Optimize Your Life

Episode #47: What To Do About Your Guilt

Show Notes:

Hello all you high achievers out there. Glad to welcome you to another wonderful episode of Optimize Your Life. One of the ways we can certainly optimize is through emotional management which is relevant to our topic of the week – guilt. 

So today, I’m going to answer three questions. What is guilt? What purpose does it serve? And how can you get it to work for you rather than against you?

Now if you’re anything like my people-pleasing clients, this will be particularly of interest to you so stay tuned as I’ll be sharing some insights from actual coaching sessions I’d led. 

To start us off, I’d like to share my definition of guilt. The way I like to think about guilt is that it’s an emotion we experience when we’ve crossed the boundary of our moral compass. In other words, we have a rule we’d like to follow that is bound by ethics and we’ve crossed the line. If you heard last week’s episode on frustration, you might recall that we often feel frustrated when we think that other people should do things differently from how they are doing them. 

Guilt is similar, but it’s not about other people. It’s about you. It’s when you say to yourself, “I should have done it differently.” There’s that word again — “Should.” 

So think of something you feel guilty about. What are you telling yourself you should have done that you didn’t do or shouldn’t have done that you did do?

Based on this definition of guilt, you can see that this emotion serves a purpose. It is there to keep you in check. 

Not everyone feels guilty, you know. People who lack empathy for others don’t have a moral compass. This is what enables them to engage in mass shootings or become suicide bombers. They believe what they are doing is justified. Therefore they don’t experience guilt. 

Now although we might say guilt is good, too much of a good thing is never a good thing. So, what can you do if you’re racked with guilt?

We’ll get to that in a minute. But first I want to lay down a basic premise. 

If guilt is constructive in that it keeps you in line with your morals, then when you experience this emotion comes up, it’s an opportunity for you to reflect on what you could do better or differently the next time around. 

That said, there are often times when guilt is not constructive. Why is that, you might ask? Well, it might be because of some antiquated rule you made for yourself or even because you’ve adopted someone else’s programmed beliefs and when push comes to shove, you don’t really believe this line of reasoning. So when guilt pops up for you, consider if perhaps it’s time to draw a new line in the sand. 

As mentioned, sometimes your guilt can be excessive. This can happen when you’re depressed because you think you deserve to be punished. In order to find out whether your guilt is related to depression, ask yourself whether it’s excessive. Try to put your thoughts that lead to your guilt in conjunction with your actions and see whether the two align. If not, that’s your sign that you’re likely projecting out of a depressed state, in which case please find a therapist to help you through this. 

But what if you feel guilty and it’s not depression that’s bringing this about? In that case, it may be related to something that’s happened in the past that you haven’t forgiven yourself for. That’s a whole other podcast and maybe I’ll cover that in a future episode, but for now, what I’d like to do is share with you a scenario from one of my client’s lives so you can get a sense of the types of strategies you can put into action, especially if her story resonates with you. 

I have a client who tends to lash out when she’s upset. But then she feels guilty about doing so. She goes down a big rabbit hole each time thinking about what she should have done instead, beating herself up for not holding it together, rehashing the scene a million times. All of this robs her of time and energy and resolves absolutely nothing because once she resurfaces, she’s bound to do it all over again. 

So I asked her to do this exercise with me and I’m going to take you through it right now.  Think of guilt as signaling a fork in the road for you. When you feel guilty, you can justify your actions. You can tell yourself all the reasons why you did what you did, how the other person made you do it, or some version of that. But all this does is lead you to run away from that negative feeling. The release of guilt serves you in the moment, perhaps, but you end up in the same pattern. It doesn’t change anything. 

On the other side you have the opportunity to ask yourself some powerful questions. First ask yourself, “Why do I feel guilty?” Maybe you yelled at your 6 year old when he played his video game for 20 minutes longer than was agreed upon. You’re livid and want to set him straight. In essence, what you want is for him to follow the rules. But by yelling at him, what you get is a child who is intimidated. 

So then ask yourself, “How can I get him to follow the rules without me feeling guilty?” This is important for a couple of reasons. First, we want you to be in control of your emotions. If you let him know ahead of time that if he violates the agreement he’ll lose his privilege for the next day, then you don’t have to get so mad. The responsibility is on him. Secondly, when you aren’t in control of your emotions, you might end up feeling ashamed of your reaction. 

So now we have guilt and shame on board and that doesn’t feel good. Remember, guilt tells you that you are going against your moral compass. It’s there to keep you in check. Don’t ignore it. Don’t run away from it. Embrace it so you can break this pattern and avoid the shame. If you’ve done something you regret, reflect on that. Then ask for forgiveness and share with the other person what you’ve learned and explain that you understand you may have hurt them unintentionally. This is how we rebuild connection. 

Sometimes we have other types of guilt. I just spoke to an entrepreneur who said she doesn’t take breaks because she has this mindset that it would be wasting time and when you’re a business owner, time equals money. That may be true but when you don’t take breaks or engage in self-care, you are also at risk for burning out. And when you burn out, you really can’t do much in your business, so then it’s costing you way more than if you had taken those breaks or taken care of yourself. 

There is some sort of belief that is driving you to feel guilty. What is it? If you’re that business owner, why does self-care bring up guilt? Do you believe you’re not worth taking care of? Do you believe that you would only earn this break if you had some amazing accomplishment first? When was the last time you accomplished something and the logical next step for you was self-care? Probably never. That’s because when you run a business, you’re always onto the next thing. 

That’s also true for professionals. You have never-ending to-do lists and you’re trying to get more done. So let’s stop kidding ourselves. We don’t ever get to the other side where everything’s checked off, where we’ve accomplished everything we wanted to. There’s always something more to do. 

Stop procrastinating on your self-care. Take the necessary breaks to prevent burnout. But as an aside, if you are already feeling some wear and tear and want to see how you’re doing I’ve created a burnout checklist just for you. Go to bit.ly/checkyourburnout to download it for free. The link will also be in the show notes. 

To sum this process up for managing your guilt so it doesn’t manage you, follow these three steps:

Step 1: Ask yourself, “What am I telling myself I should have done that I didn’t do or shouldn’t have done that I did do?”

Step 2: Do you want to keep your rule and make up for your indiscretion or redraw the line in the sand?

Step 3: If you want to keep your rule, make amends for your actions and work on forgiving yourself. If you decide your rule no longer serves you, change it and watch your guilt vanish. 

Now it’s time to take the scenario you identified in the beginning of this episode and put this to work. If you need help, do reach out. 

Nice work. See you next week.

 

Schedule a Call Now