I regularly ask people I work with what the greatest impediment to learning is. It’s one of those impossibly large questions, and they normally hesitate a long time to answer, probably annoyed at me. I suspect that they are thinking about some aspect of instruction, or access to instruction, poverty, and racism, something like that. But when I suggest that embarrassment is a likely answer, they usually nod their heads, admitting that it is a least plausible answer. In fact, many of these disadvantages, like racism and poverty, are experienced as ever-present embarrassment or shame—the sense of being an intruder, being unfamiliar with routines that seem second nature to others, fumbling for words and appearing unintelligent.
So a basic question for educators is: how can we create conditions of support so that students can fail publicly without succumbing to embarrassment, or more likely, finding ways to “hide” so they can protect themselves? A related question is: what allows some students to fail publicly and maintain a healthy sense of competence? My hope is that by naming the enemy—embarrassment— we can make some progress on these questions.
Embarrassment is linked to a thesaurus of negative emotions—fear, mortification, self-doubt, regret, humiliation, hesitancy, risk avoidance, chagrin, excessive self-consciousness, and the ever-present imposter complex, that expectation that at any moment we will create the gaffe that exposes us as not belonging. Embarrassment may seem most closely related to shame; it shares that gut feeling of public failure, of not measuring up. But with a crucial difference. Shame would seem to have a moral component. I feel ashamed for being rude, of failing to comfort a friend in distress—in each of these cases I have violated a social ethical norm, and shame is a way society enforces these norms. We can be admonished with, “You should be ashamed” but it would be odd to say, “You should be embarrassed.”
When I began writing this book, I was convinced that my focus was on embarrassment, but as I wrote I felt the need to use associated words, denoting what psychologists call the “self-conscious emotions”—regret, shame, performance anxiety, and most importantly a deep-rooted fear of being publicly awkward and inept, of failing in front of others, even if that other, that watcher, is a version of ourselves. So while researchers on this topic feel confident that these terms can and should be distinguished, I will see them as interlocking and sometimes interchangeable. Isn’t the fear of performing the anticipation of embarrassment? Doesn’t embarrassment, in the moment, easily transmute into shame, even regret—as in the case of the Calvin Klein jeans? Where does one end and the other begin? I will use embarrassment as a primary term that points to this network of self-conscious emotions—an emotional underlife. Although this will be messy at times, I feel it is true to the less compartmentalized emotional reality we all deal with.
This topic affects us all—as teachers, as students, as participants in public life. None of us escapes the fear of performing poorly, ineptly, in public. All of us have done it at some point. We all deal—successfully or not—with the fear of being seen as incompetent, even if the only person who sees this is . . . ourselves.
So let’s do battle, name and identify the enemy that can haunt our days, disturb our sleep, put barriers up to learning, and drain joy from our lives—and maybe we can also learn how to rearrange some things in our own head so that we can be more generous toward ourselves. While embarrassment is only partly about our relationships to others, I am convinced it is primarily about how we relate to ourselves, about the voices in our head that we listen to.
