95. Fear of Being Ridiculed
Recently, I was coaching one of my Satisfied AF clients, and what we were talking about was sooo good that I decided to do a podcast on the subject (with permission, of course.)
As I was coaching my client, they said, “I have this fear of being ridiculed.”
They were so scared of being ridiculed by other people that they were feeling stuck and paralyzed.
But the truth is, this client was afraid of being ridiculed because they’re being ridiculed all the time right now.
By their own brain.
When we have a fear of ridicule from others and it stops us from taking action in our career, our business, our friendships, it almost always indicates we’re already living with ridicule, but the ridicule is coming from inside of our own heads, not from the others were always worrying about.
Now, that doesn’t mean the ridicule doesn’t sting.
It does.
It’s painful to be ridiculed, especially by someone you can’t escape, like your own mind.
But it’s also helpful to realize that this is why we’re so afraid of being ridiculed by others.
And there’s something we can do about it.
We can learn to talk to ourselves in a more useful, kind way.
And listen, it’s true that others may ridicule us sometimes. It’s not fun. But it is handle-able, and it’s even more handle-able when we’re not joining in.
If you’ve ever feared others’ ridicule, or noticed and cringed at how much your own mind ridicules you, be sure to catch this week’s episode.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
The first round of my six-month Satisfied AF group coaching program is officially underway. However, you can still get your name down on the waitlist for the next cohort, starting six months from now in early 2023. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever designed in my life, so if you want to come together and be part of a community, build relationships, and figure things out so your life can feel satisfying as f*ck, click here to sign up for a consult.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What makes risking ridicule so paralyzing and scary.
The impact of internal ridicule versus external ridicule.
Why living an extraordinary life means you probably aren’t going to fit in, and that’s okay.
The cultural narratives that normalize ridiculing others for pursuing a path outside of the norm.
Why, when you stop ridiculing yourself, pretty much everything else becomes tolerable.
How to start overcoming the fear of ridicule, so you can put yourself out there and take action in your career, or any other area you want to try something new.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about fear of being ridiculed.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, Happy Wednesday. I'm actually recording this podcast on a Wednesday, which isn't my normal day. So we're all on Wednesday together, even if we're on different Wednesdays.
Recently I was coaching one of my clients who's in Satisfied as Fuck. And in Satisfied as Fuck, in this round at least, this is my beta round so I'm testing and I'm learning. In this round I'm doing group calls and then I'm also doing monthly one on one calls with all the clients in there. And that way everyone can get a little bit of individual attention and have a space for private coaching if there's something they want coaching on that they don't want coaching on in front of the group.
And so I was coaching in one of the individual calls and the thing that my client I talked about, I was like, holy shit, I want to do a podcast on this. And don't worry, I asked this person's permission, and they said yes. So even though it was on the one on one call, they are happy for me to share it with you so that you can benefit too from this information.
So we were coaching on something, it doesn't really matter what the specific thing was, and my client said, “I have this fear of being ridiculed.” Right? The client had the fear of being ridiculed by other people. And the fear of being ridiculed by other people was like, “Oh, if I try something, someone might ridicule me.”
And I said to the client, “Okay, but the thing is, you're afraid of being ridiculed because you're being ridiculed all the time right now.” And to just clarify what I mean by that, what I mean by that is when we have a fear of ridicule, it almost always indicates that we are already living with ridicule, and that ridicule is the ridicule inside of our own heads.
So I want to say it again, when we are afraid of being ridiculed by others, we’re afraid of taking action in our lives, our careers, in our business, in our relationship, in our friendships. When we're afraid of putting ourselves out there because we're afraid of being ridiculed by other people, it often correlates to being ridiculed all the time, ahead of time, inside our own heads, by the voice, or one of the voices, or some of the voices inside our own head.
And I think that this is so important because fear of being ridiculed is very real. Like a lot of us experienced this, I experience this. I share sometimes about how I love making podcasts for y'all. And I love when I hear from you about how much it's benefited your life. And still, when I sit down to record a podcast, the voice inside my head, one of them not all of them, is always like, “Oh, you don't have anything good to say. You won't say it right. You'll say something stupid. People won't like you.”
I have that voice too that ridicules me ahead of time, right? I'm afraid of someone else's ridicule, but the irony is I'm ridiculing me all the time. And I'm saying I even though I don't actually identify with that voice in my head, but it is the voice in my head. It's like the call is coming from inside the house, as my coach Kara Loewentheil says sometimes.
