Well, that’s that’s shame about excitement. Almost any emotion can become shameful if we tell tell ourselves not now. This is not a good time for it. That’s when it becomes shameful. In general, pain and struggle is the one we’re most ashamed of. We don’t like to show other people that we’re not doing well, and emotions is how we decide how well we’re doing. If I’m experiencing a lot of painful, struggling, dark emotions generally means things aren’t going very well for me. I seem to think if I’m experiencing a lot of happiness and bliss, things are going well for me, hence the attraction of drugs. Get to feel happy all the time. Must be successful, you know. So funny. So trauma, any sort of long-term emotional state of pain when you’re phobias, we react with fear constantly to something. Long-term anxiety, chronic anxiety, and depression; these are things we often hide. And like I said, even excitement and desire, attraction, lust, passion, will hide these too. When you start looking at this list, you you might start to realise, “Fuck, I hide a lot. Like there’s a huge pie of what I am, and people only get a tiny slice of it. Depending on the context, there’s very few situations where the whole pie is available to everybody.

51:32
I remember I had a couple of best friends when I was growing up, and this is actually one of the reasons I was able to break through nice guy syndrome is because I was lucky enough to have some people where I didn’t do it with them, and so they became my comparative measure. Like, how am I with Brad compared to everyone else? Now, Brad got to see any emotion I was happening. He’s got to see any struggle I was having, and it wasn’t even. It wasn’t like he was counselling me or anything. He’s actually quite a brutal guy. He didn’t give a fuck about my problems, but I didn’t hide them, you know. And I could see, wow, the things I don’t hide from him and what I hide from everyone else. That is a big list, you know. I let him see when I’m stressed or I’m struggling with a girl or just can’t be bothered. I’m feeling antisocial. Don’t let anyone else see that. Antisocial is a big one. A lot of you feel like, hey, when I’m socialising, I have to be up and beat and like really friendly and stuff. So sometimes you just want to tell people to go fuck themselves and sit in the corner and be dark by yourself. It’s very hard to express that, isn’t it? Because you think is wrong. I should want to be excited. I had one client. He was like, he was working on shamelessness, and his mission was the next time he felt antisocial, he was going to not pretend to be social in a social situation. And he was. It happened. He finally was at a dance event. So many of my clients are into dancing, I guess. And he was just like, you know what? I’m in a fucking dark mood. I can’t be bothered. Just gonna chill. And this guy came up to him and actually said, like, come on, mate, smile, get excited, and actually put pressure on him to get into that social state. Like his worst nightmare that people actually were judging him for not looking happy. And you get this a lot in the dancing. You know, people like are used to performing. They want to look like everything’s great all the time. Sometimes you’re like, no, I’m tired. Can’t be fucked talking to you today. But you hide that. So there’s emotional pain. There’s two more types of shame that I identified. There’s one I call past shame, which you might also call regret. So this is event-specific things you did, things that were done to you, things you didn’t do. It’s over and done with now. It’s in the past, but you’re ashamed that it took place the way it did. You think it’s wrong the way it went. You think you did it wrong. You made a mistake. You say you fucked up. The thing went the way it did, and you said it was wrong the way it happened. That shame about your past. That one’s an easy one to identify. You know, and it’s also one of the the ones that can be, I believe, fully fixed. There’s some shame that you’ll always have. Like I’ll always be a bit. I’ll always struggle a bit, probably to express stress. I’m so ashamed of stress that sometimes I don’t even know when I’m stressed, because I’ve got this identity in my head of a guy who can handle anything. So every time I’m stressed, my identity goes to work to pretend I’m not, you know. But there’s nothing now in my past, really nothing. Nothing. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that I’m not cool with because I like who I am now, and everything in my past made me who I am now. So it must have all helped, even with things where I’m just oh god. I believe I did that. What was I thinking? Now I’m like, well, it helped somehow. It helped. In fact, if it had gone another way, I might be worse now. So let’s just say that was a win. Every painful thing I’ve ever been through was a lesson. I understand that, but like I said, being shameless is not about the absence of shame. It’s about the ability to express it. The last category of shame is personality, your tendencies, your preferences, your blind spots. Are you introverted or extroverted?

55:35
You know, are you neurotic or carefree? You’re doing some Myers-Briggs test and said I’m an INGP four five whatever fuck you know you’re some category of thing. Do you have psychological disorder that’s a personality? You bipolar. You borderline. You psychotic? Something that’s permanent about you. A structure of your mind that’s not going to change very much. This is personality. You know. What’s interesting, by the way, is that personality can change. When I first did my proper Big Five personality testing, I was introverted. This is the most valid personality testing that exists in the world today. I did the same thing 10 years later, and it turns out I’m extroverted. So what the fuck? But I think the previous one was just nice guy syndrome, and I was always extroverted. But tendencies, you know, he’s someone who is a morning person but not a night person. Are you someone who tends to blurt out what they say instead of think it through. One of the guys we had on the Honesty Effect programme, he just found out right near the end of the programme that he’s officially been diagnosed with ADHD. He always thought he was lazy because he didn’t follow through on things. Turns out he kind of can’t follow through on things. He has to live his life in a different way. He can’t do long-term, concentrated pieces of work. But he always thought something was wrong with him, until he had a name for it. He goes, “It’s just a thing. I can work with this, you know. But these kind of these things about you that have always been that way. Like sometimes I think I used to have shame about being too serious. That’s why I was always a comedian all the time with people, because I think about think about deep things all the time. Can’t fucking turn it off. Drives me crazy sometimes. Have to pull apart and analyse every fucking situation for all the psychological implications and the dynamics between this and cause and effect. Sometimes I like I’ve got these mates who like fishing is complicated for them. You know they just they’re so simple about everything, and I totally envy them. My God, they must be nice. They must sleep like babies. You know they don’t have to analyse everything. But that’s just the way I am. I’d love to be fun and carefree, but I’m not. I’m not fun and carefree. For me to be fun and carefree, I have to force it. I’m serious and and analytical. It’s just dessert. It’s the cards I’ve been dealt. Justin, I have lots of shame in each of these categories. Yes, and I really want to point out that when you really go through this, you might just be like, “Wow, that is a big fucking list. That’s okay, all right. Because even having a big list is normal. You’ll be ashamed. It’s you know meta shame. You’re ashamed that you’re so ashamed. Well, that’s just another type of shame. In fact, the bigger, the more meta the shame is, the the more impact you can have in sharing it. You can be like, ah, you know, I’ve got all these different types of thoughts and beliefs and patterns and everything I’m ashamed of, or you can just realise, hey, I’m ashamed of the way my mind works. I could probably cover it all in a big stroke like that, you know. Just tell them. Sometimes I wish I had a different brain. Kind of covers it all, and then you can actually get some big points out of that. Personality is another one where you can get big points if you can realise that the way you are. Well, it might be able to change, and it might not really work that well for you. It’s just the way you are. Then talking about the way you are as a general concept, like being able to say, “I’m a nice guy, have nice guy tendencies, for example, can cover all the things that’s in the nice guy category as well.

59:35
It helps to like alleviate shame for everything underneath that category. You know, but we’ll get to that soon. So I want to stop in and check in with you guys. I hope I haven’t bummed you out too hard. But when what’s come up for you guys, what questions or thoughts do you want to share based on the different types of shame that I’ve gone through here? This one, this one, go ahead now.

1:00:15
Yeah, so I am, as you said, like I could relate to you saying that you you think a lot and you are generally a really serious person. So I was thinking about it. So I used to be that kind of guy. Like I never talked a lot, or so. What happened is, I mean, this is gonna take me to my past as well. So when I came to New Zealand, I wanted to eliminate myself from all my social group and circle, and then try to see how things were different. Or in a way, I needed to. I thought I needed to reset my mind to a period where I didn’t meet my friends who I was who I was then. It was basically going into like a fifth grader or you know something like around 1213 years when I was up with their values, and then and talking about that, I mean, I used to be a really serious guy, and then I started out being funny seeing my brother because he used to make awesome comments, which made everyone laugh. What I did was I used to listen to him talking at the house, and then I sort of took the ideas and implemented in class, which made me sort of like a funny person, which got all the acceptance, and I don’t know when things went off from there. So right now, like through the self development and and being who I am now, sometimes I feel like look, I don’t know who I am anymore because I used to think that I am this serious guy and I couldn’t have fun or stop thinking too much. And at the same time, as you said, I feel like I, I had all those friends and everything only when I was funny, and it kind of put puts me in situation where I don’t know where I belong anymore. Either I’m the serious guy who thinks too much, and it’s okay to be like that, or sometimes I think like I need to be this funny, outgoing person who I became naturally. But I don’t know. I feel like I’m forcing myself into that rather than accepting. Okay, this is me, and I’m happy with this person.

