The Story of Shame to Strength
Adapted from a LinkedIn post originally shared in September 2021, this story provides insight into my lived experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, as well as the ways in which that experience informs the mission of Befriend Your Strengths.This week, my first ever public presentation - From Shame to Strength - goes live on Wednesday morning as part of the Amplify DEI Leadership Summit hosted by Vivian Acquah. To set the stage, I would like to share some background about my talk and the associated new life coaching business, Befriend Your Strengths.
The purpose of sharing my evolving personal and professional story is threefold:
To connect, acknowledging that we each have our unique battles, whether visible to others or not
To validate, as per purist coaching philosophy, that every human - regardless of their unique combination of background, ability, or privilege - is "creative, resourceful, and whole."
To inspire, advocating that we each have our own set of innate Strengths which we have the right, perhaps even responsibility, to celebrate and share with the world
You might be wondering why I titled my presentation "From Shame to Strength"...
As a Dare to Lead Trained devotee of Brené Brown, I believe in the healing and connecting power of talking about shame. At 16 million views, Dr. Brown’s TED Talk on “The power of vulnerability” is one of the top 10 most watched TED Talks of all time.
In her talk, Brene describes how shame unravels connection, and as social beings, we humans need to connect well in order to survive and thrive.
Shame, Dr Brown says, is the fear of disconnection. The uncomfortable question...“Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection?”
This is a question that has haunted me for over twenty years, as a Person with an Invisible Disability.
It’s time to tell you my shame story, and how dancing with that shame has led me to this point, where I embrace vulnerability and am learning to celebrate my strengths.
In the early 2000’s, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which has been listed by the World Health Organization as one of the Top 10 illnesses with the potential to debilitate one's life.
Whether a person has severe or “high functioning” OCD, the diagnosis and healing process is often a long journey, with many if not all parts of the journey suffered in silence.
In short, the invisible monster in one’s head that is OCD picks on whatever is most important to the afflicted person, and their sense of self and social acceptance, hence the connection to shame.
Depending on a person's genetics and environment, OCD can manifest in an infinite variety of obsessions (intrusive, terrifying, irrational thoughts) and physical or mental compulsions (time-consuming, repetitive behaviors or thoughts aimed at reducing the fear and anxiety caused by the obsessions).
For the sake of this piece, I will only walk you through my journey at a high level, but I welcome you to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or Instagram should you wish to learn more. I love expanding people’s awareness of the full extent of this disorder.
And this is why I continue striving to help myself and others rise out of shame through the mantra, "Befriend Your Strengths."
My obsessions stem from my intense desire to be a good person, and consequently fool me into thinking that I have somehow harmed people and become a criminal.
For example, often when I am driving, if I hit a bump or hear a loud noise, my mind makes me think that I have hit a person, and the idea that I have committed a hit and run crime feels extremely real and terrifying.
While I am able to keep driving and looking at the road ahead, many with OCD are not.
They may spend hours trying to relieve their anxiety by performing the compulsion of driving around in circles to keep checking the place that their brain is falsely calling the “scene of the crime.”
In my case, my mind will run in endless loops for the rest of the day, if not beyond, trying to trace my memory and confirm whether or not I killed someone.
While these mental compulsions are invisible to the outside world, they hijack my internal experience to the extent that I often end up with acute brain fog, migraines, and extreme fatigue, all of which, as you can imagine, make it harder to interact with others or engage in complex thought.
This means that on top of the constant shame I carry from thinking I am a bad person, I have over time accumulated a variety of real-life setbacks which have challenged my sense of self-worth, acceptance, and belonging.
Perhaps the biggest professional setback was my decade-long crusade to become a human capital consultant, which finally came to a close a few months ago when I resigned from my job at an HR consulting firm in order to pursue professional training and start my own life coaching business.
Years of trials and tribulations, therapy, and professional development - spurred on by the great pandemic “soul search” - led me to realize that there is a better way to achieve my mission of helping people learn, grow and work better together.
And here is where Strengths-Based Inquiry comes into play.
Through deep reflection, and some support from the populare evidence-based assessment, CliftonStrengths, I realized that the consulting jobs I had been cycling through were best executed when using strengths in the domains of Strategy and Influence, whereas my top strengths lie in the areas of Relationship-Building and Organization, or Execution.
As much as I am passionate about organizational culture and change leadership, my new hypothesis is that I can make a bigger impact as a solo entrepreneur where I can build trusting, transformative client partnerships through my Relationship-Building skills, and build a thriving business through my Organizational Skills.
When I am using my strengths I feel more powerful, and I find that others respond to me in a more positive way, which usually produces more positive outcomes.
The case for leveraging your strengths is both simple and profound, qualitative and quantitative, and internal and external.
From an egoic and promotional perspective, your strengths make you unique and play a big role in shaping your authentic personal brand, which is increasingly important in the new world of work.
According to Gallup, the research organization that administers CliftonStrengths, the likelihood that someone else shares your same Signature Themes in the same order is one in 33 million.
Pretty unique, right?
When it comes to employee engagement and satisfaction, the positive impact of strengths-based development is also significant. Gallup research shows that people who are actively using their strengths are 6 times more likely to be engaged at work and 3 times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life.
These statistics are my action call. For a decade, I tried to build a professional identity around the traditional familial and societal expectations that had been ingrained within me since youth. The minimum 40 hours a week highly polished office job laiden with status symbols and prestige enough to immediately impress when asked "So, what do you do?"
This is the idea of Strength and Success that was planted within the young Kelly pictured below at her father's office. This girl is completely uninhibited, not yet aware of mental illness, bias and stigma, and the general pressures of adult life and the working world.
Long after this picture was taken and my father retired after twenty years as a partner in his firm, that desk - a heavy, imposing symbol of success and status - sits in our basement back home.
Meanwhile, my primary battlefield for the last 20 years has been in the trenches of fighting mental illness and the associated stigma, both societal and internalized.
What I have learned so far is that success for me will most likely look very different than the surroundings and symbols in this picture. But by leaning into my strengths, I am rekindling the self-acceptance that is at the heart of the freedom and confidence you see in this girl, and my mission is to help others along their journeys from shame to strength.
So, instead of asking you what you do for a living, I'd like to ask you about how you are living...