Okay, so this is so important though because when we're in this place, that fear of ridicule will feel very real, because it is very real because someone is ridiculing us quite often. And that makes it very hard to put ourselves out there. And the more we don't put ourselves out there, the more putting ourselves out there seems dangerous and like that's where the bad things happen.
And we get kind of used to being ridiculed inside of our own heads by ourselves. But the idea of putting stuff out there and being ridiculed by other people seems really scary.
So you may be experiencing this yourself, like, maybe there's something you want to do or try and you're preemptively ridiculing yourself inside your own head. How dare you? Who do you think you are? What makes you think that you can, fill in the blank with whatever the thing is that you're trying to do? And so you're already experiencing that ridicule and the idea of taking action and potentially experiencing even more ridicule may be so scary as to be paralyzing, right?
Let's also mention here that humans are social mammals. I talk about this all the time. But as social mammals, we care what each other thinks. We care what the group thinks. And a lot of us, like how we subconsciously are identifying if we're safe or not is by whether we fit in or not.
Now, here's the thing, when you're trying to live an extraordinary life, you probably aren't going to fit in. Because a lot of people aren't that happy and don't like their lives that much and aren't having like extremely exciting results, or doing work that they love, or having relationships that they're ass over tea kettle for, right?
There is this kind of cultural idea that life is suffering. And listen, life is suffering in a lot of ways. I talk about the 50/50 all the time, life does involve a lot of stuff that I think is less than pleasant. But what I'm talking about is the way like there's this like cultural idea of like, same shit different day, or this cultural idea of let's take, for example, people not liking their spouses.
That's kind of a common cultural narrative that people, actually we have these two cultural narratives, right? We have the cultural narrative that like, especially for people socialized as women, that getting married is like the pinnacle and it’s like the achievement. But also, we have this second narrative that like people don't like their significant other that much. It's very interesting, actually, if you dig into it.
So if you want to live an extraordinary life, you want to live a satisfied as fuck life, you want to live a life where you're so into your career and think your career is such amazing fun stuff to do and you cannot fucking believe you get paid for it, and you're like, “What?” Which is where I am with my career. And listen, it took a long time to get here.
Or if you want to have like a really extraordinary relationship with your significant other for years and years and years and years, not just in the beginning, in the honeymoon phase. Or if you want to have like an exceptional amount of success in some other way, you're probably going to be leaving the community of what most humans are doing and what most humans are thinking.
And that part of you that fears being ridiculed, like it's not entirely wrong. When we're willing to believe that an extraordinary life is possible, people will ridicule us sometimes. They will be like, “Who do you think you are?” They will think we're going like completely insane off the deep end. Especially if we like leave the path of what culture says is safe, to do something that is more in line with what we want, right?
Like I walked away from my very safe, to culture, corporate career to start a coaching business. I mean, a lot of people who knew me, believed in me. But I've also had a lot of people tell me over the years that they were like, “I was worried about you. But now it seems like you're doing great.” Because I was leaving what is culturally sanctioned as safe to go do something else.
Okay, so I'm a little bit talking about two topics. But I want to circle back to the fear of being ridiculed. Because here's the thing, life being what it is, we may be externally ridiculed sometimes. But it's the internal ridicule that actually matters the most. And if you're internally ridiculing yourself all the time, it's going to be very difficult for you to put yourself out there and risk being externally ridiculed.
Let's also be clear, a lot of times when we put ourselves out there, we're not externally ridiculed. We're welcomed and loved and appreciated, or people don't even notice that we did a thing. Or maybe they don't like it and they don't say anything. I mean, it is possible to be ridiculed, like especially if you're a woman on the internet, or a person who was socialized as a woman on the internet. But it's not even guaranteed that it's going to happen, right?
And especially like with the coaching with this person, the way that they were wanting to put themselves out there was, in my opinion, to a community who was probably going to embrace them. But that like perfectionism, that fear of not belonging, that fear of not being good enough, can be so strong and so powerful that we can be afraid that we're going to be ridiculed.
People can have like 20 years of experience in something, and then they'll be like, “Who am I to do this? If I put myself out there and say my ideas, people will ridicule me.” So again, it's a very normal, very human concern to have. Humans want to fit in, they want to be safe, they want to belong.
