Bloom Your Mind

Ep 26: Why We Care What People Think

• Marie McDonald

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I'll never forget the day in my teenage years when I was mocked for wearing shorts, and how that experience taught me how to stay true to myself and embrace my own authenticity. We explore the process of finding our true "yes" and "no", and learn how to communicate boundaries clearly, especially when it comes to pleasing others.

We’ll also take a look at the fear of rejection and the impact of our evolutionary biology, and how outdated survival instincts can lead to self-doubt and the constant search for external validation.

You’ll learn practices to help you identify and challenge your limiting beliefs, and how to recognize when you're seeking approval from the wrong sources, and steps to embark on a journey towards trusting yourself instead.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

  • How the lizard brain is always seeking approval
  • Why our outdated need for approval drives behavior
  • How to challenge limiting beliefs and uncover what's standing in the way 
  • Learn practices to get to the core of self-doubt and why it’s there

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How to connect with Marie:

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We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

 Well, hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome to episode number 26 of The Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we figure out why we care so much about what other people think of us. 
 
Let's do this, but before that, I've got a little story for you from this past weekend about finding your yes and finding your no. I talk about this on the podcast sometimes: finding your yes, finding your no and why this is so important, especially for many of us who grow up learning that we're responsible for making everybody happy or for making everybody feel good, or that we need everybody's approval. And I mean, all of us have that to some degree, some of us more than others, and many of us find ourselves saying yes because we think that it will make someone feel good and that they'll approve of us. When they ask us to do something or be a part of something, or say something or take something on, we think, oh, if we say yes, they'll like us, it'll make them happy. So, it's really important to know your yes and to know your no.
 
A few weeks ago, I was asked to emcee an event for my children's school. I was on the committee putting on this community picnic event that was going to have an open mic and some other stuff going on, and they said, "Will you emcee it?" And I thought about it. It's important to me to find my yes. I thought, yeah, you know, that sounds like fun. Number one, number two, that is a low lift for me and would be of service to the community and a big lift for them. They don't have to look for anybody anymore, and nobody's going to be stressed out. That's emceeing it because, for me, it'll be fun. And I said, "Yeah, I'll do that, absolutely." Then a couple of weeks later, I was talking to someone, and they said, "Okay, so we're going to dress you up to emcee the event. We are going to have our costumer that does all of our plays come and dress you up in like a Renaissance-style dress and headdress." And they started describing the type of outfit they were going to put me in. I just looked at them and smiled and shook my head and just said, "Nope, I'm not wearing that. We'll happily dress up and get sassy and silly, but that will be in the form of like a bright pink wig, and since it's a picnic, I'll find a cute dress that looks like a tablecloth or something. I can say yes to the fun, but I'm going to do it in my own way."
 
I said no so easily. It was so clear for me because I do it a lot now. The more I find my "no" with joy and humor and not apology, the better life gets. I'm really good at it now. I say no all the time and I love it, and it leads to clear and clean relationships and experiences because they're real, they're authentic, they're an actual "yes." It's not a "yes" to make somebody else happy, and I have a lot more fun and I'm a lot more fulfilled because I'm actually enjoying the stuff that I'm doing on my own terms, and I often say yes because it's of service or of value to somebody else, but it also has to be a deep "yes" for me too. So, the weekend ended up with me, my best friend, and my husband, my best friend and I in red wigs and tablecloth-looking dresses, and we put a bunch of other folks in red wigs that said "yes" to that too. My husband played music and it was so much fun; it was clear and clean. So, where this week can you notice where you're saying "yes" to what might really be a "no" for you? Are you saying yes because you're trying to make someone happy, people-pleasing, trying to get someone to like you? Or is there anywhere where you're saying "no" to something that's actually a "yes"? Or even just notice where you're saying your true "yes" and your true "no" where they're right on track. And tell me all about it because you know I love to know. Okay, so that's enough about that. Why do we care about what other people think of us?
 
When I was thinking about this, I thought immediately of this story about when I was a freshman in high school. I showed up on campus a few weeks into high school. I'd come from the big junior high in this little mountain town where it got really hot, and I was standing on this day. It was like a Thursday of the third week of school, and I was wearing shorts. I was standing under a eucalyptus tree on the asphalt out by the art wing, the art building, and my brother was a senior. He was a senior in high school with a bunch of friends. Everybody loved him; he was very charismatic, and his friends were all standing around. One of them looked at me and said, "Why are you wearing shorts?" And I said, "What?" He said, "Your legs are so white you can't wear shorts. They look terrible. You can't wear shorts when you look like that." And I just felt the inside of my freshman self-shrivel like a little raisin. I wanted to disappear, become invisible, to vanish and transport myself back home where I could put on some pants. And actually, that is what I did. I didn't wear shorts again until my mid-30s, y'all. I didn't even realize why I was not doing it. I was like, "Yeah, I don't want shorts too." One day someone asked me why and I realized it was because this person made fun of my legs my freshman year of high school. So, of course, I immediately put on a pair of shorts and now I wear them more.
 
