Want to be the most emotionally powerful leader? Then, you'll need to learn how to work with this.
What's the one emotion no one wants to talk about?
Humiliation.
Ready for a powerful paradox?
When you're willing to be curious about the emotion of humiliation—the feeling many spend their whole lives frantically avoiding—you exponentially increase your emotional power.
Humiliation means to reduce a person's value; to put them in a lesser position. The fear of humiliation gives rise to most of the painful situations in your life.
Synonyms of humiliation are words like unworthy, unwanted, and ashamed. Whether a person says they are feeling humiliated or ashamed, the brain is doing the same thing. I use the word humiliation because it holds the most resonance with my many years of experience working with people who have endured emotional pain. ??
The word humiliation has such a strong energy that it can even be hard to read. Notice if you have any instant, knee-jerk reactions to the very suggestion that there may be things in your life that humiliate you.?However, you uplevel your emotional intelligence when you realize that because the energy of humiliation is so devastatingly painful, the brain is always on the lookout for the slightest hint you could be humiliated.?
Let me ask you a question: Has something ever mildly embarrassing, awkward or uncomfortable happened to you? For example, I dislike podiums because I'm too short for them. As I stood at the podium in preparation for a recent speech, the event organizer—who was mic'd—asked me to stand up and I had to say:?I. Am. Standing.
Of course, the room erupted in laughter and I was pretty sure this was a totally legitimate reason to move to another state and change careers.?
These instances we call “embarrassing” or “awkward” fly like warning shots through our most precious energy field: Our belief about our sense of worth.??The voltage of their laughter weakened my grip on my worthiness as I thought to myself: See, you are a joke.?
Talking about humiliation might seem too upsetting. It’s not.
It’s pure emotional power.?
There are two particularly powerful reasons to discuss humiliation. First, humiliation is so dangerous because it destroys the integrity of the Good Self. This energy cracks your belief that you're worthy of anything good: love, attention, compliments, safety, rest, wealth, etc.??When you're unable to hold meaningful amounts these things, you’ll live a very painful life.?
Second, there’s something humiliating about admitting you’re humiliated. Most people are either unaware or unwilling to admit that another person contributed to their sense of humiliation.?As someone who routinely works with teams, couples and families in tremendous pain, I can tell you that humiliation energizes all kinds of "downstream" painful situations that—to the untrained eye—look like they have nothing to do with humiliation.
They have everything to do with it.?
For example, an executive team made what it considered a relatively small reorganization to their HR team. No one got fired, no one had to change locations.?The main shift occurred as employees were reorganized into new teams. You can imagine leaderships’ surprise when what they considered an inconsequential move flipped the place upside down.??One of the leaders said, “People lost their minds.?You would have thought somebody died. They were so upset—and over nothing!”?
As I spoke with the employees, it was clear it wasn't nothing. They described the experience as a surprising and poorly communicated change that felt “disrespectful” and “unsettling.” One employee said, “It’s like we don’t matter at all.”?
What energy does a ‘lack of mattering’ always produce???
The emotion of humiliation.????
If these executives had understood that power of emotional energetics—the reliable ways in which emotional energies move through relationships—they could have predicted and avoided this stressful situation.
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Maybe you still think I’m making too big a claim, stating that humiliation is a root pain—itself the most fundamental energy producing so much downstream pain in your life.?To illustrate this very clearly, I’m going to show you two examples that are intentionally so different you might initially think I was comparing apples to furniture.??
Consider employee engagement and combat veterans.?
Let’s start with employee engagement. The best predictor of employee engagement is not salary, bonus, title or benefits.?The best predictor is whether employees answer yes to the question: Do I feel like I matter to my job and does my job matter to me???
Let’s unpack this: If I work a job that I conclude does not matter to me, then I’m wasting my time and energy doing something I decided was meaningless. The more I give away the holy days of my life to something I already told myself was meaningless, the more I work against the value of my own life. Remember: the word humiliation means to take away value. If I persistently work against my own wellbeing, this is a humiliating act of self-betrayal.???
In terms of combat veterans, I do a lot of work with veterans, helping them recover from the traumatic events they have endured. When I first started working with them, I assumed the worst fear would be a fear of death. Seemed logical. But that’s not what I was hearing. I was hearing across guys, across wars, across experiences that the worst fear was:??
In other words, I heard that a fate worse than death was the fate of being humiliated.
What I hope you're seeing is that when human beings are forced to reckon with the belief that we are intrinsically insufficient, this reliably produces the emotional energy of humiliation. To claim your power, you cannot run from situation after situation because the thing you fear is not the external situation; it's the internal energy.
The more we realize that all of us are in the fight of our lives: The fight for our own sense of worthiness, the more we—paradoxically enough—can relax and connect to each other. We torture ourselves and each other so unnecessarily. It's ok you didn't meet your goals; it's ok you sent an email with a typo. It's ok I'm the size of a lawn gnome.
It's ok you lost your job, that you're getting a divorce; that you've made some big mistakes; that you can't get pregnant; that you're still working on getting sober; that some days you wonder if you were really meant to be a parent.
It's all going to be ok, because you already are ok.
Listen closely: If there is a single situation that can confer your worthiness, then you are at perpetual risk of losing your worthiness. Because you never know: it could be this day or that thing or those people or this woman or that guy that takes it from you. And if your worthiness is really on the line, then you better hustle like hell because a human being cannot be well and be unworthy.
But if it occurs to you that nothing can confer your worth, then the flip side has to be true: if nothing external can prove you're worthy, then nothing external can take it from you.
This is what it means to be unconditionally worthy.
When you realize that the things you've been frantically hiding from the world to save yourself are the very things you've been weaponizing against yourself, this is the moment of your emotional conversion.
Welcome to the powerhouse.
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About Dr. DiGangi:?As a neuropsychologist who specializes in the brain, anxiety and leadership, Dr. DiGangi helps you leave your pain and claim your empowerment.
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Is this helpful to you? If next-level conversations on emotional intelligence light you up like a firecracker, let me know. I'm happy to answer questions you may have. My life's mission is to bring exceptional levels of emotional intelligence so we can diminish our pain and increase our power.