Embarrassment vs. Humiliation

Hi, 

Have you ever done a workout that at the time felt hard but manageable, and then you get home and your whole body crashes? 

Well, that happened to me on Friday. 

It was a mixture of a few things, I haven’t worked out my back very many times in the last couple years, I was probably dehydrated and low on carbs, and I think I was getting a little sick going into it. 

The last layer, this was my first back workout with my personal trainer, and the workout was primarily focused on activation of the correct muscles and getting into the right postural position for the exercises. 

By the time I got home, my mind and body were exhausted and I spent the rest of the night in the fetal position. It literally felt like my body gave up. 

As I recap on this experience I think about Steve Magness’s training anecdote, “the goal of training is to slightly embarrass the body so that it will move in a certain direction.”

He also talks about the dangers of humiliating the body because it promotes a fight or flight response rather than a growth response. 

This is going to come as a surprise to you, but I can’t stop thinking about the glaring life correlation this has.

That’s this week’s topic: Growth through Embarrassment not Humiliation. 

In 2021, The Hero’s Journal hired its first ever marketing agency. Other than the fact that you always remember your first, there were other very memorable moments like them saying our product wasn’t selling because it was bad, or us spending a lot of the time listening to the owner talk about everything they knew about stuff. 

But the most memorable moment for me was in one of our first calls with the whole ad team. The owner kept talking about the power of UGC marketing. 

He may have said the acronym UGC 100 times on the call. 

I remember not knowing what UGC meant, and with every passing mention I felt dumber and dumber. I was googling UGC, but this was before the power of AI overview, so I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t paying attention while I feverishly read articles. 

So after UGC mention #87, I interrupted and said, can you explain to me what you mean by UGC marketing. 

This moment was definitely embarrassing. Obviously UGC was extremely important and here I am asking someone to explain the meaning of an acronym in the middle of a high octane marketing conversation. 

BUT if I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t have ever been able to glean anything from the conversation. 

That embarrassment allowed me to grow. 

Not to brag, but sometimes I say UGC in conversations now. 

Fortunately, I do not have a story of pure humiliation from my time running The Hero’s Journal. But this topic got me thinking, what would that have done to my outlook as one of the operators, and for my outlook on the rest of my career? 

As I think about the difference between embarrassment and humiliation, I think it really lies in what happens next. 

In moments of embarrassment you may think to yourself, “well that was a silly thing that I did, never again.”

In moments of humiliation you may think to yourself, “I am incapable of being successful in this arena.” 

Obviously, your responses to moments are unique to you, but generally speaking embarrassments are a momentary obstacle, and humiliations are permanent path redirectors. 

This makes me think of Carol Dweck’s growth mindset. 

Humiliations can shift us from the growth mindset into a fixed one, which will not only change our decision making in a singular domain, but will change decision making in all domains. 

A fixed mindset is a virus. It tells you that you are forever unable to change in one sector of your life, and that thought begins to creep into the other sectors. 

So why all of this? 

Well I have two applications: For you and for those you disagree with. 

For you: grow at the pace where you can make mistakes, but not such large ones that you give up on yourself. 

For those you disagree with (this is even more important if you are correct and they are wrong): argue in an empathetic way. Argue in a way where you are both trying to find the solution to the topic, not humiliating one another. 

Imagine if you were arguing about something of consequence and everytime that topic came up all they could think about is the time you were condescending, rude, or whatever humiliating action you were doing. 

They will probably never come to the truth. 

Some would say they would be fixed in their beliefs. 

Feels appropriate in our current climate. 

Let me know what you think, 

Kyle