But there's a real reason for moments like this, for moments where we are in a social situation and someone judges us or says something about us, and we interpret that random thought they're saying out loud as mortal danger. We feel like our survival is dependent on them changing their mind or us hiding or getting out of sight. There's a reason. Why does our brain think that judgment and rejection mean death and destruction? Well, in the last episode, when I talked about self-doubt, I mentioned that we have a motivational triad in our brains that everything we do is for one of three reasons: to avoid pain, pursue pleasure, or do what's easy. So today, we're going to zoom in on one particular leg of that triad - avoiding pain and, in particular, the pain of social rejection. So why are we so terrified of social rejection? Why is this such a big deal?
 
I'm going to put an article in the show notes by a guy called Tim Urban, and it's called Taming the Mammoth. It is a very delightful article, a little bit on the longer side and hilarious. So read the whole thing if you want to just click on in. But I'm also going to pull heavily on it for today's episode, along with a couple of other thinkers. But a lot of this comes from Taming the Mammoth, some of these ideas. So, you can just hear my synopsis of the first half of it here, and I won't go into the second half of this article. But it's great. So, click in if you want.
 
But Tim talks about how, 10,000 years ago or so, we were a tribal people and that being part of a tribe was critical to our survival. There was nothing more important than belonging to our tribe and maintaining good standing in the social hierarchy. Why? Because back then, there was a very real danger that if we did something weird, like wearing shorts at the wrong time, or if we were ostracized in some way, not only would the entire tribe know about it, but it would impact our ability to survive, to find food, shelter, a mate, warmth - all of the things necessary to live. And in fact, if we got too weird or different, I don't know, we wore our fur draped in the wrong way or, you know, had lettuce in our teeth too many times, or, I don't know, maybe snored too loud in the cave, we could get kicked out of the tribe, which might literally mean death. So that old lizard brain evolved to have this paralyzing fear of rejection, of judgment in general, just of being disliked. So, we evolved to pay a lot of attention to what people think about us.
 
Now, in this article, Tim talks about how, over the last 10,000 years, our society has dramatically changed, technologically and in terms of our infrastructure, but our evolutionary biology didn't keep up. Our bodies and our minds are built to live in a tribe, so we're still practicing this tribal-style social survival in a world where that's not really a thing. So that's why you and I might do things like spend a lot of money on a car that will turn people's heads while we're at home eating ramen every night, and not the fancy kind – the kind that you pour hot water on, and the noodles soften – or why so many people got their bangs permed in the 80s and then cried when they got home and saw them. Or why we don't want to go out to dinner alone and sit by ourselves where people can see us at a table for one or a personal example. I remember a couple of years ago, I was standing in front of the mirror getting ready to go out and hang out with a group of people that my husband and I and our kids hung out with a lot. I had tried on four or five different outfits, and I was asking my husband again which shoes to wear. He was laughing and I was like, "What? Why are you laughing? Do I look ridiculous?" He said, "No, you know, the only time you do this is anytime we're going to an event with this group, you try on a whole bunch of different clothes, and you get all weird about whether you look weird." And I stopped and I looked at him and I started laughing and I thought, "Oh my gosh, he's right." Every time that I go out with this group, I get really weird about what I look like, about fitting in, because this group was really critical, and I always feared being judged by them. So, I acted really atypically. That's not like me to try on five different outfits, maybe for fun, because I'm having a good time, but that's not something I typically do out of fear of looking weird because I usually just dress the way I like.
 
So, yeah, our lizard brain does some annoying things, and it also needs constant approval. It needs a constant voice saying you're on the right track. It needs outfit approval. Okay, it needs to only show our good side on social media. It's the part of us that goes out with friends and brags about all the things we're wearing. It's the part of us that goes out with friends and brags about all the things we're proud of and then goes home thinking, "Oh, why did I say that?" Urban talks about how our society feeds this lizard brain part of us by creating titles to satisfy this outdated need for approval. We have structures to validate and certify and indicate societally agreed-upon approval. This part of us looks around at what we're supposed to look like and be like, and then it matches that. This is actually called the bandwagon effect.
 