And also that fear doesn't create space for like the nuance that I want you all to have. Which is like, if I choose to stop ridiculing myself, most things are tolerable, even if someone on the internet hates what I've done. Even if someone I love has a critique of what I've done. If I'm willing to set my self-ridicule down, that is handleable, it's figureoutable.
And there's also this interesting thing where if we take away this idea of like ridicule, I'm being ridiculed. And we're willing to hear what feedback other people have, sometimes other people have really great feedback for us that actually helps us get closer to where we want to go, right?
That wouldn't be ridicule, that would just be feedback. And I have a whole podcast episode about that, about how feedback can be the exact blueprint to where you're trying to go. Now, it's not always. Not everyone who gives us feedback has our best interest at heart. Interestingly though, sometimes we can even take feedback from people who don't have our best interest at heart, and we can find something in it that's useful to us.
Okay, so again, you know me, I'm like tangental. I'm going off in all these different directions, but let's circle back. The main idea here that I want y'all to have or to understand is that fear of being ridiculed is extremely normal. And if you have that, there's nothing wrong with you. But if you are really afraid of being ridiculed by others, you're probably ridiculing yourself all day long inside your own head.
And listen, sometimes, we're not even aware of it because those internal voices can be very subtle or very quiet. One of the things that's happened in me with coaching over the years, is I've started being able to hear thoughts that I didn't used to hear.
And I may have shared this example before, but I'm going to share it again. Which is like when I was in my first six months of coaching in this style, like in the thought work style, I remember I like walked into a fence. You know how sometimes when you're walking there's like a post, and it's kind of above your eyesight and if you're looking down you don't see it?
Maybe this doesn't happen to other people. But I bet it does. It happens on TV sometimes. Anyways, it happened to me and my face, my face and the post or fence or whatever it was, and I walked into it. And I felt this like hot wash of shame over my whole body, which was normal. I knew that the hot wash of shame was something I experienced.
But that time I heard the thought and the thought in my head was, I think it was, what was it? It was like everything is ruined, which is like pretty melodramatic. And listen, I have an extremely melodramatic brain, and I'm here for it because I'm learning to like love my brain for what it is instead of trying to make it be exactly what I think it should be. And also because melodrama can be fun. But that melodramatic thought is one I want to like look at with levity and I don't want to believe it.
And at first glance that might not seem like I'm being ridiculed, or I'm ridiculing myself. But everything is ruined because I walked into something with my face and wasn't even seriously hurt. It wasn't saying you ruined everything, but it subtly was, right? It was like I've ruined everything by walking into this. So that's an example of how I could then hear the negative thought, hear the shame causing thought that I didn't used to hear.
So this may be happening for you. If you're super concerned that other people are going to ridicule you, or they're not going to like things, or like one of my thoughts is always like they're going to think I'm too big for my britches. Which is so funny because I don't use the word britches in my vernacular at all. But it's a thought I picked up somewhere, obviously in someone else's language. Like my brain just fully downloaded that shit.
So if you have thoughts like that, they're going to be like, who does she think she is? She's too big for her britches. If you're having that experience and that fear of ridicule, the call is coming from inside the house, again, to quote Kara. You are very likely ridiculing yourself a lot and expecting yourself to be perfect before you put yourself out there.
So if you want to be able to put yourself out there, if you want to be able to overcome this fear of ridicule so that you can take action, whether it's making some changes in your career, or like reaching out to a contact that you want to have a sales conversation with, or maybe it's something with your significant other. I don't know, maybe it's like something with your kids or your parents.
But if you want to be able to put yourself out there, you have to be willing to see that like that ridicule may be inside your own head, and be willing to shift that narrative. I mean, you don't have to. You're allowed to keep ridiculing yourself if you want to, I just don't recommend it. People a lot of times are like, “Oh, I have to ridicule myself or I'll never get anything done.” I just don't subscribe to that shit.
Ridiculing ourselves makes ourselves feel bad, and people who feel bad don't want to do things. We want to like drink wine and watch Netflix and avoid our whole life, right? And I know a lot of people think beating themselves up is like the key to their productivity. And I'm just going to say fuck that noise. Like that's not, that's not a thing.