1:02:38
Yeah, well,

1:02:38
I get it, but no,

1:02:40
this is this is huge because this is at the heart of the the journey that ends in the destination. There’s something wrong with me. The not good enough story. There’s, I think, there’s nothing more devastating to somebody’s long term enjoyment of life as when they pretend to be something else and it works, because that doubles the shame. Now confirms that the thing I used to be must have been wrong. Because this other thing I’m being is killing. I got the same thing when I got into pickup. All of a sudden, being not me did very well with women, and it just confirmed, hey, the real me is not attractive. Women don’t like the real me; they like this guy I’m pretending to be. Now the trouble is, and I like to use a kind of like a Bloods and Crips analogy here: red and blue. If you’re being a red person, only people who like red people will see you, and you’ll only meet red supporters, and you’ll only attract red supporters, and you’ll end up assuming that everybody’s red, and being red’s the right way to be. So bias, because all the blue people walk right past you; they’re not interested in you, or they they literally don’t see you because of the way you’re behaving. And this is a similar thing as to what I noticed saying pickup when I was being like the guy who teased people all the time and played all these tricks and games. It seemed like I was attracting lots of women. Really, I was attracting a specific type of woman. We’ll call her the pickup woman. Well, the confident woman walked right past me and rejected me quickly. They had no interest in a guy that played these games or wore silly clothes. Just it was bizarre for them. But the insecure, fucked up, ashamed-I don’t want to come up with some really bad words here-but the kind of girls who were into what I was doing, they had problems. That was proven to me over and over again over time. Where you know the next day you wake up next to them and just go, oh, I’m in some trouble here. How the fuck do I get out of this one? You know, and that kept happening. And the same thing with like when I was my circle of friends has changed quite dramatically from when I was younger, and yet they’ve still stayed together. So I’m not in them anymore, but they’re still with each other. And so what I mean to share that is that they’re kind of all red people would say. But secretly, I’ve always been blue. They all fit in with each other quite well, but I always had to perform to fit in with them. When I stopped performing, I lost them. But now I have blue friends. You know, like me and Mike, it’s ridiculous when we have a conversation. It’s never fun and light-hearted. It’s always very deep, very analytical. We pull apart every fucking thing to see what’s behind every door. It’s exhausting because we both like that, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s how we talk. That’s how we do shit. It’s not like we can’t have a laugh, but it’s none of this comedy stand-up routine that I used to do and have to do with my old friends. What we often get is a situation like yours where you started off being natural blue, but you were surrounded by red people, and you thought, “I don’t fit in. So then you tried being red, and lots of red people validated you for that. You thought finally I fit in, not realising, hey, for some reason or another, I never found the blue people and connected with them to begin with. There was a group at my school who I really think emphasise this the best. I went to a very big high school, it’s like 2000 kids or something, which meant that whatever you’re into, you could find a group of who was into it. It was that kind of size school, which you can’t get at like a small country school. You’re like the one guy who’s into magic cards at the small country school. You’re going to get bullied.

1:06:34
If you’re into magic cards at my high school, there’s at least 30 other kids who are there, and you’ll all become a team together. And this is what I was in the academically gifted class, and by fluke mostly because I failed so many subjects. But all the kids were were the uber nerds. They’re the ones who were doing like university degrees and shit while I was still in high school. You know, the kind of like demon hawking kids, and they were all together, and there was a lot of them, and they actually formed this clique. It was like this clique of nerds sort of thing. So whereas most schools that they had been to before this, they were the odd one out. Now they there’s a whole group of them. You know, the most bizarre thing I found out later on is that they used to have orgies, totally blew my mind. But like when everyone else was trying to get laid, these ones were having so much sex that they got in trouble for it because they had this group. And I don’t know where I’m going with that, but the point of the story is is that in a big enough sample size, you’ll actually find your kind of people. But most of us aren’t raised or exposed to an environment that’s a big enough sample size when we’re younger. So if we don’t naturally fit in with whatever that sample is, we’ll think that we’re outcast. We’ll think that we’re different. Just like a blue person will always think he’s different if he’s only surrounded by red people, but he doesn’t realise that there’s blue people out there, so now you end up with with a lot of shame. You end up, am I red or blue? I don’t even know anymore. Spent so long being red, it became true, and that’s what I got with nice guy syndrome. I spent so long being the entertainer, the compassionate advice giver, and the apathetic, sarcastic Chandler from Friends, that I thought that was me, simply because I spent a lot of my time doing that, and that’s what shame does. Is you know, if you’re pretending a lot, then the pretence seems to be true just because there’s a lot of it. But the point being is, you always have to put an effort into that pretence. But if you didn’t put effort in, that wouldn’t happen. We won’t go too deep into what being yourself is, though. That might be a category for another webinar. What I will say is, red or blue is what happens when you’re not trying. If you have to try to be something, then it isn’t what you are. I don’t want you to confuse that with, say, putting effort into being courageous or something like that. But the performance, when you put on a show for a long period of time, that’s probably what you’d call like meta meta shame. This is where you’ve now created a character to hide all the shame, character who has none of the flaws that you want to hide, and that’s what my nice guy comedian was. He was essentially a performance that eliminated all the things I didn’t want to share: negative emotions, shame about myself, struggles with women, all the stuff I want to share. This one character, this act, was the guy who had none of those issues, or was not affected by those issues. You know, and I wanted to be him, so I became him. But he was never actually me. The real me still had all the issues. Otherwise, this guy wouldn’t be needed to hide them all. You know, does that make sense? Yep. Like Peter says here, you don’t have to be one thing constantly. You’re allowed to be serious. You can be the party guy. You can be a mixture, and that’s what authenticity is: is the natural you reacting to the moment. But if you have to like turn it all up one category, you have to be like put it this way: If you have to be red all the time, and sometimes you feel like being blue, then that’s a shameful performance. The authentic guy is red when he feels red.

1:10:30
He’s blue when he feels blue. He’s black when he feels black. Does whatever fuck is right for him right there and right now. There’s no effort. You just slip into what you are in a sense, actually, I shouldn’t say that because eventually the performance becomes something you slip into. But we won’t go too deep on that. Justin, you raised your hand. Can we just do that? You’re on the line, Justin.

1:10:57
Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to add that just as you’ve listed all of those categories and and and then the feelings of shame within those. I’ve I’ve spent most of my life thinking I was a shy introverted person, but but I think now it was just because you know I I would be hiding all of these things that I would feel ashamed of, and and I wouldn’t want anyone, I wouldn’t want anyone indefinitely, you know, seeing shameful things about me, and and just like you’re talking about the red and

1:11:33
blue

1:11:34
there, if I wanted to interact with someone, I would I would mimic them, or or I would I would react to them, or I would act the way that I thought they would want to act. They thought you know that they would want me to act around them, and yeah, and and I think now that that’s why never I never really developed any close relationships with with with basically anyone. I mean, just I’ve only ever had really a couple of good friends in my life, and and and I don’t even I don’t know them anymore either. So yeah, yeah, I’m starting to understand that that I think these areas of shame were what I thought was just me being shy, and always thought that well that’s how I was born, that I’ll always be, but but now I’m starting to see that that you know maybe I can that I’m not always going to be that way, but I can work on it. This

1:12:28
is huge. I was talking about this with Mike actually the other day. The difference between being introverted and being shy, you know, there’s so many like according to like psychological statistics, it should be about a 50-50 spread in the general population of extroverts and introverts. You go around asking people when everyone thinks they’re an introvert. How’s that possible? You can’t all be fucking introverts. I thought I was one, but I wasn’t an introvert. I was shy. Shy is different. Shy is shamefully hiding who you are because you’re worried about the social consequences. An extroverted person can do that, and they can do it for so long that they appear to be introverted. It goes the other way as well. If somebody might think they’re extroverted because they have to put on a big social show every time they’re around people, except they’ve always been introverted, if they could just let themselves be quiet, they’d realise they actually quite like being quiet, and they quite like having some time to themselves, and they don’t want to socialise that much because it exhausts them, and so on. Also, with the introvert extrovert thing, is the idea that because you are this way, that you’re somehow in a prison of behaviour. So no, you can still be outgoing if you’re an introvert if you feel like it, and you can be thoughtful and have time to yourself as an extrovert if you feel like it. But if you’re shamed, you won’t even know what the fuck you are. And mimicry is a big one, a big, big warning sign that you’re ashamed is when you try to fit in. Any act you do to try and make yourself not just more likeable, but just more appropriate. You know, if you find like you’re in a group of people and they swear a lot, and you notice yourself swearing a lot, even though you’re not really a cursing person, that’s shame. That’s saying, hey, the way I normally talk isn’t good enough for this group. And what you’ve identified, Justin, I think is the same for all of us in this group, is eventually like mimicry is the act of someone who’s already come to the conclusion that their natural self completely is shameful, and they have to make up a new one for each person. They have to abandon whatever they really are and just come up with that. And the fucked up thing about that is that’s what psychopaths do. Psychopaths are chameleon. There’s no true self to a psychopath. They’re a blank slate that they fill in depending on who they’re around, they become what’s going to be the most effective person in any situation. They don’t have a consistency of character. It’s almost impossible to nail down the personality of a psychopath because they can’t even prevent themselves from lying. So even if you want a psychologist to test them, they’re going to lie throughout the testing. You won’t know who the fuck they are. It’s kind of like the monster of Stephen King’s “It. You know, you think it’s a clown, but it’s actually something else, and yeah, it always changes into something. But yeah, that’s really interesting insights you’ve had there, Justin. In that, yeah, if you if you’re trying to be the thing that other people want you to be. You get you get the kind of the great tragedy of shame. Shame is designed to avoid rejection and isolation. You know, shame is like I’ll hide this thing about me so that I fit in better. But what do you end up with? No close relationships, no real connection, constant loneliness. People are worried that other people not liking them creates loneliness. Shame creates loneliness. That’s why I’m doing this session. Essentially, is your problem socially isn’t what other people think of you. It’s caring what they think of you and adjusting to that. That is what makes you lonely. The ironic thing is, by the time you’re shameless, you don’t actually care if people like you anymore, but they will be more likely to because the blue people will find you because you finally see that you’re blue, you know, or whatever. Ashwin says my nickname among my best friends is chameleon. I used to call myself that chameleon. I’d be like, give me any group, I’ll fit in. I got this.

