Guilt sucks — I figured out a trick to get rid of it

Andrew Horn
Be Yourself
Published in
2 min readJul 26, 2016

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This is cape cod last night with no filter.

As I was biking home to catch the sunset, I got hit with a pang in my chest. A pang that has become somewhat familiar these past few weeks.

It was that pang of guilt telling me that I should be working, getting something done for the business…simply, that I hadn’t done enough.

When I got back to the house, our group was gathering for a sunset meditation. Before we started, Erin grabbed a deck and pulled an intention card for us to sit with. The card she pulled was serendipitously, “guilt.”

As we dropped in, I started to think about guilt and weighed its propensity for inspiring and stifling my energy to create.

Then I asked myself a question…

“What is the opposite of guilt?”

The first word that came to mind was “pride.”

If guilt was the perception that I had not done enough, pride was a sense of accomplishment in the things that I had actually done.

I started to think about what I had done in the last week at work that I was proud of. I quickly remembered three late nights in the office and two major partnerships that we confirmed.

I realized in that moment that when I have these pangs of guilt about not doing enough, I tend to disregard all of the things that I have actually accomplished.

When I allowed myself to consider what I had actually done, the pressure in my chest subsided and I became more present to the moment, people and natural beauty all around me.

“But, guilt drives action” my brain shouted back at me.

Which is true, but it also drives a great deal of procrastination and there are many other feelings that can inspire us to act without making us feel like shit. (i.e. Inspiration, love, service). As Max put it, it is the difference between “should work” and “want to work.”

Hard work is one of the simplest ways to achieve a sense of pride, but we need to be conscious of this pull. There is a fine line between working hard for what you believe in and ALWAYS feeling a need to be buried in something.

For me, this construct helped me to become conscious of my guilt, call it out for what it was and make a more informed decision about whether I wanted to pay attention to it in the moment.

In this moment, I chose to let that shit go.

I’m happy that I did because this sunset deserved all of me there.

Come to think of it, most moments do.

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Founder // www.Tribute.co - Spreading gratitude and meaningful human connection in the world — prev. @dreamsforkidsdc and @abilitylist. www.itsandrewhorn.com