It may sometimes work in the short term, it's not a long term solution. In the long term it's going to cause you to burn out, feel resentful, not have a great relationship with yourself, probably not have a great relationship with others. I think it's much more useful to build a powerful relationship with yourself where you decide to be on your own team and love yourself and think highly of yourself, whether others ridicule you, whether they love the thing you said.
So another way to think about this is like, can you praise yourself for putting yourself out there? Like let's say you put yourself out there and someone does ridicule you. And you look at their ridicule, and you're like, “Nope, that's a valid point.” Can you love yourself anyways? Can you be proud of yourself anyways? Can you be grateful that you took action anyways?
And can we make progress our goal instead of perfection? Because it's really hard to go from never putting yourself out there for fear of ridicule to putting yourself out there perfectly. I know that's what we all fantasize about. And I'm saying we because, yeah, my brain wants to put myself out there perfectly too. But it doesn't happen.
We can't go from like not doing something to doing it perfectly. So if you want to be really good and skillful at something, are you willing to do it imperfectly, love yourself, be discerning about the feedback you get and which of the feedback you metabolize and upload to your brain, and which the feedback you simply dismiss and keep going, lather, rinse, repeat.
When we're so afraid of being ridiculed that we don't take any action, we just keep ourselves stuck in this sort of interim place where we're like not trying. And then we beat ourselves up for not trying, right? So we don't try because we don't want to be ridiculed. Then we ridicule ourselves inside our own head, we beat ourselves up. And then we keep not trying because the more we don't try, then trying seems scarier and scarier.
And then the more we have to be perfect to think highly of ourselves, the more we just don't want to do anything because we know we're not going to think we're perfect. Even if we manage to be perfect, we wouldn't think we were, we'd still find something to find fault with ourselves.
So basically, if there's something you're avoiding and you think you're avoiding it because you're afraid of being ridiculed by other people, ask yourself how you're already really killing yourself about it now. Ask yourself how you can be on your own side about it.
Ask yourself how you can lead with love and lead with like praise for yourself, and lead with courage. And then praise the shit out of that courage, even if you don't do it perfectly. And how you can use all of this to carry you forward instead of using all of it to hold you back from ever trying.
Here's one final thing I want to say, which is that if you're used to really killing yourself all the time and someone else praises you, it may be hard for you to even receive that. If you're used to ridiculing yourself all the time and someone says something neutral, you may hear it as ridicule. If you're used to ridiculing yourself all the time and you put something out there and you get zero feedback, you're probably going to treat that as ridicule.
So it's really important to do this work because otherwise that internal ridicule is going to taint everything, it's going to color everything. And it's going to make things just very fucking difficult and very unfun. And I'm just like, what if we just have fun? What if we just have fun and love ourselves and try shit and test and learn?
And yeah, some of the stuff we try may not be great. What if that's okay? What if we become great by just trying some shit, seeing what happens and keeping going?
All right, that's what I have for y'all today. And if you want some guidance and support as you learn how to stop ridiculing yourself, I totally support that because learning how to stop ridiculing yourself can be an extremely difficult task. And I would love to hop on a consult with you and talk about it. We can make a little plan for you.
If you want to work with me, I can tell you about my current offering for how I'm supporting clients. And if you don't want to work with me and you just want to have a conversation about it, we can do that, too. All right, y'all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, Happy Wednesday. I'm actually recording this podcast on a Wednesday, which isn't my normal day. So we're all on Wednesday together, even if we're on different Wednesdays.
Recently I was coaching one of my clients who's in Satisfied as Fuck. And in Satisfied as Fuck, in this round at least, this is my beta round so I'm testing and I'm learning. In this round I'm doing group calls and then I'm also doing monthly one on one calls with all the clients in there. And that way everyone can get a little bit of individual attention and have a space for private coaching if there's something they want coaching on that they don't want coaching on in front of the group.
And so I was coaching in one of the individual calls and the thing that my client I talked about, I was like, holy shit, I want to do a podcast on this. And don't worry, I asked this person's permission, and they said yes. So even though it was on the one on one call, they are happy for me to share it with you so that you can benefit too from this information.
So we were coaching on something, it doesn't really matter what the specific thing was, and my client said, “I have this fear of being ridiculed.” Right? The client had the fear of being ridiculed by other people. And the fear of being ridiculed by other people was like, “Oh, if I try something, someone might ridicule me.”
