That's Embarrassing!

Embarrassment is a self-defeating emotion that can obstruct your personal wealth building plan before it even gets started. It also weakens your ability to assume leadership roles that are highly valuable to society.

My Embarrassing Anecdote

If you embarrass easily or have difficulty letting go of embarrassing experiences, you are not alone.

I can't help but tell this story whenever anyone brings up an embarrassing account of their own:

I married into a Spanish-speaking family, and frankly I'm not too good at foreign languages. I've been speaking broken Spanish for years and can barely string a sentence together when called to do so. It's my own cross to bear.

One day, my in-laws were sitting around the table and my brother-in-law joked in Spanish that I had gained a little weight from all of the rich Spanish food my mother-in-law had been feeding us over the course of the month while we were staying in the country.

I laughed at my brother-in-law's jibe and said, "Por favor, no me embarase."

Obviously I thought that I had said "please don't embarrass me."

To my chagrin what I had actually said was, "please, don't get me pregnant."

Needless to say, laughter erupted around the table, and when I was let in on the joke I flushed a deep shade of crimson.

I laugh about this moment today. But I am also stunned at how that experience fit so squarely into one of the wisest self-help sayings that I have recently read:

"We attract what we resist most."

It's true. At that dinner I wound up attracting the very thing I was trying to avoid most - embarrassment!

Definition

The state of embarrassment is generally considered to be self imposed, like shame or guilt. Miriam-Webster defines embarrassment as "a self conscious response to an unacceptable act or condition that is witnessed by or revealed to others and judged to be unacceptable."

Inherent in the definition of embarrassment is the element of fault, which at least in part lies with the embarrassed party because of an act deemed unacceptable by society's standards.

The Judging Community

The key to dealing with this unfortunate social flaw is to recognize that whoever doesn't care about your self esteem doesn't care about your embarrassment.

Communities are notorious for failing to support individuals in their quest for high self-esteem, especially people who fall through society's cracks due to class or other perceived inferiority.

The Pressures of a Flawed Society

Whenever you feel embarrassed, you should first examine society's predatory ills to see whether you have not fallen prey to one of them. These ills include bigotry, chauvinism and lack of taught empathy that disadvantage certain classes in society to the benefit of others.

In any environment, some persons are singled out and tormented because of their perceived differences or inferiorities. So, no matter what, the community is going to find ways to make these people feel like outcasts - one way or the other!

The Pressures of Competition

We also use embarrassment as a means of combat in competitive environments - such as school or the workplace.

If we are in a "zero sum game," where someone else feels (s)he will lose if we win, there is no better way to engage in psychological combat than to tear down someone's high self esteem.

A "win" that causes us to feel highly self-conscious can frustrate our ability to pursue our goals and cause us not to perform well to the benefit of our tormentors.

Attacking a person's natural intellect is very difficult to do by legal means -- but attacking their high self-esteem and emotional well being is legal, if not ethical, and very easy to do if supported by enough like-minded colleagues.

Something New on the Horizon

Lack-of-taught-empathy is finally being addressed as a social ill through the new clinical discipline of "emotional literacy."

A program in Canada called "Roots of Empathy" allows classrooms of children aged 4 to 14 to "adopt" an infant to expand their emotional vocabulary by trying to identify what the baby is feeling and sensing.

By watching how the infant interacts with its parents, the children learn empathy and later are able to interact with the baby in groups to get in touch with their own emotions and learn how their actions affect the feelings of others.

Roots of Empathy was created to address the problem of bullying in schools, which has been cited as a cause for a 30 fold increase in teen suicides in Canada and the tragic school shooting phenomenon in the U.S. The study reported an 88% decrease in violent aggression in children after participating in the study.

Roots of Empathy is the first study of its kind, meaning that an education in human empathy is something that has gone sorely lacking in our society for generations.

Where We Go Next

The importance of self image to a personal wealth building plan cannot be overstated. Until now, it has been difficult to confront embarrassment in a way that doesn't also include a bitter dose of self-introspection and blame, which often exacerbates the damage caused already by the embarrassing moment and does more harm than good.

A lot of self help guidance on self consciousness focuses on what we did to cause our embarrassment to the exclusion of the more important questions: who made us feel embarrassed, and why?

This legacy needs to change. It is serving as a barrier to a good self-image for many talented and skilled people in our communities. This barrier causes society to advance more slowly than it could, since we continue failing to tap a great deal of individual potential.

Visit http://www.powerwealthcreation.com/high-self-esteem.html to get more information about the emotional work required for sound personal wealth planning.