1:16:20
You know, high school I had like six different groups of friends. I had like music people. I had the the nerds in my class. I had rugby guys. I had like a big group of like islanders and mouldy tough guys. I fit in with all of them, the skater kids. I was never the king of any group, but I was never at the bottom or ostracised. I could fit in with all of them. I could blend in. It’s funny enough to be like interesting to keep around, not too funny as to actually polarise anyone’s opinions of me. It’s just this nice little grey thing that could go anywhere and be whatever. But of course, if you go to a party and three different groups are there, it’s a fucking nightmare because you have to be like, like what’s that thing of never-ending stories? Like four faces and one head, you know, like trying to be all these different things. So that’s why I designed the funny guys, because everyone likes the funny guy. So I was able to blend to most groups by just being like, if lots of people from different groups were around, I’d just be funny all night. That would kind of keep me safe. Awesome, Chris. I see your hand up there. Hang on a second, Justin. I’ll just mute you again. Chris, go ahead.

1:17:35
Yep, I’ve been listening carefully to what everyone has been saying tonight, and I can relate to a lot of things. I wanted to share my experience with shame. So, when I was in that period, transitioning from being a child to becoming a teenager, I got picked up a lot in school and started believing the shit that people were saying about me. Things related to my skin colour, to my pimples, to my introverted personality, to how I spoke, how I pronounced, how I dressed, how I danced, everything, and I believed all that shit, and became more ashamed of myself. Okay, and started becoming ashamed of the gifts and opinions and skills and talents I had, and wanted to become unnoticed. Okay, and basically, I wanted to avoid being criticised, being embarrassed, being mocked. So the thing is that my experience of two decades of being a nice guy, I think that people perceive the shame you have, of course, and then when this, when you have some argument with bullies or people that dislike you, yet they use the shame you’re showing to them. You’ve shown to them, and they pick it up and bring it up and use it against you. And then, what happened to me is like the cycle perpetuated. So because I lost the argument or was humiliated in public, I became more ashamed and tried to become less noticed and trying to avoid any confrontation or conflict with these jerks, bullies, teachers, whatever. So it’s been happening for a while, and even though I try to be the nice guy or try to make things better for everyone, they’re still perceiving the shame. And whenever I have a discussion or an argument, they bring it up. They don’t call it shame. They don’t call it. They call it like lack of confidence, insecurity. They call it self-sabotaging myself. They call it hiding something in what’s happening. You know. So I just want to know, from your perspective, how do you cut that down? Spiral or vicious cycle of the shame you’re showing, and stop doing it so that people can, so that you can feel better, and you don’t, people don’t pick it up when you’re having discussions on any other topics. This

1:20:18
is a great point. I just mute you for background noise. There, we get this concern that we are showing our shame, and people pick up on it and they call it different names. But the thing is, they’re not showing it because we’re trying to show it. They’re showing it because it comes through, and that’s different from intentionally expressing it, and significantly different. It is the difference. Shamelessness doesn’t get come from being caught being ashamed. It comes from handing yourself in. Yeah, and I think that’s a great analogy. If you think there’s a big difference between being caught for committing a crime versus showing up to the police station and saying I did it. The consequences are often very different, aren’t they? And yeah, and this raises a really good point. A lot of you think you are good at hiding your shame. You ain’t. People aren’t that fucking stupid. Some people are. Some people be like, “Oh, that guy’s really carefree. He’s got his shit sorted. Everyone else is like, “That dude’s all kinds of fucked up. Don’t know exactly what, but there’s something nobody smiles that much, you know. You you can see it in others, and yet you think you’re the one who can hide it. You’re not that good at it, and this is one of the things to understand with shamelessness is they can see it anyway, so you don’t really lose in taking the the baton and making sure they at least see what it really is. I think that’s a key difference here, Chris. Is you’ve always been caught being ashamed. It’s not the same as being shameless. It’s not the same as saying, “Hey, I got this thing about me. It’s waiting for it to be picked up on. You’re actually hiding it. It’s the hiding they pick up on, and that’s how they say it. It’s something, lack of confidence, like you’re hiding something. They they can feel that you’re hiding something. It’s the hiding that creates all the drama. You can have something you’re deeply ashamed of, but if you don’t hide it, it becomes fine. You can see this with stand-up comedians all the time. Guys like Louis C.K. There’s a lot of things that he’s ashamed of about himself, but he talks about it like it’s the most normal thing in the world. You don’t even have to guess what he’s ashamed of. He’s going to tell you, and you don’t get a sense of hiding from him. Yeah, I just remember this one story. Oh God, what was he talking about? I won’t try and rejoice it, but he’s just talking about how, like, when when you see your house, if you’re busting for a shit, you see your house, your asshole just assumes you’re already home and just lets go. You know, even if you’re like two blocks away, he’s just telling this big story about how he like half shit himself on the way home, and then when he got home, he had to take his pants all the way off because there wasn’t room for him to spread his legs properly. He doesn’t like doing a closed leg shit. Just went on and on and on. And and the point was, it’s like it’s a very disgusting story where he did something that’s very embarrassing. But do you feel any shame? Do you feel like there’s anything wrong with him? No. You say that’s some funny shit, which is the truth. All the fucked up things about you are actually quite hilarious if you can let go of the idea that there’s something wrong with you. And I think yeah, this is the key thing that we’re going to begin to write at the end of this is it’s not that you’re ashamed of it; it’s that you’re hiding it. That’s the problem. It’s the act of hiding. You’re not hiding it well. It’s like I imagine people walking around with like a little tree branch over their face, like this, you know, as if they’re camouflaged. And really, it’s super obvious that you know they’re hiding something. The shameless guy is not the guy who has no embarrassment or no regrets or no guilt about who he is. He’s a guy who lets you see all of that, and he’ll be the one who puts it forward first, without any apology. And that’s what we’re getting to in this.

1:24:16
Shamelessness isn’t built from getting caught. That actually compounds shame, even though the result seems to be the same. Like they know there’s something wrong with you, sort of thing. But shameless is actually. By the way, did you know there’s something wrong with me? Here’s this thing. Before they even had the guess, and as we’ll get to expressing in a way where there’s no actual wrong attached, you’re like, here’s just this thing about me you should know that I think about that’s on my mind. So it gets there because you know, Chris, it can seem like you’ve had a lifetime of being caught out being ashamed, and that hasn’t worked for you. That is so different to being the one who puts it forward first. It’s worlds apart. In fact, it is the difference that we’re really talking about here. That’s what I learned. Is you know when I was a nice guy and I was getting friend zoned all the time and stuff like that, I thought, you know, my shame about who I was and everything wasn’t immediately available to women. They didn’t see it. And then there was one girl I was in the friend zone with who had a very frank discussion with me one day, and she just laid it out. She’s like, “You are obviously this, and she just step by step, just like buried me. I was like, wow! I thought I was doing a way better job of hiding that shit. To her, it’s like the most obvious thing she knew. Within five minutes of meeting me, and I realised she wasn’t particularly bright girl. She could see it. Holy shit! Maybe I’m not hiding it as well as I thought, you know. And there’s been so many times where, like, like I release shame in my books when I write them, and somebody will read them, like my parents will read them, and be like, “I was pretty scared about you reading this. They’re like, “Why? I was like, “There’s a lot of shit you don’t know. They’re like, “We knew everything that was in that book. I was like, “Fuck, are you serious? Even the bit where I like stole your money and everything. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we know all of that. People knew all the time, and if I had known they had known, maybe I would have been a bit bolder earlier on. And that’s kind of where we’re going with this. One of the things that really helped me, particularly with women, was to assume that they can read my mind, and there’s no point in hiding anything because they’ll know I’m lying. And that actually helped me a lot with women to just go, “Oh, she already knows of this thing that I’m just started thinking about, so I might as well say it out loud, and that’s that kind of healed my relationship with woman. Ashwin was saying here, “Fuck me, I thought it was good to be able to blend in. I give you think it’s good to have options. Hasn’t been bad considering there are a few people from different group who value me. No, don’t try me. Yeah, survival thing to adapt. Yes, you can adapt. You got to choose between surviving and thriving. You know, chameleon fitting in with everybody-that’s surviving. You’re not going to have deep connections with anyone, but no one’s going to hate you. Thriving-is there going to be some people look at you, go, “Fuck, I can’t stand that, dude. Such a dick. But while they’re thinking that, you’ll be in deep in conversation with someone who loves you just the way you are. That’s a choice you make. Shameless is the thriving choice. It’s painful one. Takes a lot of effort. Scary to do. Fitting in actually takes even more effort, but it’s it’s less terrifying. The funny thing, as as you guys all have identified by now, trying to fit in doesn’t even work that well anyway. Even when you’re good at it, because the trouble is you don’t have deep connections with anyone, so it’s way easier for them to leave you. It’s way easier for them to ditch you. I got ditched a lot when I was a nice guy. My friends would go out for an event and they’d forget to invite me. It’s just because I wasn’t-I wasn’t that significant.