And I said to the client, “Okay, but the thing is, you're afraid of being ridiculed because you're being ridiculed all the time right now.” And to just clarify what I mean by that, what I mean by that is when we have a fear of ridicule, it almost always indicates that we are already living with ridicule, and that ridicule is the ridicule inside of our own heads.
So I want to say it again, when we are afraid of being ridiculed by others, we’re afraid of taking action in our lives, our careers, in our business, in our relationship, in our friendships. When we're afraid of putting ourselves out there because we're afraid of being ridiculed by other people, it often correlates to being ridiculed all the time, ahead of time, inside our own heads, by the voice, or one of the voices, or some of the voices inside our own head.
And I think that this is so important because fear of being ridiculed is very real. Like a lot of us experienced this, I experience this. I share sometimes about how I love making podcasts for y'all. And I love when I hear from you about how much it's benefited your life. And still, when I sit down to record a podcast, the voice inside my head, one of them not all of them, is always like, “Oh, you don't have anything good to say. You won't say it right. You'll say something stupid. People won't like you.”
I have that voice too that ridicules me ahead of time, right? I'm afraid of someone else's ridicule, but the irony is I'm ridiculing me all the time. And I'm saying I even though I don't actually identify with that voice in my head, but it is the voice in my head. It's like the call is coming from inside the house, as my coach Kara Loewentheil says sometimes.
Okay, so this is so important though because when we're in this place, that fear of ridicule will feel very real, because it is very real because someone is ridiculing us quite often. And that makes it very hard to put ourselves out there. And the more we don't put ourselves out there, the more putting ourselves out there seems dangerous and like that's where the bad things happen.
And we get kind of used to being ridiculed inside of our own heads by ourselves. But the idea of putting stuff out there and being ridiculed by other people seems really scary.
So you may be experiencing this yourself, like, maybe there's something you want to do or try and you're preemptively ridiculing yourself inside your own head. How dare you? Who do you think you are? What makes you think that you can, fill in the blank with whatever the thing is that you're trying to do? And so you're already experiencing that ridicule and the idea of taking action and potentially experiencing even more ridicule may be so scary as to be paralyzing, right?
Let's also mention here that humans are social mammals. I talk about this all the time. But as social mammals, we care what each other thinks. We care what the group thinks. And a lot of us, like how we subconsciously are identifying if we're safe or not is by whether we fit in or not.
Now, here's the thing, when you're trying to live an extraordinary life, you probably aren't going to fit in. Because a lot of people aren't that happy and don't like their lives that much and aren't having like extremely exciting results, or doing work that they love, or having relationships that they're ass over tea kettle for, right?
There is this kind of cultural idea that life is suffering. And listen, life is suffering in a lot of ways. I talk about the 50/50 all the time, life does involve a lot of stuff that I think is less than pleasant. But what I'm talking about is the way like there's this like cultural idea of like, same shit different day, or this cultural idea of let's take, for example, people not liking their spouses.
That's kind of a common cultural narrative that people, actually we have these two cultural narratives, right? We have the cultural narrative that like, especially for people socialized as women, that getting married is like the pinnacle and it’s like the achievement. But also, we have this second narrative that like people don't like their significant other that much. It's very interesting, actually, if you dig into it.
So if you want to live an extraordinary life, you want to live a satisfied as fuck life, you want to live a life where you're so into your career and think your career is such amazing fun stuff to do and you cannot fucking believe you get paid for it, and you're like, “What?” Which is where I am with my career. And listen, it took a long time to get here.
Or if you want to have like a really extraordinary relationship with your significant other for years and years and years and years, not just in the beginning, in the honeymoon phase. Or if you want to have like an exceptional amount of success in some other way, you're probably going to be leaving the community of what most humans are doing and what most humans are thinking.
And that part of you that fears being ridiculed, like it's not entirely wrong. When we're willing to believe that an extraordinary life is possible, people will ridicule us sometimes. They will be like, “Who do you think you are?” They will think we're going like completely insane off the deep end. Especially if we like leave the path of what culture says is safe, to do something that is more in line with what we want, right?
Like I walked away from my very safe, to culture, corporate career to start a coaching business. I mean, a lot of people who knew me, believed in me. But I've also had a lot of people tell me over the years that they were like, “I was worried about you. But now it seems like you're doing great.” Because I was leaving what is culturally sanctioned as safe to go do something else.
