Surely it has happened to you at some time; You are with a group of friends and someone has an idea so out of place that you begin to notice a storm of feelings that range from pity to embarrassment to an “earth swallow me” that you don’t quite understand. After all, you are not the one making a fool of yourself. It is what is called embarrassment and the truth is that some people have it more developed than others.
What is the shame of others?
- If you suffer this situation very often, if you easily put yourself in the place of your neighbor suffering the shame that he should be suffering, you are in luck, because it shows that you are a sensitive person and that you care a lot about the feelings of others. But be careful because an excess of empathy can harm you.
- Feeling embarrassed is often associated with great shyness, and the threshold for self-embarrassment is usually very high as well. This means that just imagining yourself doing the same thing makes you want to run. Or it may be that you have a highly developed sense of the ridiculous and you find certain situations embarrassing.
- Other times, that hard time you spend thinking that another person is showing up is motivated by your own perfectionism and your obsession with always doing the right thing. In any case, do not forget that conventions are interpreted differently according to each person, and that what seems ridiculous to you may not seem so to others.
How to overcome embarrassment
- Tolerance and respect for what is different are the keys to begin to overcome the shame of others, although this exercise must always be accompanied by an increase in self-esteem and the conviction that what others think does not matter, as long as we are not there. hurting anyone. It is true that living outside of criticism is not easy, but we cannot transfer our own fear of being judged to others.
- If a person is in an embarrassing situation but it doesn’t affect them, it doesn’t have to matter to you either. Perhaps that person who is making a fool of yourself for you has a different concept of what it means to be out of tune and probably has more flexible convictions than yours. Because remember, the important thing is that you feel good about what you do.
- In any case, in our attempt to overcome the embarrassment of others, we also do not want to turn into indifferent people who care nothing. It is one thing that we do not judge others by their behavior and another thing is that we are not invaded by embarrassment when we see certain shows of the political class, for example.