From Shame to Self-Acceptance

I didn’t become a public speaking coach out of a burning desire to be a teacher, to give TED Talks, or even because I wanted to help other people.

It came from a far more powerful motivator: fear.

Public speaking has always terrified me. For years, it derailed my career and held me back from countless opportunities.

In 2019, I did a course with the School of Connection to help overcome this fear, and soon after began working with them as a trainer.

But really, my journey of working on confidence and mental health started long before that, and it continues to this day.

During this journey, I’ve discovered that buried within the fear of public speaking is another powerful emotion: shame.

From my own experience, and from watching other students in our classes, I’ve seen that those of us who struggle the most with confidence are usually struggling with shame.

One of the clearest definitions of shame I’ve found comes from Brené Brown, who says:

“Shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, I won’t be worthy of connection?”

It’s not just Brené Brown who highlights the power of shame. In his book Letting Go, David Hawkins went as far as to place it at the very bottom of his "scale of human consciousness” (below).

The fact that Hawkins placed shame at the very bottom tells us something important - when we’re stuck in shame, we’re cut off from the possibility of joy, growth, and real connection with others. This has helped me understand why it has felt so heavy in my own life.

Lots of therapy and lots of reading have shown me that shame often begins when we learn - sometimes as children and sometimes later - that who we are isn’t acceptable. To protect ourselves from experiencing this again, we create a self-image, a persona, an ego. Something that looks safe, acceptable, and perfect. The way the image gets specifically shaped depends upon the culture, environment, or society you need to adapt to.

Once that self-image is in place, the ego needs a way to keep you in line with it, and that’s where shame comes in. Shame becomes the mechanism that punishes you whenever you step outside the image and rewards you when you stay inside it. The result is a constant battle: either improving the image or desperately protecting it. When the image gets validation, we feel relief. When it cracks, shame floods back in.

Your behaviour is constantly pulled in one of these two directions, and the result is high levels of neurosis, dysfunction, and problems in interpersonal relationships.

This is why public speaking can feel like walking a tightrope. If we look good, the image is safe. If we slip up, the mask falls and we’re exposed. Shame, shame, shame! No wonder the simple act of talking feels so stressful.

I still feel this before speaking to a new group. A wave of panic hits me: what if they see I’m nervous, what if they notice I’m not as confident as I want to appear, what if they realise the public speaking coach isn’t who they think he is? I’m afraid that I will be exposed as less than the image I’m trying project. It’s the split between who I am and who I think I should be.

Healing shame, as I understand it, is about closing that gap. It’s about finding some measure of acceptance with ourselves and our feelings. In my experience this has only come from meeting and facing shame directly.

As David Hawkins writes:

“Fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them. Once we have mastery over our feelings, our fear of life diminishes.”

If shame is the emotion that we are so desperately avoiding, facing it robs it of its power. It is a feeling, and while it is a very potent and powerful feeling, it is still only a feeling.

When we’re willing to feel it fully, we start dismantling the image we’re trying so desperately to uphold.

Here’s what this might look like in practice:

Think of a time when you felt shame, or a situation coming up where you’re afraid of being seen. Now be willing to let that feeling be there without needing it to be different. If you do this right, you will literally feel your body tense up and try to pull away from it, but try to do the opposite. Imagine other people really seeing you and all the embarrassing things you think they might think, and embrace it. You can say, “I’m willing to feel this shame” or “This doesn’t need to be different.”

Make this a continual process. I also highly recommend using supplementary therapies like somatic therapy or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) to aid you and really heal from shame on a nervous system level.

Remember, your ego, your persona, is just an image of yourself as you’d like to be seen. Anything that sits outside of this causes you to suffer.

What you have to do is allow all the stuff you’ve put outside of it, in.

You then take away the ego’s power over you.

This is how you stop caring what other people think - by accepting the parts of yourself you once thought were unacceptable.

By remembering you don’t need to be perfect. This is the reminder I try and carry with myself every time I go to teach a class or talk to people I feel intimidated by, or step out outside of my comfort zone.