Why do you feel guilty?

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:

Guilt is a guide, not a mandate. So guilt is not a mandate in your life if you're living a big crazy life of and if you've got lots of dreams and ambitions on your heart, Guilt is not a requirement in and for that life. But guilt can be a guide to get our attention towards the thing that we're becoming and who we want to be.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:21]:

I'm a small town kid born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:25]:

Awesome roles in life.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:27]:

Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too. I'm Tiffany Sauder, and this is Scared Confident.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:01:03]:

Welcome back to another episode of Scared Confident. You guys, I am so not crushing it right now. The first time I pushed record on this episode, I didn't even have a microphone, like, in my vicinity anywhere. So I have a microphone now, so that's exciting. And my phone just buzzed and I have my ringer on, and so I'll shut that off so that I don't get distracted. Welcome to the holiday season. It's upon us. Merry Christmas.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:01:25]:

This episode's gonna drop the week of Christmas. And I think this is a season where there is just a profound amount of expectations. And with expectations can come all kinds of reactions to that. At least that's what it feels like to me. I have expectations of how I want to show up for myself. I have expectations of the holidays. My kids have expectations of their gifts. You know, like, there's the expectation that you're at these parties and that you bring an app and that you have 33 secret Santa gifts ready to go at a moment's notice.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:01:57]:

And that everybody in your life feels like I don't. Not even important, but everybody in your life feels special. Like, there's this expectation that all these people in my life that make it go, the bus driver, the kids, teachers, Samantha, my family, my extended family, my house cleaner. Like, everybody in this season feels like I love them and I appreciate them. And with all of that can just come all of this expectation. So I want to take a hot minute and actually talk about guilt, because I think guilt can show up in seasons where there is an immense amount of expectation. So we're going to talk A little bit about this and then we'll wrap up. It's not going to be long because I know you don't have a lot of time right now.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:02:39]:

This season is, like, wild how busy it is. I know it is for us in our house too. So, okay, guilt. Here is my belief about guilt. There is good guilt, productive guilt. Guilt that gets our attention. Guilt that screams at us when we are making decisions with our time, with our resources, with our attention that are not aligned with our values and what it is that we want to become and what we're moving towards. Guilt.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:10]:

Good guilt to me, gets our attention out from kind of this just like, I'm just going, I'm just going. I'm just doing the things guilt can scream at us and say, hey, what are you doing? Tiffany, pay attention. That is good guilt. And then I think there's bad guilt, there's unproductive guilt. And there's like two places that that comes from in my observation experience, and that is guilt where other people's expectations are making you feel guilty. And we're going to, like, double click into these, so we'll go a little deeper. But other people's expectations of me are making me feel guilty. That's bad guilt.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:47]:

And the third is that I feel like I should feel guilty. And this is probably like a first cousin. If I really sat down and like, did the dotted line on this, it's probably a first cousin to this idea of expectations. But when you feel like you should feel guilty, that that is like, the noble response is guilt. So let's spend a little bit of time getting deeper into these unproductive places of guilt. And then we'll go back to productive guilt and then we'll get this guy wrap. So, okay, others expectations are making you feel guilty. This can be things like when JR and I were earlier in our careers and we had very limited vacation time because that we just did, like, we needed to literally be working every living second on our very fragile businesses.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:04:34]:

There were times when our extended family's expectations of our, like, availability to be able to, like, go on our extended family vacation for the whole time. Let's say it was like five or six days or really invest in, like, those extended family environments. Our time was so limited that we knew the best thing to do was to invest in, like, our nuclear family. And the expectations of feeling like we were letting everybody down by not being there. We carried that, like, really heavily. So there might be in this season where you feel really heavy expectations to be at different Christmases or to be at two places in one time, or to, like, you know, have to split the day and move your kids all over. Like, those expectations that other people have of us can make us feel guilty because we're not delivering on what other people want for our time and priorities. And sometimes that can be easily solved by calling a timeout and, like, really intentionally defining it and, like, negotiating it.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:40]:

