Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
One visible mistake. That’s all it takes. And suddenly you’re three weeks in, replaying a single four-second moment over and over and over again, long after everyone else has forgotten it even happened.
You know rationally that they’ve moved on. You know the mistake was small, recoverable, the kind of thing you’d tell a colleague to shrug off without a second thought. And yet still the loop runs. That night, the next morning, in the shower, in the car. Each time it plays, the feeling arrives fresh, as though it’s happening right now.
In this episode, we look at why. We look at the distinction between guilt and shame, what that difference actually means for the pattern we have been uncovering across this series, and the two shifts in perspective that begin to loosen it.
Key Themes
- Why one mistake can run on a loop for weeks
- The difference between guilt and shame
- James and the board presentation that followed him home
- Why approval feels weightless but failure feels like verdict
- Two practical shifts that start to loosen the spiral
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. One visible mistake, and that’s all it takes. And suddenly, you’re 3 weeks into replaying a single moment over and over, long after everyone else has forgotten it even happened. In this episode, we are going to look at why, and we’re going to look at the distinction That starts to loosen it. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble, because success shouldn’t cost everything. Welcome to Episode 32, The Shame Spiral. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide. Now, we have spent the past 2 or 3 episodes looking at the approval pattern.
We met the internalised audience that you perform for. We call it the critical voice speaking in borrowed judgments. And in the previous episode, we unmasked its cleverest disguise, The Critic That Sounds Like Wisdom. If you haven’t caught them up, catch the previous 3 episodes and then come back and join us for this one. Because today in this episode, we’re going to round it all up by looking at what all of that machinery has been protecting you from. What happens when the performance fails? When you get it wrong visibly? In front of the audience that matters. Because what fires in that moment, that has a name, and it behaves in a very particular way. And today we are talking about the shame spiral.
Before we go on, and especially if you’re new here, do follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening on. This episode completes a 4-part block, and the earlier episodes are still going to be there waiting for you. Let me describe the moment that this episode is all about. You make a mistake, a real one, in front of people. A wrong figure in a meeting, a name you should have known, a decision that just didn’t hit. Objectively, in the scale of your working life, it’s small, it’s recoverable, the kind of thing that you’d tell a colleague just to shrug off and move on. But you can’t shrug it off. You can’t move on.
Something else happens instead. There’s a heat that rises. There’s an almost physical urge to disappear. You know what I mean? And then, oh, and then the replaying starts. That night, the next morning, in the shower, in the car, at your desk. The moment runs again and again in high definition surround sound. And every time it runs, that feeling arrives with it fresh, as though it’s happening right now. You know exactly what I’m talking about, right? We have all been there.
Days pass. Everyone else has moved on. And you know rationally that they have moved on. And yet still that loop is running. Here is what I would like you to understand about that loop. You’re caught in it because of what the mistake means inside the approval pattern. Out there in the world, a mistake, it’s just an event. Inside the pattern, a visible mistake is evidence presented to the audience about what you are.
And that changes everything about how it feels. Excuse me. So let me show you the shape of this whole pattern and spiral. There’s a manager who I will call James, and he presents to his board. It’s a solid presentation, a month of good work behind it, and then in the question section he misreads a figure. He corrects himself, but it’s a beat too late. One of his directors frowns and makes a small note, and the meeting moves on. The meeting moves on, but James does not.
For the next 3 weeks, that 4-second moment runs on a continuous loop. And watch what he does with it, because this is the part that really matters. He starts over-preparing for everything. Twice the rehearsal for routine updates, triple-checking numbers a junior colleague has already checked twice, scripting answers to questions that nobody’s even going to ask. Now, from the outside, that looks like diligence, and if you asked him, he’d probably call it learning from the experience. But look closer at what this extra work is actually for. None of it is aimed at making the work better. It’s only aimed at making sure that he’s never seen like that again.
That, that is the tell. He is still in the spiral and it’s now organising his working life around a single frown from a man who in all likelihood couldn’t even recall the moment if you asked him directly. So let me pause for a moment here and let me ask you something directly. What is your version of that moment? The one that still plays even though everyone else has long since forgotten it. What’s your version of that moment? And here’s a follow-up that’s worth some thought. What has that moment been making you do Ever since. There is a distinction I’d like to offer which unlocks this entire episode, and that distinction is the difference between guilt and shame. And although those 2 words often get used interchangeably, they actually describe 2 very different experiences.
Let me explain. Guilt Guilt is a verdict on an action. Guilt says you did something wrong, and because it points at behaviour, it comes with a natural exit. You can apologise for your behaviour, you can correct it, you can repair it, you can learn from it. Guilt, for all of its discomfort, is useful, and it tends to resolve once the repair has been made. Shame goes further and points the verdict at you. Not you did something wrong, but you are something wrong. And there’s the whole problem, because you can’t apologise your way out of being something.
There’s no repair for identity. The mistake stops being a thing that happened. And it becomes a thing that you are. And that’s why the spiral loop can’t close. The spiral keeps running because it’s searching for a fix. And the one thing it’s certain of is that the flaw is you, which is the one thing that can’t be fixed by checking the numbers a 4th time. Now connect this to the past 3 episodes that we’ve gone through together. Shame is what fires when you fail in front of the internalised audience.