1:27:46
I was a funny guy, but if they didn’t feel like laughing, there wasn’t really any reason to invite me. It was quite heartbreaking. Whereas when I-what’s ironic is when I became much more authentic, I had way fewer friends, but my calendar was stocked full. I had to say no to people all the time. It was bizarre. Yeah, so hiding is the key here. I want. That’s the thing. the The message I’m trying to get across to you guys the most is you worrying what other people think. It’s an illusion. It’s not what they think that bothers you, it’s what you think of yourself that bothers you. That manifests as guesses about what other people think of you and the consequences of that thought, and then you hide to prevent that guess from coming true, and it’s the hiding that does all the damage. When you hide something about yourself. Your brain can only perceive that in one way. This thing is wrong. I wouldn’t hide it if it was right. Your brain watches you, goes, “Hey, he doesn’t hide what he has for breakfast. He doesn’t hide his face. Those things must be good. But he hides his feelings. He hides his beliefs. He hides his past. He hides his illness. I guess those things are bad. Your brain doesn’t know what’s right and wrong until you act on it. Your brain’s waiting for you to decide with your behaviour. When you go, okay, your brain goes right. I’m feeling confused. What are we going to do? Not tell anyone? Okay, it’s wrong to be confused then. That’s the way your brain works. That’s how you end up thinking, oh no, that person knows I’m confused. They’re going to hate me. They don’t give a fuck that you’re confused. You do, because somebody shameless about confusion won’t have that train of thought at all. They won’t go, oh no, that person’s worried about me being confused. They’ll just be like, fuck, I’m really confused right now. It’ll just pop out. And if someone goes, oh really? Don’t you know the answer? He’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t. What’s your fucking problem? It’s totally subjective. He won’t have built up the story that confusion is wrong, so it won’t be true for him. And no matter how anyone else reacts, it still won’t be true. Quite often, we can do this with a mental experiment. If you think about the kind of person. Whose opinion you really don’t care about, maybe a two-year-old child or severely disabled mental patient. If you can think of a of a really extreme stereotypical person who, no matter what they thought of you, you wouldn’t be affected by it because you just don’t have any faith or weight attached to their belief, you think about that. Our shameless person views everyone like that, and what’s really interesting is we can see bits of it. Like when I worked in I worked in the Mason Clinic in Auckland, which is a forensic mental health unit, so a prison for crazy people, basically. And you know, there’d be a guy who’d be like, “I don’t like you very much, but he’s the same guy who plays table tennis by himself because he thinks he has a partner. You know, he’s totally crazy, stabbed his mum like 50 times or something. I’m like, okay, he doesn’t like me, but I’m actually, I’m okay with that, because one, I don’t care if he likes me, and two, I don’t think he even knows what’s real, so I can’t trust his judgement. But what’s the difference between him and anybody else? Why would somebody else saying I don’t like you suddenly be more important than this guy? Why don’t they have any mental problems? Why do I see their functioning and their thinking as clearer than this guy? This guy might be the only person who can see the people you know that actually exist that none of us can see. Who knows what the fuck’s real? Okay, it’s probably not that way. But point being is, why would I think some people’s opinions mattered and others didn’t? And this is a huge part of shame and shamelessness. Is you you start to validate whether or not something’s wrong by hiding it, and this is what creates special people in your life.

1:31:49
So if you always hide a certain emotion from authority figures, then you become very ashamed in front of authority figures in general. You’ll see a police officer start shitting yourself. The CEO will walk into the room, and you just clam up and go silent. There might not be anything happening with you in that moment that’s in the shame category, but now to be in this person’s presence is shameful. Just because you’ve always been ashamed in front of these kinds of people, you create that scenario. So people get starstruck in front of celebrities, they’re just a skeleton with meat on it. You know, we don’t get starstruck in front of master plumbers, and yet they’re more talented. What is it about celebrities that makes a big deal? Well, we decided it was a big deal, and then we hide stuff in front of them, and so on. Kind of getting a little bit off track here, but what we’re getting into now is is how shame relates to caring what other people think, and really emphasising the point: you don’t actually care what other people think. That’s just like a movie representing your shame, and you know this because most of the time, the judgement you receive is Imagined. Now, some cases, like Christy demonstrated, you will be actively bullied or tortured for the way you are, but there’ll be other times where you go through that pain and nobody’s even done anything. They haven’t said anything. Think about how many times we’ve lying lying awake at night in pain, worrying what other people think of you. There’s nobody else even in the room giving you feedback, and yet you’re going through the pain nonetheless, as if they’re there yelling at you for being a loser. Imagine judgement as the proof of shame. If you’re worried what people think before they express it, That’s shame, because they haven’t seen anything yet. There’s no evidence that there’s anything wrong with you in their eyes yet, but you’ve already decided there is. Only shame can do that, and when you look at it that way, you’ll start to realise that other people’s opinions has never actually been the concern. It’s only been your opinions of yourself projected onto them. When I’m running a meeting and somebody yawns, I think, “Oh my God, I’m so boring. They didn’t actually say I was boring. They just yawned. Maybe they didn’t get enough sleep. I’m the one who called me boring. The only person whose opinions hurt me on my own. Their opinions don’t mean shit. They might love me. They might be embarrassed to yawn. They can’t wait to hear more of what I’d say, or maybe they don’t like me. But I don’t actually know. All I know is I don’t like me, and I throw that onto their face. I give their face to my insecurity. Now this becomes really hard to see because sometimes you do get genuinely negative feedback, and this gets mixed up with all your imagined feedback. Sometimes the dude is just yawning. Other times the dude is like, “That was actually pretty fucking boring. You think? Okay. So every time someone yawns, it’s the same. That guy saying it’s boring. So yawning means I’m a loser. So every time someone yawns in my presence, I fall to pieces. Actually, only one guy said that you were boring, and who knows what he actually thought? Maybe he was jealous of you, and he said that to try and bring you down a peg. Just like all the girls that have always, you know, that have rejected me when I’ve asked them out or something. I always thought that as mean they’re not attracted to me. Maybe they are attracted to me, but I remind them of their ex. Maybe they’re a lesbian. Maybe they wish they had said yes, but they accidentally said no out of habit. Or maybe they thought I was something that I’m not. Or maybe they do not like me. But I don’t know which one it actually is because they don’t even know which one it actually is. You know, you ask somebody why they like you, and they’ll give you a big list of reasons, and you’ll think, “I’m not those things all the time. What about when I’m not those things? You still like me? Why do you like me then?

1:35:56
They won’t know because the truth is that list isn’t real either. They say I like you because you’re kind and generous and funny. So, so when I’m not being kind and generous and funny, you hate me. No, you still like me then, don’t you? Because that list is bullshit. It’s just a story you give to to a preference that makes sense. But actually, preferences never make sense. We don’t know why we like or dislike things. You don’t know why somebody likes or dislikes you, but you’ll come up with a fucking reason for it, won’t you? You’ve actually pre-packaged that reason, just like Ashwin was talking about. You decided on that reason in the morning when you got up. Now you’re just waiting for someone to throw it onto. You’re like, oh my god, I’m such a loser. I’ve got nothing going on in my life. Then you’re standing at the queue at the bus stop, and you smile at a girl, and she frowns at you, and be like, “Yep, she knows I’m a loser. What? Maybe she has a facial disorder. Maybe she’s shy. A key example I saw of this is one of my favourite ones. I was in a dance class, told the story before, and the instructor just kept making the move more and more difficult, and everyone was struggling. I was helping out. I was kind of more advanced than the participants in the class. I’m like, man, they’re just this is just getting worse and worse. Like they barely got the first bit, and he’s on to the fifth bit already. I was just like, why does he keep making it harder, like has he got Asperger’s or something? Can he not see that people are struggling? Like what’s going on? I went and talked to him afterwards, and he was actually worried because they look bored. I was like, they’re not bored; they’re concentrating. And the more the more difficult he made it, the more I had to concentrate, the more bored he thought they were. So he got stuck into this loop of making the class harder and harder and harder, and they just looked more and more bored. By the end of it, you know that this is the long-term picture here. They won’t come back to the class, and he’ll be like, “Oh, see, it was too boring. I had to make all my classes more interesting. And he’ll get into this massive self-sabotaging pattern simply because he projected his self-worth issues onto somebody else’s facial expression, that is a lot different. Going, hey, how did you find the class? How did you feel during the class? What was good about it? What would you improve? He didn’t do that. He didn’t ask anyone anything about how they felt. He had already knew, because he’s the master of reading facial expressions, just like you think you are. You don’t know. You know, there will be times where somebody really does judge you, and there really are consequences. I just want you to notice how rare those occasions are compared to the overall judgments that you predict and imagine. Know the difference between solid evidence and imagined evidence. Though they both feel equally real. You think someone frowning is feedback. It’s not. Until they look you in the eyes and say, “Look, I’ve got to be honest with you. I fucking hate you. You haven’t received feedback, negative feedback of any kind. Now you can, over time, become quite good at reading people’s faces and knowing what they’re feeling, but assuming you’re right is the problem. One of the things I’ve learned is, even though I am through so much coaching and stuff, I am pretty accurate at reading people now. I always assume I’m not, and I ask them, “How do you feel? What are you thinking? Now, sometimes their answers do not surprise me. I’m like, “Fuck! I was bang on the money there, but sometimes they do, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I must have been making up some shit in my head there. I thought they looked confused, but they’re actually happy. Why did I think they were confused? Where did I get that from? Especially men, we spend most of our lives socialising without looking each other in the face. We’re not that practised. We’re not that good at reading people.