Okay, so I'm a little bit talking about two topics. But I want to circle back to the fear of being ridiculed. Because here's the thing, life being what it is, we may be externally ridiculed sometimes. But it's the internal ridicule that actually matters the most. And if you're internally ridiculing yourself all the time, it's going to be very difficult for you to put yourself out there and risk being externally ridiculed.
Let's also be clear, a lot of times when we put ourselves out there, we're not externally ridiculed. We're welcomed and loved and appreciated, or people don't even notice that we did a thing. Or maybe they don't like it and they don't say anything. I mean, it is possible to be ridiculed, like especially if you're a woman on the internet, or a person who was socialized as a woman on the internet. But it's not even guaranteed that it's going to happen, right?
And especially like with the coaching with this person, the way that they were wanting to put themselves out there was, in my opinion, to a community who was probably going to embrace them. But that like perfectionism, that fear of not belonging, that fear of not being good enough, can be so strong and so powerful that we can be afraid that we're going to be ridiculed.
People can have like 20 years of experience in something, and then they'll be like, “Who am I to do this? If I put myself out there and say my ideas, people will ridicule me.” So again, it's a very normal, very human concern to have. Humans want to fit in, they want to be safe, they want to belong.
And also that fear doesn't create space for like the nuance that I want you all to have. Which is like, if I choose to stop ridiculing myself, most things are tolerable, even if someone on the internet hates what I've done. Even if someone I love has a critique of what I've done. If I'm willing to set my self-ridicule down, that is handleable, it's figureoutable.
And there's also this interesting thing where if we take away this idea of like ridicule, I'm being ridiculed. And we're willing to hear what feedback other people have, sometimes other people have really great feedback for us that actually helps us get closer to where we want to go, right?
That wouldn't be ridicule, that would just be feedback. And I have a whole podcast episode about that, about how feedback can be the exact blueprint to where you're trying to go. Now, it's not always. Not everyone who gives us feedback has our best interest at heart. Interestingly though, sometimes we can even take feedback from people who don't have our best interest at heart, and we can find something in it that's useful to us.
Okay, so again, you know me, I'm like tangental. I'm going off in all these different directions, but let's circle back. The main idea here that I want y'all to have or to understand is that fear of being ridiculed is extremely normal. And if you have that, there's nothing wrong with you. But if you are really afraid of being ridiculed by others, you're probably ridiculing yourself all day long inside your own head.
And listen, sometimes, we're not even aware of it because those internal voices can be very subtle or very quiet. One of the things that's happened in me with coaching over the years, is I've started being able to hear thoughts that I didn't used to hear.
And I may have shared this example before, but I'm going to share it again. Which is like when I was in my first six months of coaching in this style, like in the thought work style, I remember I like walked into a fence. You know how sometimes when you're walking there's like a post, and it's kind of above your eyesight and if you're looking down you don't see it?
Maybe this doesn't happen to other people. But I bet it does. It happens on TV sometimes. Anyways, it happened to me and my face, my face and the post or fence or whatever it was, and I walked into it. And I felt this like hot wash of shame over my whole body, which was normal. I knew that the hot wash of shame was something I experienced.
But that time I heard the thought and the thought in my head was, I think it was, what was it? It was like everything is ruined, which is like pretty melodramatic. And listen, I have an extremely melodramatic brain, and I'm here for it because I'm learning to like love my brain for what it is instead of trying to make it be exactly what I think it should be. And also because melodrama can be fun. But that melodramatic thought is one I want to like look at with levity and I don't want to believe it.
And at first glance that might not seem like I'm being ridiculed, or I'm ridiculing myself. But everything is ruined because I walked into something with my face and wasn't even seriously hurt. It wasn't saying you ruined everything, but it subtly was, right? It was like I've ruined everything by walking into this. So that's an example of how I could then hear the negative thought, hear the shame causing thought that I didn't used to hear.
So this may be happening for you. If you're super concerned that other people are going to ridicule you, or they're not going to like things, or like one of my thoughts is always like they're going to think I'm too big for my britches. Which is so funny because I don't use the word britches in my vernacular at all. But it's a thought I picked up somewhere, obviously in someone else's language. Like my brain just fully downloaded that shit.
So if you have thoughts like that, they're going to be like, who does she think she is? She's too big for her britches. If you're having that experience and that fear of ridicule, the call is coming from inside the house, again, to quote Kara. You are very likely ridiculing yourself a lot and expecting yourself to be perfect before you put yourself out there.