I know in our, like, little world, and this is not an atypical solve, is letting our families know that, hey, it is much easier for us. It feels much more like the holidays. And we don't feel like we have to do every family all the time for every holiday. Easter, you know, Thanksgiving, Christmas, on and on. And so we, like, switch off back and forth. Or our families have kind of settled into this rhythm so that we can be with both of them, but it doesn't require us to be in seven places on the exact same time. So I'm using this as an example to say if there's places where you feel guilty, is it that you actually feel guilty, or is it that other people's expectations of your time and priorities are the thing where you're like, I don't really want to do that. And that.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:06:27]:

That is the truest thing that you can say to yourself and everybody around you is, I don't really want to do that. And so I'm not going to feel guilty about not being where and what people want me to be. I'm going to clearly define my boundaries in a loving and thoughtful way so that everybody understands, hey, these are the expectations that we've agreed on versus the expectations that are kind of inferred and maybe were never explicitly said. And therefore we're never able to be agreed upon or renegotiated. And so those conversations can be difficult. But how freeing to replace this feeling of guilt with this feeling of saying, hey, I really walked into this conversation and said, hey, I'm feeling a sense of expectation from you that I don't know that I can deliver on, and that makes me feel bad because I love you and because I want to make you happy. But would there be a way for me to understand from you what your expectations are or what makes you feel delighted by our family or whatever the situation is? And then can I explain our side of it? And can we meet together in an expectation that we both can uphold, that we both feel free to manage and to live within together? That is what I mean is that we. We wear this feeling of guilt almost accidentally, I think, when we allow other people's expectations to drive our decision making and our priorities for our time.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:06]:

And I think in a season of holidays, it can be especially acute as we're managing the expectations of families and Christmas parties and all those kinds of things. I lived this out in my professional life when I was making the transition from being president to moving to just CEO. And I felt like the expectations of the leadership team was that I was in the business every single day, still working on client work, running every off site at the front of the room. Every time the company gathered that, like their expectation was that I did all those things and if I stepped back at all, that they were going to be greatly disappointed. And so I felt guilty that I didn't want to play in that role anymore. And when we talked about it, it was like I actually had read it totally wrong. That was not their expectation of me. I didn't need to feel any kind of way about making a change there.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:01]:

And in fact, they were super supportive. So shining a light on this, I think can not only spare you the like soul sucking feeling of having to wear guilt because it is like a very unproductive emotion. It's like you're fighting with your values, but sometimes you're wrong. And it can again free truth to be able to be managed so that everybody's expectations are the same. The last one is that I. I guess the second unproductive is I feel like I should feel guilty. And this is when you actually don't even. You're kind of just feeling like, if I don't pretend to feel guilty about this, then I probably am a terrible person in my world.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:41]:

This shows up in things like, wow, I feel really guilty that I did not sign up to volunteer at the open house at the elementary school to support the pto. I actually don't feel guilty about that at all. I just don't want to do it. I don't like it. It feels super chaotic. You usually have to be there for like a meeting in the middle of the day. And that is wildly difficult for me to do. But it's mostly difficult because I don't want to.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:08]:

Like, I just don't want to. And so there are times when I'm in like a big group of moms and it's like, oh, I feel like I should have done that. I don't actually feel like I should have. I didn't want to, but it feels like I'm literally throwing a bowling ball in everybody's face. If I would say to them, I just didn't want to. Didn't want to do it. Happy to pay money, happy to go as a customer. Like, happy to, like, go buy every raffle ticket, whatever.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:31]:

But I don't want to do that. And I feel like saying I don't want to feels socially, I must have no clue, but that's my truth. And so instead, I'll find myself saying, like, I feel so guilty I didn't get a volunteer spot. I don't feel guilty. I just don't want to do it. This can also show up to me. It's like, a lot around the kids stuff. Like, I feel guilty that I.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:51]:

Oh, a parent in one of my daughter's classes. I won't just say which one. Literally, Wild is coordinating the most elaborate Christmas gift for a teacher I've ever seen in my entire life. And I was like, I'm just not gonna help with that. That's a choice that she made. And if she wants to do that, I'm happy to spend some money on it, but I'm not gonna feel guilty for not helping. This is wild. This is crazy.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:11:15]:

