Shame and Ghosting

So many problems that could be solved with communication are not solved because of shame.

The cycle goes like this:

• You don’t live up to your commitment.
• You feel bad so you commit in your end to fixing it before reaching out to the person you had made the previous commitment to.
• Then something happens so you can’t fix it right away.
• You eventually communicate after the fact feeling even worse because you know haven’t met your commitment and haven’t lived up to your communication expectations for yourself.
• So you set a new time to have the thing done, but you feel so bad and are so down on yourself that working has become miserable, you procrastinate and the new deadline comes and goes.
• You once again decide that reaching out and talking about how you didn’t meet your commitment is going to feel so bad that you’re just going to fix it first.
• And so you don’t communicate. Time goes on and now you’ve really gotten yourself in a bind. So you keep ghosting because talking about the missed commitment will just make you feel worse.

At the end instead of being late on a project, you’ve burned the trust and working relationship you had. You’ve tanked your self-esteem and probably will be thinking about whatever the project was for months into the future.

There is an alternative though.

It’s accepting the little loss so that it doesn’t turn into a bigger one. It’s owning whatever is slowing you down and working to figure out what got you off track instead of beating yourself up and metaphorically banging your head against a wall. Remembering that you are not always going to have perfect results and that the people who succeed do so by overcoming failures, not by perfection.