1:39:50
Shame relates to caring what other people think and the overall concept of trying to fit in, of not being. Ostracised of trying to be red like all the other ones, but secretly you’re blue. Shame is about a process of moderating you down to fit in. You know what’s that? Like a plane when you’re shaving wood down to make it fit into a certain shape. That’s what shame’s like. It tries to shave away the parts of you that might not fit in, so that you can slip in nicely. Shame is actually a social survival strategy, isn’t it? You hide the things that might rock the boat, so that you can fit in with the group and be privy to all the resources. Yeah, that was great like 10,000 years ago. It’s not 10,000 years ago. If the people around you are red and you’re blue, then you can leave them and go find some blue people. You don’t need that tribe to survive. And the ironic thing is, even when you’re around red people, they’ll respect you if you’re proudly blue, or at least shamelessly blue, if not proud. But they won’t be able to respect you if you’re pretending to be red. They won’t be able to connect with you if you’re pretending to be red. So the biggest irony in caring what other people think is it guarantees the very bad consequence that you’re trying to avoid, which is isolation. The only thing that comes from being shameful, as in hiding, is the very thing you’re trying to stop from happening, which is people rejecting you, people not wanting to be with you, people not being able to connect with you. So, worst case scenario is you end up alone, but at least you could choose it rather than having handed to you, and you didn’t even get to be yourself in the process, there are some highly psychopathic people that are so good at mimicry and stuff that they can even form deep relationships, at least one-sided deep relationships, with fucked up people. You can see this: there are psychopaths who get married and have kids, but those relationships are a fucking nightmare. What shame really does is it makes a probability assessment of long-term love. You look at a situation, and your shame goes. What do I need to hide to increase the likelihood of long-term love? That’s what your shame does. Those times when you’re worried what somebody else thinks, what you’re really doing is making a long-term love assessment, aren’t you? You say, “Oh no, I better not, better not share this opinion. It’s going to rock the boat. What your brain’s really doing is like, based on this situation, all the factors involved, sharing that opinion will reduce your likelihood of long-term love in this environment. So that one’s going in the hiding category. It tells you it’s wrong, but what it’s really saying is it’s unlikely to make these people love you, and I want you to just notice the difference between that and the concept of wrong. Having murdering people will make people hate me long term, and it’s also harmful behaviour. But being angry at people-that’s just a preference. But my brain will treat being angry at people like murdering people. It’ll say nobody will love you if you stay angry. If you’re angry, there’s no-you know-your long-term love assessment looks really grim. Stop being angry. Hide it. Pretend you’re happy. People like happy people. This is so. This is the worst part of it. That assessment is based on some pretty poor wisdom. For example, I used to think for some reason that women would be attracted to someone who had no sexual experience and did poorly with women. I don’t know why I thought that, but I believed it. So I used to always joke about how poorly I was doing with women because for some reason I thought that would make women like me more. Like I wasn’t a slut or a player. I was like this nice guy who’s finishing last. You want to have a guess how that worked out? Pretty fucking poorly. Got me a lot of friends, but no girl gets turned on by the guy who’s ashamed of his own sexuality. But that was my probability assessment.

1:44:34
I said, “Hey, if I brag about the fact that I kissed a girl this weekend, this girl won’t want to kiss me. So I better hide that. She needs to see me as a guy who never gets kissed, so I can be all hers and all this other weird stuff that I must have got from a fairy tale somewhere. Yeah, Peter, I’ve done the opposite, pretending I was a stud. Well, we’re both well. We’re both wrong. Insecurity in either direction is unattractive, or at least shame about insecurity is unattractive. The thing is, your shame assessment-the thing saying this is wrong, don’t share it-is wrong. It doesn’t know what you’re supposed to be sharing. All it knows is how to fit in with red in a very mediocre, superficial way. Shame doesn’t know how to build connections. Shame doesn’t know how to find your tribe. In fact, the very things it’s hiding are your main weapons. Drug addicts. Do you know who their best friends are? Once they get through rehab, the people they went to Narcotics Anonymous with. They stay good friends for life with those people. They keep going back to meetings even when they’ve been sober 10 years. Why? Because they’re shameless in those meetings. They get along with each other because they’re drug addicts. They’ve got the same pain. They’ve got the same cravings and desires and addictions. They understand each other. A lot of them became drug addicts because of the pressure of trying to fit in with the dancing, with the gang, and that’s the shame they all have in common. There’s a lot of people pleasers and drug addicts. Too much pressure. Your tribe is out there, but they can’t see you if you’re pretending to be something you’re not. And any time you hide what you are, then you’re by default pretending to be something you’re not, and ironically, it’s that pretence that creates the “there’s something wrong with me” judgement. Until you hide something, it’s neutral. Until you tell yourself, “I can’t share that, and then you follow through on that thought, that thing was fine. Could be the most fucked up thing ever, You know, it’s amazing how many guys will admit to a murder and go to prison, maybe even for the rest of their life, just because the shame, the hiding it, was so much worse. They had to neutralise it. They had to make it okay. Not okay as in it was good that they did it, but just yet it happened. It’s part of me. I am a murderer. I need that to be true. I can’t keep hiding that. It’s killing me. You’d be amazed at how many people confess to murders they don’t need to, just to get their burden off. You know. Confession. So how does all this reduce confidence? Well, you’re rejecting yourself. You’re worried about other people rejecting you, and to avoid that, you reject yourself. So the one person who knows you best rejects you. You know how much more it hurts when someone who knows you well rejects you compared to someone you barely met. You know, and someone you go up to some girl at a bar and she rejects you. You’re like, oh, she doesn’t really know me. She’s having a bad night. When you’ve been friends with a girl for 12 months and then you ask her and she’s like, no, I’m just not that into you. It’s like, ah, brutal. She knows me down to my core and she hates me. Well, you know you better than anyone, and you’re rejecting yourself all day long every time you hide something. That’s why it feels so shit. You’re getting rejected by the one person you can’t hide anything from. He’s the one saying you’re not good enough. And self censorship. You know how fucking devastating it is when you tell a child to shut up. It’s one of the most painful things a parent can do to a child. Tell them to not speak and not express themselves. Stop crying. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Censorship is like the ultimate rejection. You are not worthy of expressing yourself. What you have to say doesn’t matter. You’re doing that to yourselves. Every time you hide something, you’re bullying yourself worse than anyone else ever could.

1:49:09
Every time you censor yourself, you’re saying what I had to say, what I think is unworthy. How else could your brain interpret that? You tell yourself stories about it’s inappropriate or not right now, or you know, it’s just I don’t want to rock the boat. But all you’re really saying is, what I have to say is not worthy of being spoken. What’s true about me is not worth knowing. Peter, so you flick your hand up there. Hang on a sec. Bring you on the line there.

1:49:41
Yeah, it’s it kind of it’s crazy, but what the thing that was holding me back for about 15 years, maybe since when I moved to to Hungary. When I was 18, when I finished school, I didn’t want to go to the army because it was compulsory there, so I fled to Hungary, and over there it was shameful to be a Romanian or to be from Romania. So my biggest shame was where I was born, which I couldn’t change, and it held me back for 15 years, and now I just realised no one cares where you were born. Why would anyone be ashamed of it? But I was, and it was-it was definitely holding me back, and it felt really bad. Like for example, when we were out with friends, and someone was bringing up, “Oh, these fucking Romanians, this or that. I was just sitting quietly,

1:51:00
and

1:51:01
no, I’m not gonna say anything. They don’t know. I’m from there. I don’t see anything.

1:51:07
They won’t

1:51:07
find out. It’s all cool. But it wasn’t cool because I felt smaller and smaller, and just reinforced

1:51:21
in

1:51:21
my mind, that being born in Romania is wrong about me. It’s just only now. I don’t know how how this thing was holding me back, but it was, and that’s what happened with most things that I’ve been ashamed of. I just started telling people, and I don’t even know why I was ashamed of it. Now makes more sense. What? But they were such a big deal. But yeah,

1:52:08
that’s the key word. There is reinforced. You know, there’s always a there’s a trigger for shame. Like somebody else gives you shit about it or something, and you think, but this thing might be wrong. You’re at a crossroads that point. This thing could be wrong. It could remain neutral. That was just one person saying one thing, perhaps. Then you go to hide that thing. Boom! It’s reinforced immediately. I learned this thing about panic disorders or panic disorder syndrome. People with panic attacks often develop agoraphobia. They become afraid of leaving their house. They’re actually afraid of everything. The house is just the least scary place. And what happens is, if they’re like on their way to the shopping mall and they have a panic attack, and then they decide to go home instead of follow through and go to the shopping mall, their brain actually confirms that as the shopping mall being dangerous. So now they’re going to be even more scared of going to the mall, even though they didn’t have an additional experience of going to the mall. Nothing actually bad happened, but because they ran away from it, it was reinforced. And this exactly describes what we’re talking about here. Every time you ran away from your Romanian heritage in whatever way you reinforce the idea that it was bad or wrong, and yet that original idea was an illusion. The whole thing was an illusion. Fuck, Romania is an illusion. There’s no such thing as countries. It’s just dirt you were born on that some humans gave a name and put some lines around on a map once. We’re all just born on the planet, but that’s the thing. If we decide not only is Romania real, but being from there is wrong, and somebody goes fucking Romanians and you stay quiet, reinforced. Not only does it reinforce that being from a country matters, but that you got the wrong one, you fucked it up somehow being born. And that’s the thing, especially when you shame yourself for something you have zero control over, it says there’s something wrong with me as a person. I was born wrong, like I didn’t even have a chance to fix it. I’m so fucked. As opposed to say like a bad habit that you could correct, and this is where personality comes in. You know, there’s a difference between being shy, which is a set of behaviours, and being introverted, which is a personality type, there’s nothing wrong with ashamed of being shy and trying to work on it, you know, because you enjoy life more. But when you’re ashamed of being introverted and pretend to be extroverted, you’re running away from introverted. You’re reinforcing that introverted is bad all the time. The funny thing is, the reinforcing is the problem. As soon as you go, you know what? I am shy. Fuck it, shy. I might be shy for life. So be it. Suddenly, being shy is back to neutral. It’s like taken back onto the debate. Maybe shy is okay. Let’s have a look. Start again. Same with Romanian. At some point, you took that back. You said, you know. Maybe being Romanian is okay. Let’s see what happens if I talk about it. If I be it. If I allow it to be known. Where are you at with that now? What’s it like to be Romanian for you now? Oh,

1:55:13
it’s okay. Even a. I mean, it’s kind of. I even consider a selling point, like when people, I meet people and they pick up on my accent. They ask me where I’m from. Tell them I’m from Transylvania, and it starts interesting conversations as well. So why I I don’t even understand why I was ashamed of this, or I was. But while we were talking about, you said about these people who agrofolk, no agrofolk, but these people who are afraid to leave the house. I think something like that happened with me, with women, with asking out women. Like I asked some girl out, and she gave me a wishy-washy answer because she didn’t even know what she wanted to say, and I didn’t understand it. And I was just thinking that asking girls out-it’s such a painful thing to do. I can understand what’s going on. It’s just embarrassing. It’s just a really hard thing to do. But it wasn’t. It was just that one experience of mine. Nothing actually really happened. Nothing bad happened. Nothing ever. I can’t recall anything bad happening when, at least you you did have some of these girls turning you down and and I heard from other guys like Henry had one really bad experience. I can’t recall anything happening to me, and it was still a really something that that I consider hard to do.