So if you want to be able to put yourself out there, if you want to be able to overcome this fear of ridicule so that you can take action, whether it's making some changes in your career, or like reaching out to a contact that you want to have a sales conversation with, or maybe it's something with your significant other. I don't know, maybe it's like something with your kids or your parents.
But if you want to be able to put yourself out there, you have to be willing to see that like that ridicule may be inside your own head, and be willing to shift that narrative. I mean, you don't have to. You're allowed to keep ridiculing yourself if you want to, I just don't recommend it. People a lot of times are like, “Oh, I have to ridicule myself or I'll never get anything done.” I just don't subscribe to that shit.
Ridiculing ourselves makes ourselves feel bad, and people who feel bad don't want to do things. We want to like drink wine and watch Netflix and avoid our whole life, right? And I know a lot of people think beating themselves up is like the key to their productivity. And I'm just going to say fuck that noise. Like that's not, that's not a thing.
It may sometimes work in the short term, it's not a long term solution. In the long term it's going to cause you to burn out, feel resentful, not have a great relationship with yourself, probably not have a great relationship with others. I think it's much more useful to build a powerful relationship with yourself where you decide to be on your own team and love yourself and think highly of yourself, whether others ridicule you, whether they love the thing you said.
So another way to think about this is like, can you praise yourself for putting yourself out there? Like let's say you put yourself out there and someone does ridicule you. And you look at their ridicule, and you're like, “Nope, that's a valid point.” Can you love yourself anyways? Can you be proud of yourself anyways? Can you be grateful that you took action anyways?
And can we make progress our goal instead of perfection? Because it's really hard to go from never putting yourself out there for fear of ridicule to putting yourself out there perfectly. I know that's what we all fantasize about. And I'm saying we because, yeah, my brain wants to put myself out there perfectly too. But it doesn't happen.
We can't go from like not doing something to doing it perfectly. So if you want to be really good and skillful at something, are you willing to do it imperfectly, love yourself, be discerning about the feedback you get and which of the feedback you metabolize and upload to your brain, and which the feedback you simply dismiss and keep going, lather, rinse, repeat.
When we're so afraid of being ridiculed that we don't take any action, we just keep ourselves stuck in this sort of interim place where we're like not trying. And then we beat ourselves up for not trying, right? So we don't try because we don't want to be ridiculed. Then we ridicule ourselves inside our own head, we beat ourselves up. And then we keep not trying because the more we don't try, then trying seems scarier and scarier.
And then the more we have to be perfect to think highly of ourselves, the more we just don't want to do anything because we know we're not going to think we're perfect. Even if we manage to be perfect, we wouldn't think we were, we'd still find something to find fault with ourselves.
So basically, if there's something you're avoiding and you think you're avoiding it because you're afraid of being ridiculed by other people, ask yourself how you're already really killing yourself about it now. Ask yourself how you can be on your own side about it.
Ask yourself how you can lead with love and lead with like praise for yourself, and lead with courage. And then praise the shit out of that courage, even if you don't do it perfectly. And how you can use all of this to carry you forward instead of using all of it to hold you back from ever trying.
Here's one final thing I want to say, which is that if you're used to really killing yourself all the time and someone else praises you, it may be hard for you to even receive that. If you're used to ridiculing yourself all the time and someone says something neutral, you may hear it as ridicule. If you're used to ridiculing yourself all the time and you put something out there and you get zero feedback, you're probably going to treat that as ridicule.
So it's really important to do this work because otherwise that internal ridicule is going to taint everything, it's going to color everything. And it's going to make things just very fucking difficult and very unfun. And I'm just like, what if we just have fun? What if we just have fun and love ourselves and try shit and test and learn?
And yeah, some of the stuff we try may not be great. What if that's okay? What if we become great by just trying some shit, seeing what happens and keeping going?
All right, that's what I have for y'all today. And if you want some guidance and support as you learn how to stop ridiculing yourself, I totally support that because learning how to stop ridiculing yourself can be an extremely difficult task. And I would love to hop on a consult with you and talk about it. We can make a little plan for you.
If you want to work with me, I can tell you about my current offering for how I'm supporting clients. And if you don't want to work with me and you just want to have a conversation about it, we can do that, too. All right, y'all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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