Skip the Guilt Trap: Simple steps to help you move on with your life. Gael Lindenfield
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course was enlightening and helped her to see that her style of management had been aggressive and was having a demotivating effect on her staff. She was recommended an eight-week evening assertiveness training course and decided to do it.
At work the next day, she called a meeting of her staff and told them what she had done and intended to do. She apologised and asked for their help in giving her honest feedback while she was trying out a better style of interacting with them. The end result was that morale improved enormously, and so did the turnover.
Hard though it may be to accept, remember that guilt is sometimes a friendly internal voice reminding you that you’re messing up.
MARGE KENNEDY, NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT
Ian and Janine’s examples show that positive guilt can be beneficial not just to us, but also to others. It can also be used for the prevention of wrongdoing. This is particularly so if it is used in conjunction with empathy. Here’s a simple example of good parents using it well:
Twelve-year-old Joe is kicking up a fuss about having to go to his grandmother’s birthday tea. Instead, he wants to spend the afternoon with his friend. His mum tells him his gran will feel very hurt and disappointed if he doesn’t go. She adds, ‘I know how much you love your gran, so wouldn’t you feel guilty if you hurt her feelings?’
Of course, some might argue that Joe’s mum may be using guilt in a manipulative, controlling way here. But let’s assume that she isn’t, and that she is simply using it to help her son become more empathic and kind.
There are many other different examples of anticipated guilt being used positively as a preventative aid. Instilling a sense of loyalty is a powerful way of getting people to conform of their own free will. It motivates people to keep ‘in line’ and avoid the guilt they would feel if they let the side down. Additionally, it doesn’t provoke the resentment that formal authoritarian power can induce.
Leaders of all kinds use the ‘threat’ of guilt to build loyalty within their staff or team members.
• CEOs will create values-based mission statements and urge their employees to live up to them.
• Sports coaches will motivate their teams by reminding them ‘not to let the side down’.
• Soldiers are regularly told that being part of a battalion is an honour, and to ‘stand by your mates whatever’.
• Actors are fed the message that for the sake of the audience and the other actors ‘the show must go on’, however tired or hungover an individual may be.
• Card manufacturers and social networks encourage us to keep our personal support systems alive by sending caring messages saying ‘Thank you’, ‘Get well’, ‘Good luck’ and ‘Congratulations’.
Anticipated guilt is also used more directly to encourage helpful behaviour. For example:
• donor cards sitting by shop tills and medical reception counters;
• the rattling of charitable donation tins in full public view;
• ‘Smoking harms others’, ‘Drinking and driving kills’ and Neighbourhood Watch scheme posters.
All these examples give our positive-guilt buttons a gentle push. Sometimes, however, guilt buttons need a stronger push to transform them into a positive force. Interestingly, a series of research studies done by Stanford University in the United States, led by Professor Francis Flynn and Becky Schaumberg, revealed a strong correlation between guilt proneness and leadership. Guilt-prone members of the research group seemed to the rest of the participants to be making more of an effort than the others to ensure everyone’s voice was being heard, to lead the discussion and generally to take charge. Even when they did the test in a real-world setting, a strong link emerged between a participant’s guilt proneness and the extent to which others saw the person as a leader. Becky Schaumberg reported that these guilt-prone people showed the most responsibility. They were prepared to lay people off in order to keep a company profitable, even though they felt bad about doing so.
… the most constructive response [to making mistakes], and the one people seem to recognise as a sign of leadership, is to feel guilty enough to want to fix the problem.
PROFESSOR BECKY SCHAUMBERG, STANFORD UNIVERSITY4
Is it any wonder that leaders tend to use guilt frequently to push or pull the people they lead?
Finally, it is important to remember that for guilt to work positively, there does need to be an element of caring involved. For example:
• The people involved are part of a group who love or respect each other such as a family, friendship group or team of close colleagues. Miguel, a star footballer, went out on a drinking binge to celebrate his brother’s birthday. It was the night before a big match and the match was lost. The coach had noticed that Miguel had not been performing anywhere near his best. When he confronted him, it was obvious that Miguel felt more than usually gutted and quickly confessed what he had done. He expressed his guilt to his teammates, apologised profusely and asked for their help to stop this happening again.
• The guilty party has empathy with the victim’s suffering and cares enough about them to want to make amends. Sometimes this empathy may have to be induced to prompt a caring feeling. For example, a ten-year-old boy had stolen from another child at school. The teachers arranged for him to meet with his victim and hear about how the boy felt and the difficulties that the theft brought him.
• The guilty party cares about the goal that has been mutually agreed and is still mutually wanted. When Carole had an affair, she and her husband Bob agreed to stay together and try to make it work for the sake of the children. A year later Bob started an affair himself. Six months later, his fourteen-year-old son uncovered his secret. Bob didn’t feel bad for his wife, but he did feel guilty that he had not been careful enough to hide it from the children. He broke off the affair and committed to couple counselling with his wife.
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
VOLTAIRE
Summary: Positive guilt
• If guilt is a justified response to some real wrongdoing and motivates the wrongdoer to take constructive action to repair the wrong, it is positive.
• Anticipated guilt can be used positively to strengthen and motivate individuals and groups of all kinds.
• Pressing our positive-guilt buttons can encourage us to be more empathic and helpful.
• If we are prone to guilt, we could make a good leader.
Suppressed guilt
This is the kind of guilt that occurs when someone is aware of the feeling but consciously keeps it hidden inside, although it does then have a habit of surfacing into the mind from time to time. This can happen without any obvious prompting, but more frequently a reminder will trigger it. The person may well intend to do something about their guilt one day, but as time goes on they find this harder to do. So their guilt grows, and then they beat themselves up for procrastinating. The longer they leave it, the harder it becomes to deal with.
Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.
PLAUTUS, ROMAN PLAYWRIGHT
Over the many years since my daughter Laura’s death at age 19 in a car accident, I have had quite a number of emails, cards and letters expressing this kind of guilt. They have come from a range of people, including many of her friends who were her age at the time.
Most have said similar things: they have often thought of Laura and felt bad that they had never expressed to us what she