1:57:10
Well, this this brings up a key point about shame, which is the ultimate tragedy of it, and that is it’s the shame that creates pain in most situations in the first place. A common example is like if you’re asking someone out and it hurts when they reject you. It’s not that they rejected you that hurts. It that you hid your reaction to how they rejected you. There’s the shame. You are embarrassed. You felt bummed out. You’re disappointed, but you pretended to be okay with it. Maybe even pretend to be angry, but you didn’t let out how you really felt-hurt, alone, embarrassed-and so you shamed yourself in reaction to their rejection. The rejection was pain-free. They just said no. No’s never hurt you. You telling yourself they said no because, and then hiding that reaction was like a double shaming. Not only did you shame yourself by coming up with a reason why they said no, that was just a made-up story based on your own shame already, but you also hid that reaction, which doubled the shame. And then you walk away going, “Fuck, rejection hurts. No, no. The correct perspective is you hurt yourself after rejection. That’s a behaviour that can change. It’s the same with yeah anything that you think is a painful experience. Quite often, shame is what created the pain in the first place. Like God, you know, I just, I just fucking hate job interviews. They’re so painful. It’s because you spend half an hour hiding shit about yourself and rejecting yourself during the interview. So much stuff that you don’t want to know about yourself comes up, and you push it down and hide and pretend you’d be fine. You walk out of the interview after like 30 minutes of beating the shit out of yourself. No wonder you fucking hate job interviews. Shameless person. Job interviews just a conversation. That’s it. Self censorship equals self rejection equals shame. You want to know where the “I’m not good enough” story comes from? You write it yourself. Nothing anyone has ever told you makes you feel that you’re not good enough. It’s you reinforcing the story and making it true. And every time you hide anything about yourself, the story is reinforced. That’s why sometimes it takes a while to become shameless. The first time you share something, you’re shaking, and you still think it’s really wrong because you’ve been reinforcing how wrong it is every day for 30 years. Saying it once isn’t going to get it done, but the 100th time you say you see this in addicts anonymous meetings. You know, I used to attend them because I was working with with addicts and stuff and support them. You see, the first time person goes like powerless to heroin, and they’re just deeply ashamed and stuff like. And then the 10-year veterans like, hi, my name’s Greg. I’m addicted to heroin and cocaine. He talks about like he’s talking about what he had for lunch, and there’s just zero shame left. He’s talked about it so much it’s almost boring. It’s still true. There’s no wrong attached to it anymore. And this is where we’re going with this. You want the story, the not good enough story, to shut the fuck up. You need to stop hiding stuff about yourself. It is that simple. You’re allowed to feel ashamed whilst sharing these things. You don’t have to try and convince yourself that they’re good or right. Just understand every time you hide it, you convince yourself they’re wrong. That’s the key to understand here. You create illusionary evidence of ostracism because you reject yourself so much on other people’s behalf. Like you do it for them, like not asking that girl out because you think she doesn’t like short guys. She hasn’t even had a chance to reject you. You’ve got to let people reject you for real. You have to, because most of your rejections are made up. And then this is where you get into a pattern. Like a guy will not express attraction, for example, for a long time, or the girl, because he’s scared of rejection. He’s rejecting himself, rejecting himself by suppressing his attraction. Then finally he tells her, and she says no. He’s like, see, she doesn’t like me. Saying no, you left it too long. You’ll never know how she felt about you.

2:01:28
Your window of opportunity closed six months ago. She might have been into you, but you fucked it up by hiding it too for too long. So now you think she’s confirmed the the bad thoughts you had about yourself. All she’s confirmed is you waited too long. That’s it. That’s all you know for sure. Now she might never have liked you, but if she did, it would have been at the start. You missed it because you shamed yourself, and every piece of shameful baby. She hasn’t been getting to know you. She’s beginning to know your performance. That’s what she just rejected. You’ll never know how she feels about you because he never showed her you until now. Now she’s got old you and new you. What the fuck’s going on now? She doesn’t trust you, and you’re worried that she doesn’t think you’re good enough. She’s confused. Who are these two guys? Yesterday this guy didn’t like me. Now he likes me. Turns out he always liked me, but he pretended he didn’t. How am I supposed to say yes to that guy? That guy’s a fucking nightmare. I can’t trust that guy. Who knows what he’s thinking? One thing I noticed in high school took me a long time to learn: the people who do best in romantic relationships, it’s not the smooth ones, it’s not the charming ones, it’s the shameless ones. There’s a guy who lived across from me, and it’s so funny because he lived opposite to me, and he was also like my opposite. He was good at everything I sucked at. We were really we were like best friends all through high school. He used to hang out his house every day, and God, he used to just kill it with girls. Like it was just-it was so painful to be his friend. Every time I went to a party, I was making everyone laugh, and nothing good happened. He would just come back out of the bushes, pulling his pants up. He’s like, “That’s three tonight, my God! It was just ridiculous to watch him. It was so painful. But the difference between me and him is, whatever came into his head came out of his mouth, even when it was judgments about himself, wasn’t self-deprecating humour to make people laugh. If he thought badly of himself, he said it. If he liked what he did, he said it. If he had a fucked up thought, he said it. If he felt a certain way, he said it. You know, I remember as a girl I had a crush on all through high school. She was on my bus, and I never said a word to her about it. The first time he saw her, he was just like, “Damn! So loudly, the whole bus looked at him. You know, she was the most popular girl in school, I think, at that point. The first time he saw him was just there was no moderation between his immediate reaction and expressing himself. Two years younger than her, which in high school we may as well be 20, right? And he ended up sleeping with her that year as well. The point I’m making is not that shamelessness will get you laid, but it certainly prevents you from being shamed. Definitely prevents you from connection, prevents you from sexual interaction with people because you’re hiding all the good stuff, all the tense stuff, all the stuff that sparks something, all the stuff that would make exciting and thrilling to be around you. You’re just showing this like lukewarm, tepid water. You can drink it, but there’s no flavour to it. You won’t hate it. You can’t hate it, but you also can’t love it. But the point being, is you believe that you’re supposed to do this because you think everyone’s rejecting you based on the information you’re hiding, but you rejected you by hiding it. Other people rejecting you is a rare occurrence. It will happen. From the people that you don’t need to be friends with anyway, so there’s no loss. But it will never happen to the amount of time, you know, to the level that you do it to yourself.

2:05:09
Put it simply, shamelessness is a way to reduce rejection in your life by about 95% By reducing you rejecting you, then you’re only left with other people rejecting you, which is a tiny percentage of the rejection you face each day. Most of you won’t get rejected by a person more than once a week, but you get rejected by yourself about 1020, times a day. You’ve got a lot of power to bring that number down. All you have to do is share what you’re hiding. Which brings us. I’ll wrap it up with the kind of practical. So we’ve gone a bit over time here. Practical is the shame grid, which is an exercise. I won’t go through it too depth. We’ve got other resources. You can always ask, send me an email or something. I’ll flick you through the worksheets and stuff for doing it. But really simply put, is you list everything that you hide and you start sharing it. You start sharing it with safe people first-people you can trust, or people like Brojo community who aren’t going to be too shitty about it and give you too much rejection for it. And then once you’ve practised that and gotten okay with saying it out loud, you go find some people that you think will react to it, and you keep doing that until you can’t find anyone left where you’ve said it all, where there’s nothing on the grid that hasn’t been shared and isn’t regularly shared and frequently shared, and shared as soon as it occurs to you. Emotions, weaknesses, strengths, things that happened in your past, the way you think, weird stuff that comes into your head, whatever it is, getting to the point where the time between when it occurs to you and when it gets out of your mouth is reduced to zero. That’s shamelessness. You might still feel ashamed. You might be shaky, as you say. It might even be sick with fear. But saying it anyway eliminates the self-rejection, and this is the secret to stop caring what other people think. Because you don’t really care what they think; you’re projecting what you think onto them. When what you think is at least accepting of who you are through constant repetition, you won’t find that projection happens anymore. I promise you this. I do not really give a fuck what people think about me anymore. Or when I do, I want to know what they actually think. I’m not guessing anymore. Someone looks at me weird. I’m like, why do you look at me like that? What’s going on? I don’t be like, oh god, it’s probably because I’m this, this, and this, and this. I don’t do that anymore because I’ve let all that stuff out now. He, whoever he is, with his weird facial expression, he’s seen everything about me, so I can’t really guess what it is. Probably something about him. That’s the other thing I’ve learned, of course, is like Peter’s story with being Romanian. Perfect example. After a while, you go, “Why was I ever ashamed of that? I don’t get it. I can’t actually figure out. Like, I can figure out why I was scared to share it, but why did I think it was wrong? You know, I used to like I was saying this on the honesty effect programme. I used to be really ashamed of how pale I am. I can’t get a tan. I get sunburned really easily, covered in God knows how many nightmarish moles. You know, I’m terrified of the sun. And in high school, it was a big deal among my friends to get tanned. You know, that was kind of like a measure of attractiveness. And so, whenever summer came round, I was reminded yet again of how much less attractive I was. Now I understand how I developed the shame, but to this day, I don’t really understand how I saw that as wrong. I’m of Scottish and Irish ancestry. I’m built to be in like rainy hills. Of course, I’m pasty. How’s that wrong? What’s the wrong part of that? I’m really well designed for my heritage. You know, I’m not very well designed for the Caribbean, but you know, my bloodline isn’t from the Caribbean. So where did I get the wrong part from?

