Skip to main content

Guilt

7.   GUILT.  The emotions of guilt, regret and remorse are among the emotions human beings do most to avoid in life, and this is valuable. They are painful emotions for us to experience, but they, too, serve a valuable function, one which becomes apparent once we hear the message.

The Message : 
Guilt tells you that you have violated one of your own highest standards, and that you must do something immediately to ensure that you're not going to violate that standard again in the future. If you recall, in earlier articles I said that leverage is accessed when someone begins to link pain to something. With enough pain linked to a behavior, that person will eventually change it, and the strongest leverage is the pain we can give ourselves. Guilt is the ultimate leverage for many people in changing a behavior However, some people try to deal with their guilt by denying and suppressing it. Unfortunately, this rarely works. Guilt does not go away; it only comes back stronger.

The other extreme is to surrrender to and wallow in guilt, where we begin to just accept the pain and experience learned helplessness. This is not thee purpose of guilt. It's designed, again, to drive us to action to create a change. People fail to understand this and often feel so remorseful about something they once did that they allow themselves to feel inferior for the rest of their lives! This is not the message of guilt. It's there to make sure you either avoid behaviors out of  your certainty that they'll lead to guilt, or, if you've already violated your standard, it's there to induce enough pain within you to get yourself to recommit to a higher standard once again. Once you address your old behaviour that you feel guilty about, though, and you're sincere and consistent, then move on. 

The Solution:
1) Acknowledge that you have, in fact, violated a critical standard you hold for yourself.
2) Absolutely commit  yourself to making sure this behaviour will never happen again in the future. Rehearse in your mind how, if you could live it again, you could deal with the same situation you feel guilty about in a way that is consistent with your own highest personal standards. As you commit beyond a shadow of a doubt that you'll never allow the behaviour to occur again, you have the right to let go of the guilt. Guilt has then served its purpose to drive you to hold a higher standard in the future. Utilize it; don't wallow in it!
Some people manage to beat themselves up mentally and emotionally because they are constantly failing to meet standards that they hold for themselves in virtually every area of life. As a result, most of these people experience a feeling of ...

8. INADEQUACY.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"This, too, shall pass,"

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania did an intensive research on what creates learned helplessness. In his book Learned Optimism he reports on three specific patterns of beliefs that cause us to feel helpless and can destroy virtually every aspect of our lives. He calls these three categories permanence, pervasiveness, and personal. Many of our country's greatest achievers have succeeded in spite of running into huge problems and barriers. The difference between them and those who give up revolves around their beliefs about the permanence, or lack thereof, of their problems.  Achievers rarely, if ever, see a  problem as permanent, while those who fail, see even the smallest problems as permanent. Once you adopt the belief that there's nothing you can do to change something, simply because nothing you've  done up until now has changed it, you start to take a pernicious poison into your system. No matter what happens in your life, you've got ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Problem Solving Questions ...............Continued

Every morning when we wake up, we ask ourselves questions. When the alarm goes off, what question do you ask yourself? Is it, How come I have to get up right now?," "Why aren't there more hours in the day?, "What if I hit the snooze alarm just one more time?" And as you get in the shower, what are you asking yourself? "Why do I have to go to work?," "How bad is the traffic going to be  today?," "What kind of stuff is going to be dumped on my desk today?" What if every day you consciously started asking a pattern of questions that would put you in the right frame of mind and that caused you to remember how grateful, happy, and excited you are? What kind of day do you think you'd have, with those positive emotional states as your filter?  Obviously it would affect how you feel about virtually everything. Realizing this, I decided I needed a "success ritual" and I created a series of questions that I ask myself ever...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Magnificent Obsession - Creating A Compelling Future....

GIANT GOALS PRODUCE GIANT MOTIVATION So often, people ask me, "Where do I get my energy? With all that intensity, no wonder you're so successful. I just don't have your drive; I guess  I'm not motivated. I guess I'm lazy." My usual response is, "You're not lazy! You just have impotent goals!" Frequently I get a confused look to this response, at which point I explain that my level of excitement and drive comes from my goals. Every morning when I wake up, even if I feel physically exhausted from a lack of sleep, I'll still find the drive I need because my goals are so exciting to me. They get me up early, keep me up late, and inspire me to marshal my resources and use everything I can possibly find within the sphere of my influence to bring them to fruition. The same energy and sense of mission is available to you now, but it will never be awakened  by puny goals. The first step is to develop bigger, more inspiring, more challenging ...
Post a Comment
Read more