It’s the enforcing arm of the approval pattern. The performing, the scanning, the critic in all of its costumes— every piece of that machinery exists to make sure this feeling Never gets triggered, which tells you how much power the feeling actually holds and why so much of a capable person’s life can end up arranged around never meeting it. And before we go further, let’s remove any judgment from this. If you spiral after visible mistakes, that says absolutely nothing about your resilience. It says absolutely nothing about your maturity. It says that your worth got staked on approval a long time ago, and when worth is staked on approval, a public error touches that stake. Of course it burns. Anyone would in that situation.
So why does that one frown outweigh 100 nods? Why can a person with 20 years of strong work feel they’re undone for 3 weeks by a 4-second mistake? Well, because inside the approval pattern, the ledger doesn’t balance. Approval and evidence of competence get filed as relief. They’re welcome, but they’re weightless. They’re gone by morning. On the other hand, a visible failure, that gets filed as a revelation. The pattern treats the mistake as the moment the truth slipped out, the glimpse behind the performance, the thing the audience now knows. Which is why the spiral replays it. Each replay is an attempt to Unhappen it.
It’s an attempt to find the version where you catch the figure in time, and each replay fails because obviously we cannot change the past. We can’t edit what happened. The loop was never really about the meeting. The loop is the pattern trying to protect the only thing it knows how to protect, which is your standing with the audience. And it’s trying to do that using the only tool it has, which is rehearsal. And notice the strange mathematics of it. The audience in the room forgot within the hour because to them your mistake was information. It was briefly interesting at most.
The audience in your head, on the other hand, That never forgets, because to that audience, the mistake was a verdict. The spiral, in other words, runs on the exact machinery we have spent the past 3 episodes uncovering. Take away the internalised audience, and a mistake goes back to being what it always was: an event. Not a verdict, just an event. An unwelcome one, to be sure. Unwelcome, intrusive, and over. Done with. I’m not going to hand you a technique for switching shame off because, well, if I did that, I’d be pretending that this is just a shallow thing.
It’s not. It runs deeper than that. However, there are 2 shifts in perspective that begin to matter. I’m going to share them both with you. The first one is naming. When the heat rises and the loop starts, say to yourself, this is shame, and shame is the approval pattern firing. What you’re doing is what we’ve done over the previous episodes as well. We’re placing the experience inside a pattern rather than taking it as the truth about you.
You see, when, when we feel it as a truth, shame is unanswerable. But when we see it, shame, simply as a pattern doing its job, It loosens it just slightly. But slightly is where this all starts. So the first thing, name it when you see it happen, when you feel it happening. No judgment, just name it. And the second thing is sorting the question. Sorry, is the sorting question. Ask yourself, what here is guilt and what here is shame? What part points at something I did which I can repair, and what part points at what I am which, to be honest, was never actually on trial? Do the repair that the guilt asks for, if there is one, Yeah, an apology, a correction, a lesson noted.
Sort that and then notice that everything left over, that’s just the internal audience talking, the internal audience from long ago. James, our manager from a little bit earlier, didn’t need to treble-check his numbers. He just needed to see that the extra rehearsal was actually payment to an audience that isn’t collecting. That closes our block of 4 episodes exploring the approval pattern. In the next episode, we’re going to open a new chapter, which does follow on from everything that we’ve built here. So look at this as a foundation, And in the next series of episodes, we’re going to build on that. Because once you can see the critical voice for what it is, a question arises. And that question is, what would it mean to treat yourself with the same basic decency that you’d offer a colleague who made the same mistake? If the word compassion makes you flinch, and for a surprising number of people it does, if it sounds soft, the next episode is especially for you.
For you. Self-compassion is not weakness. That’s what we’re exploring in the next episode, and the evidence that we share there It might surprise you. That’s coming up in the next episode. But until then, here’s a question I’d like you to mull over for the week. Think of a moment that you still replay. If the same thing had been done by somebody that you respect, would you have decided it was a verdict on them? Or would you just decide, hey, it was a simple 4-second mistake anyone could make on an otherwise good day? Everything that we’ve covered in these 4 episodes, the audience, the voice, the contract underneath it all, all of that we’ve actually been working through in real depth right now inside the Overachievers Club in this month’s series, The Approval Pattern. These episodes give you the map.
The club is where the excavation and the deeper change work happens with structured modules, space to work through it properly. If you want to find out more, go over to KeithBN.link/TOC and you’ll find out more about the club. If this series, if this podcast has been useful, then hey, a rating or a review on your preferred platform really helps other people to find their way. Share this episode with someone who’s been hard on themselves lately. You never know, it might just arrive at exactly the right time for them. And do follow or subscribe if you haven’t already, because the next few episodes, they are taking us somewhere rather important. Meanwhile, head over to KeithVBN.link/TOP , T-O-P, The Overachievers Podcast. You’ll find all of the episodes, find this episode, you’ll get the show notes along with some additional resources that you may find worth exploring.
I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, The Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