2:09:14
You know, I remember, you know, these days you get a lot of shame and guilt just about being whatever you are, especially being male. My God, that’s so wrong these days, isn’t it? I remember when the Labour Party leader Phil Goff back in the day said, “I’m sorry for being a man. God, I just wanted to punch him in the face. What a shitty thing to say! You’re sorry for being a man? Like, did you choose before you were born? You’d be like, yeah, give us the penis. I’ll take one of those. That should be all right. You didn’t even get to choose it, so even if it is wrong, you didn’t choose it. So fucking no blame lies with you. How many women did you rape and kill? None? Then shut the fuck up about being wrong. The shame thing. It’s a story you tell yourself based on a neutral characteristic. About yourself, something that’s neither good nor bad. It’s equally ridiculous to be ashamed of being a man as it is to be proud of being a man. Oh, David Cunliffe. Yeah, my bad. That was the wrong person I chose there. Phil Goff. Still a dick, but no, it’s David Cunliffe that said it. The idea, you know, like you get it with like nationality. Talk about being Romanian. It’s as equally ridiculous to be proud of being Romanian as it is to be ashamed of it. To start, being Romanian isn’t even a thing. It’s just an illusion about a country that we made up. But secondly, you didn’t choose it. It wasn’t a skill set. You didn’t create it. It’s ridiculous. Pride’s-I won’t go into it-but pride is the counterpoint of shame. So if you find yourself being proud of things about yourself, then you’re actually at risk of becoming ashamed because you’re creating a counterbalance. If I’m proud of this, I’m not proud of that. That’s shame. Whereas, how about everything about me is neutral, and I just have to learn how to express it as such. This is where it’s a kind of-it’s not fake. It is until you make it, but it’s acting as if you have to act as if you’re shameless to become shameless. And what I mean by that is, you have to start from the understanding everything about me is truthfully neutral. So the only way for me to be honest is to speak about it as if it’s neutral, even when I don’t feel that, I might think, “Oh, this thing’s really wrong with me. But the truth is, it’s neutral. I’ve attached the wrong bit. That’s a fiction I’ve attached to it, and that’s how I’ve got to speak. So instead of saying, “Like, God, I’m such a loser because I couldn’t get it up with my girlfriend last night, you say to yourself, “Like, I’m feeling really bummed out. I couldn’t get up with my girlfriend last night, and I always make a big deal about that. So I’m expressing it, but I’m identifying this is actually a neutral event that I’ve reacted to, rather than it’s worth reacting to. Does that make sense? But the point is, if you want to get to the point where you do not care what other people think of you. Take one thing from that list every day and share it without apologising. Share it like you’re talking about what you had for breakfast. Even the feelings of shame and guilt talk about them as if they’re the most normal thing in the world to have. If you can, try to recognise the humour in it without being self-deprecating, don’t hide behind humour, but realise how hilarious and ridiculous it is to be a human with all our reactions and all our petty worries and everything that we have. Like, oh no, I’m too fat. Like being fat matters. Just learn to talk about yourself without rejection. Let you talk about you instead of censoring yourself. A year of this, one a day, and a year of this, and other people’s opinions will just be pieces of information for your use. They won’t be any relevance to your self-worth or confidence. They’ll just be other people telling you about themselves won’t be information about you. Any final thoughts, questions before we wrap this up today? Cashman,

2:13:20
yep,

2:13:20
go ahead.

2:13:22
Sweet food for thought came into my mind during the session, and sometimes it’s been in back of my head every time I do a session, or like in the halfway session, or in any session, like on Saturday sessions, or or weekday session, or on this webinar, what it occurs to me like, okay, self development in itself makes me think that I’m a good enough, and well, as the session progressed and we came to the very end of the death. It made sense that okay, I invested this time, but there’s a part of me who steps aside and look at it and and think like, am I reinforcing the fact that me practising this is it actually harming me, or or actually helping me?

2:14:27
It’s a

2:14:27
great question. I actually I did a podcast a while back. I think it’s called like self development is pointless or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what I called it, but the idea being that self development is really about just learning to express yourself more truthfully, both in actions and in words. There’s nothing wrong with you that needs to be fixed. It’s just things hidden about you that need to come out. And one of the ways I look at it is like dancing. I can develop a skill set of dancing. Without telling myself I’m a bad dancer or that my dancing is wrong, so I can be a beginner who’s got a lot to learn and wants to develop skills that will make my quality of life improve without there being anything wrong with me. And it’s the same with self-development. I might want to work on my memory training skills. I want to work on my health and fitness. I want to work on even my basic psychology. I want to work on my career. There’s nothing wrong with working on these things. It’s interesting. I engage in life. It’s fun to do. It gives me options that I didn’t have before that I can play with. It’s just living. When I say I have to do these things because I’m broken and this is me fixing myself, the whole thing gets fucked up. It goes backwards, or does this confirm there’s something wrong with me? Because there’s always more I can work on. There’s no finish line for self development. We’d have to live 10,000 years to get to the point where we can’t think of anything to work on, and even then, the fact that we can’t think of anything is something to work on. There’s no end to self-development, so it’s not a fixing process. It’s not you correcting what’s wrong with you. Simply you engaging in development for your own thrill, through your own fun, through trying to live by your values, trying to have integrity, making meaning out of life. As soon as it’s because there’s something wrong with me, the whole thing actually gets reversed. It becomes unhelpful. So what I always sort of talk about shamelessness isn’t about developing your social skills that you lack social skills. It’s about allowing yourself to be not fixing something that’s wrong with you. It’s expressing what you think is wrong with you until it’s no longer wrong with you. It’s just true. Does that make sense?

2:16:52
Yes, it does. At the same time, when we were talking about it, like I got into self-development when when I felt like the whole existence was getting wrong, so or didn’t make sense, so I actually got into it to make some sense out of it. So I actually, and then maybe in the span of time, I never got out of that thought. From okay, this is me fixing myself alone. I mean, and to a place where okay, this is. I also think. I mean, it’s a 50-50 for me. 50% is me fixing myself again and over again, and the other 50% is okay. I’ve seen these developments since I’ve practised these things, and I feel it’s beneficial, and I think I need to practice more because once I started doing brojo, the possibilities were endless. So that’s what’s keeping me doing it. But at the same time, sometimes I do think like, okay, am I sabotaging myself or who I used to be?

2:18:01
It all comes back to value

2:18:02
because I started off in a place I was broke. A lot of

2:18:07
people, a lot of us start self development because we think we’re broken. We need fixing, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. But starting for that reason, it’s about as quickly as possible finding a better reason. A better reason is to just fully engage with life, to have integrity, to to make meaning out of something that you’re forced into. One way to look at it is always you have to know why you’re working on something, and that why must be value reason. You’re working on something. Ah, I want to work on my social life to get better with women. That means you’re saying that not being whatever with women is bad and wrong. Says that being single and by yourself is wrong. Shaming yourself with that very attempt. But if you say, “I want to work on my social life, practice my values of honesty and courage, determination, well, you’re actually validating your values, you validate yourself. Saying these things already exist, and I want to experience more of them. I want to do them as often as possible. I want to be me as much as I can. That way, self-development itself validates you, instead of I need to do this to get better, which invalidates you. What’s ironic, of course, is when you work on trying to improve yourself, your progress will be slow. When you work on trying to live by your values, because you’ll be doing what’s right for you, your version of progress is what will happen.

2:19:32
Yeah.