So again, and the last one, I think this shows up a lot for working moms. I used to feel like when I was traveling, I should say things like, I feel so guilty for being away. This just happened last week for our family. I had to be away last minute for a work trip that happens very rarely. And Junior was also going to be tied up. There was a million people that had to come in and help our family do the things. And I needed to miss some stuff. I missed a winter concert for Aubrey.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:11:44]:

I missed a tryout for Ivy at the musical. Like, I missed some things that were important to the girls, and I did not feel guilty, and I did not say to the girls, I feel so bad that I'm not there, because the truth is, I got to choose it. I chose to go do a thing for Element Three that I believed was very important for me to go do. I chose that. I am not a victim of that choice. I chose it. A natural consequence to that choice is that I was not going to be able to be in our hometown on Tuesday evening, and I was going to be away. And so I was able to come up with, like, plan B, C, D, E, and F to make sure that the things happened.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:12:26]:

But I was not there for the girls, and I did not feel bad for that because I'm there a lot of times, and I was the right solve for that thing at work. So, like, my self 10 years ago would have felt A ton of guilt around having to be away. I would have used some version of that in my vocabulary to the girls. Like, I'm so sorry. I wish I could be there. I feel so bad. Instead I was like, hey, this is what happened. I need to be here.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:12:55]:

I want to know from you exactly what it is that you need to feel really comfortable stepping into these opportunities. How can I support you from afar or. Or how can I get ready on the days leading up to it? Because I'm not going to feel guilty about a choice I made that I know there are natural consequences to positive and negative. Because that is how life works. So that is the point around this episode is when you're feeling guilt, take a look at it. Really pay attention to where is this guilt coming from? Is it self imposed? I've created it. I've told myself the way I should feel in this situation is guilty. That's the one we just talked about.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:13:36]:

It is it. I'm trying to please other people in the. I want to say the priorities they have for my priorities, but their wishes for my time and resources. Is that why I'm feeling guilty is because other people are wishing for my time, things that I don't necessarily want for it? Or is it the most productive form of guilt? And that is when you are actually violating your values. Your body is screaming at you, saying you feel guilty because this is not who you are. This is not in line with your character. This is not in line with who you say you want to be in the world. That's productive guilt.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:14:15]:

It gets our attention so that we can make different decisions in our lives. That is productive guilt. The rest of it is a bit of a facade. That's not even a good word. A bit of a. It's a game. It's a game. It's a crappy game.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:14:31]:

A crappy mental game on top of it that is wildly unproductive and takes your energy away from doing all the things that you want to do. Living in your extraordinary, pursuing your goals, loving your people, showing up for yourself, having the energy for the day. That's what we want. That's the life of. And. And guilt can be a total drain on our focus and energy in pursuing the things that we want to do. So, okay. This kind of like a tad luxury.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:15:00]:

Sorry about that. And it's like. And happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Thanks so much, Tiffany. But I'm telling you this because I love you, because I want the best for your life. And I have seen these be little poison pills that like live in my brain. And when I can speak sternly to it and make it go away, we can live intentional lives and not live underneath things like guilt.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:15:25]:

So one of the little sayings I say to myself is, guilt is a guide, not a mandate. Guilt is a guide, not a mandate. So guilt is not a mandate in your life if you're living a big crazy life of ant. If you've got lots of dreams and ambitions on your heart, guilt is not a requirement in and for that life. That guilt can be a guide to get our attention towards the thing that we're becoming and who we want to be. So Merry Christmas to your family from my big crazy family. And as always, I just thank you so much for joining me in another year of Scared Confident. We're going to do an episode where I reflect on 2024 and just this whole journey and set some goals and intentions for 2025.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:16:10]:

That episode will drop in January. But I mean, honestly you guys, it's been almost four years. I never would have imagined we'd get to over 250 episodes. And I don't know, I just like really appreciate you giving me your time. You letting my voice be in your ear, you letting me use this as a way to discover in my own life and get better in my own space. And I just appreciate every direct message, every email response, every LinkedIn message where you encourage me to keep going. So thank you, Merry Christmas and I'll see you next year.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:16:46]:

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling Fear, you will not decide what happens in my life.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:16:56]:

I will.