2:19:34
You know, when I came to my social life, it wasn’t about getting better with people. It’s about becoming bold and honest about being the thing I know I am, getting it out as much as possible. Now that’s what’s thrilling. I can walk away, and I have from social situations where I’m like, “Wow, no one in that room liked me. Like that was very fucking clear. I am not getting invited to their next wedding, but I love myself for the experience. Like, oh. They they wanted me. They got me. That was their mistake, and it’s thrilling experience for me. There’s nothing wrong with me. I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t likeable, but my values were on form. I got to really have a thrilling ride of being exactly what I am. That’s what I believe self development is about. Is trying to bridge that gap between you know who you’re being, you actually are. That’s all it is. It’s you’re not trying to make something new happen. You’re trying to get back to what you are. That makes new things happen. You know, progress in my career or whatever that kind of getting better concept happens as a natural byproduct of me being myself, and happens in my own way. My version of being better happens because I’m being me for longer. That’s it. I don’t need to work on stuff. Me building my skills for dancing doesn’t come from trying to be a better dancer. It comes from trying to give myself time to do dancing, to push myself to be courageous and trying new moves, to be determined and working on technique-those are all values. Happens to make me a better dancer. Even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. I get the thrill just from doing it. Shamelessness can work in that same process. You don’t become shameless so that you’ll be good at socialising. That’s backwards, because shamelessness is being shameful was based on trying to be good at socialising. Shamelessness should be done to let you out, even if everybody hates it, even if it gets like yelled out of the room. Like at least they hated who I really am. You know that’s where I learned with pickup is I used to get rejected, and I’d be like, “Yeah, but they don’t even know who I am. They rejected like the show that I put on. By the end of it, I was really frustrated with this. I was like, “I really want to know if they like me or not. So I’m going to make sure it’s me that gets rejected now. That way, I’ll know. Ironically, my success, you might say, increased when I took that approach, because who I was was so much more interesting than the bullsht performance I was putting on. At least to some people, other people it was repulsive, and they rejected me quickly. It didn’t matter because I was validating myself. It’s normal to keep slipping in and out of this mindset as well. It’s ashamed. There’s no point of being ashamed of being ashamed, and acting on that shame, and being seduced by that shame, and forgetting to be shameless. That’s part of it too. It’s called being a human being. If you punish yourself for that, you’re being even more inaccurate. What I always said, like during the honesty effect programme that we just finished, I kept saying, if if you’re in doubt, just be more honest. It’s the only thing you ever need to fucking remember. You’re in a situation. What’s the right thing to do? What what would be me be right? Just express whatever’s going on inside your head. Just go for it. Get it out, because at the very least, at least then you’ll be being shameless. That always scores you long-term points. That makes sense. Yep. I’ll send you through that. Send you through that podcast if I can find it as well, because that’s really specifically on that point. Justin, you had your hand up as well.

2:23:21
Yes, yes, I did. Oh, yeah. Okay, so right at the start, very early on, you spoke about how there might be something shameful that that you you never want to share with anybody. Now there is there there are a couple of points like that for me. The the the big one the big one I’ve I’ve I’ve managed to put it behind me, and it’s not something I do anymore. But but I don’t want to. I’m not going to. I don’t want to share that with anybody. I don’t ever want to share that with anybody. I’m I’m very ashamed of it, and and you know I don’t want anyone judging me about it. I’ve put it behind me, but then how do I how do I reconciliate still having shame over that? But you know, it’s it’s just not something I’m ever going to share with anybody. Does that make sense?

2:24:26
Ironically, you just did it. You’re ashamed of the shame, and then you spoke about it. So with that particular topic, that’s as shameless as you can be right now.

2:24:40
Yep. Sure. Yes. Yes. Because yeah, I’ve I’ve never said that before. What I’ve just what I’ve just told you in the group, I’ve never said that before. Yeah.

2:24:52
Exactly. So at least the fact that you’re too ashamed to talk about it, at least you’re not being ashamed of that. That’s meta shame. So at the very least, it’s like, like for example, with anxiety. I talk about anxiety squared, where you worry about being anxious. So if you if you can express that you’re anxious, at least you’ll only be anxious. You won’t be anxious about anxiety. You’ll just be anxiety. It’s the same with shame. You might not be able to express a thing you’re ashamed of, but you can express that you struggle to share it, or that you don’t want to share it. So at least you’ll take off that extra layer of shame. The fact is that was as honest as you could be right now about that issue, which is the most honest anyone can be ever. Just because you could potentially imagine a fictional version of you sharing that thing doesn’t mean that that’s actually real. What’s real is what you just did. You could have pretended you had nothing you’re ashamed of. That would have been even more shameful. I also want to just plant a seed. Not only was that an act of courage and honesty for you to just admit that you’re ashamed about something to bring this thing close to the light and say, “Fuck it exists. You admitted it to yourself that it’s real and that you’re ashamed of it. It’s important to do that as often as possible, which is why I always emphasise journaling. If you’re not going to tell anyone else, at least tell yourself. You and you are two separate entities. They need to speak to each other and be honest with each other. You may not be able to share some things with other people, but don’t pretend to yourself that they didn’t happen. Don’t pretend to yourself that they’re over, because if you’re still thinking about them, they ain’t over. But at least be okay with you expressing it to you. It’d be amazing how much shamelessness can occur just in journaling, just in you going. Okay, there’s something I don’t want to share with others, but there is something. It exists. It’s real. You know, it happened. I also want to open the idea. Quite often, you’ll use language like, “I will never tell anyone this. You want to be careful with language like that. It’s like a prison sentence. It makes it true. It’s much more accurate and freeing to say right now I can’t imagine myself telling people this, but who knows? The way I see it, there’s a spectrum: confidence on one end, shame on the other, confidence can be experienced alongside any emotional state. You can be confident and anxious. You can be confident and depressed. You can be confident and scared. Confidence is just a state of living by your values and liking who you are. As long as you’re shameless about those emotional states, you don’t have to be free of them to be confident. A lot of people think confidence is feeling happy about yourself and motivated. Now, confidence is just being okay with whatever you feel. But there’s one thing that confidence does not go with, and that’s shame. You can’t feel confident and be hiding something about yourself at the same time. Those two things never go together. So whenever you see there’s something I don’t want to share with people, that’s fine. Don’t share it, but don’t deny yourself the possibility of ever sharing it, because then you’re designing, you know, you’re denying yourself an extra few percentage points of confidence. Say not now, but always ask yourself: Could I one day? What situation would need to happen for me to feel safe to do that? Rather than saying I never will, saying what would need to happen so that I could. Trying to open your mind up as much as possible to a potentially shameless life where nothing about you is hidden. Now I don’t believe personally that that’s humanly possible. Just because I’ve never seen it, I’ve never seen someone who I fully believe has no secrets at all from anyone, who never hesitates to share something, who has nothing about themselves I think of as wrong. I haven’t met that person yet.

2:29:02
I might have and not believed it, but considering my own case where I’ve still got a couple of things on my shame grid that I wouldn’t tell the whole world, and I can’t imagine yet bringing those things out into the light. But my list used to have like 100 things on it, and I was like two. That is what I believe in. I believe anyone’s capable of that, and I also believe that those two that are still on my list, they’re going to come off one day. And as soon as they come off, I wonder why I didn’t do it earlier. Just like I have with every other thing that’s been on their list. But I also understand there are some things on my list that were originally ranked as a one, which is impossible to share right now. They’re no longer on there. In fact, I talk about them on a frequent basis as if they’re nothing. You know, there’s other things that are still they’re currently on the list, but I share them, like my stream. I still find it hard to talk about my stress or admit that I’m stressed, but I can see that one coming off the list pretty soon. I can’t think of many more situations where I hide that one. You know, but you have to give yourself potential to share it and understand when you can’t be honest about something, you can at least be honest about not being able to be honest. That’s the secret. That’s how you can always be honest. The limit of honesty is how much can you share about the thing now. And if it is, I’m too scared to share anything. Then being honest is saying I’m too scared to share anything, which is what you just did. That was as shameless as you could be in this moment. That makes sense.

2:30:43
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It it does, and it reminded me of a of another video I watched of yours a while ago. You you said pretty much the same thing with that, and I mean, and yeah, look like you. I think I think I can get most of the stuff out, but yeah, there’s there’s always there’s going to be a few that will that that that will take a bit longer, I guess.

2:31:05
Your courage to share the big things comes from sharing the smaller things. Practice the things you can do. Don’t try and force yourself to do the things that are too hard. The things that are too hard become easier by sharing the ones that you can do. The ones that only require a little bit of courage, or a single shot of whiskey, or whatever. You know, get those ones out first, and then you’ll be like, you know what? Getting all those out hasn’t killed me. Everyone knowing I’m Romanian, it’s fine. So maybe this other one isn’t as bad as I thought it was, and that’s how it begins. You start to have a faith in yourself that hey, I can share this stuff and not die. I can share this stuff and not feel disconnected. And most importantly, you’ll find, like as I did, because my biggest shame was attraction. When I started regularly expressing attraction to people, I just felt this inner weight come off. I stopped rejecting myself. I felt attraction a lot for people, but every time I denied myself the permission to express it, I rejected myself, and I wasn’t doing that anymore. And suddenly, I looked at all the other things on my list. I’m like, are they really that bad? Because attraction turned out to be all right. Suddenly, my my certainty that I couldn’t say these things was reduced. I started to see cracks in that that certainty. Like, maybe this thing could come out, but I never have the pressure myself to say them all. Just to say, I might go to my deathbed without saying this thing, but doesn’t mean I’ll close off the possibility. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind on this, or one day, you know, as I’m dying, I’ll give people the password to my journal, and they can read about it after I’m gone. You know that kind of concept. Alrighty, guys, fairly long, deep one today. Appreciate you guys sharing your experiences. Notice how we all have this in common. That’s a huge factor in shame as well, isn’t it? You think, oh, I’m the only one. It’s like, no, you wish. We’re all fucked up, and that should help as well. He finds that I’m really going to emphasise this. You won’t know it, you won’t believe me until you experience it. But Pete already hinted at it. The thing that you think is a weakness that you hide is actually your greatest weapon for connecting with people. One day it will be the reason you have a deep relationship with someone. You’ll be like, “Why was I hiding this? What have I missed out on? That’s what my people want to hear. No wonder I couldn’t find them before. I was never saying it. You know, it’s one of the reasons we put brojo together. You’re surrounded by people who actually want to hear that stuff that you hide from everyone else, they’re interested in it. They’ve got it too. So practice on the group if you have to. So we’ve got the Facebook group and we’ve got the sessions. It’s a safe place to have a go at like picking a few of the things off the list. Once you get comfortable doing it with people who aren’t going to give you shit about it. You can go find the ones who will, and at least you won’t have trouble saying it because they have trouble with their reaction. All right. Post the recording soon. Thank you guys for your participation and your contributions. Truly appreciate it. And I will see you all next time. Cool. All right.