What it is, is when we adopt styles and do things because everyone around us is doing them. Just think about the haircuts that everybody had during The Beatles era - the bowl cuts. Everybody had that style back then. What about when the show Friends was popular? Did anybody who was alive then get one of those Monica or Rachel haircuts? Or, more recently, I had a friend who I saw after I hadn't seen him for a long time, and he was wearing all sorts of oversized clothes with no marks or labels on them. They were all very plain, all black, white, and tan, and he looked cool. He always looked cool, but he looked different. And then I started seeing everybody else doing it, and then I found out it's a look called "normcore," where you wear everything that looks super normal, non-branded. Then about five years later, I kept seeing all this fashion that reminded me of Little House on the Prairie books and that show, Little House on the Prairie. Everywhere, it was floral dresses after floral dresses and giant knitted sweaters. And then I found out there's a name for that, and it's called "Cottage core." I love fashion, to be honest, I really do. And I think sometimes it can be a form of self-expression, and sometimes it's a way that the bandwagon effect helps us blend in and look the same as everybody else. So hey, rock your fashion, just do it because you want to.
 
And sometimes, this lizard brain gets approval in the form of degrees or in the form of getting a single group or person's approval. Sometimes there's a single entity that matters so much to our lizard brain that they can say a single phrase that will bring us to our knees and replay inside our mind for years. Do you have one of those? Can you think of one? I remember once a very close caregiver told me that my tall, thin best friend, who was in a bathing suit standing beside me, that her body was what a real woman's body was supposed to look like. And that just repeated for the rest of my life in my short, freckled head. That's just a thought, a random thought that he had, and he said it out loud. If that was me now, I could recognize that as a thought, reject it. Let him take that thought right on back and decide to think instead that my body is exactly what this woman's body is supposed to look like. But that can only happen when we really know who we are when we can separate ourselves a little bit from that lizard brain's constant narrative. And it helps when we know our values, our life's purpose, what we like, and what we don't.
 
Urban calls this finding our authentic voice, and that's the whole second half of his article that talks about that. You can read it. But for now, I'll say that when we don't do that work, we stay fragile. Our identity, our choices, the way we feel day in and day out, oscillate depending on what other people say and think about us. It's moderated externally. We're not in charge; we don't have control over how we think, feel, and act because we're so dependent on external approval. This part of us makes rejection really hard to take; it makes criticism really hard to hear, and it makes some of us lash back out at people who share feedback with us. When we let our lizard brain lead us, we get into some trouble.
 
Our lizard brain also kicks into high gear with something called the spotlight effect. This is something Brene Brown talks about. The spotlight effect makes us think that people are watching us, noticing us, thinking about us, judging us about three times more than they actually are. People are just really thinking about themselves most of the time, or they'll notice us and then look past us, and we think they're still thinking about us. Our brain tells us that everyone is thinking about us, judging us, and looking at us, specifically when we're doing something atypical. So, when we're trying to take an idea out of our heads and make it real, make our idea a real thing out in the world, where we can touch, feel, and experience it, where it can be seen by others and judged. This comes up a lot because most of the time, when we have an idea, we're doing something new, something atypical, and our brain tells us everybody's going to freak out, but they're really not paying that much attention. They're worried about what their own lizard brains are whispering to them.
 
And, by the way, we've talked about how our lizard brains are designed to keep us small, hidden, people-pleasing, and avoid any type of judgment, and you know what that means to me. They're boring. They keep us from living full, happy, expressed lives, sure, but they also, ironically, make us less likable. That part of us that wants us to stay likable makes us less interesting, makes us just the same, makes us cookie-cutter. So here are some questions that you can ask this week to find out where your lizard brain is leading you. Where are the little corners of your life that your lizard brain is in charge of, and where do you want to break free?
 
Alright, first of all, write down where you see yourself being impacted by the bandwagon effect. Where are you doing things because everybody else is doing them? Where are you adopting styles or behaviors because you see the people around you doing it? Just notice - do you like that, or do you not? Where do you see yourself having the spotlight effect shine on you, like you're walking around with one big spotlight pointed right down on you? Where do you think everybody's watching you when, really, they're probably not? Just notice. With a little bit of humor, start to giggle at yourself. Shine that spotlight onto somebody else.
 
Secondly, is there something you think you can't do because you have a lot of self-doubt about it? Julianne Coast says that you should write down all the reasons that you think you can't do it. Just write them down and check them out. Most of the time, you'll find that the reasons you think you can't do something are not external. They're not coming from the outside world. They're just limiting beliefs that your lizard brain has been practicing for so long that they're automatic now. These beliefs are designed to keep you hidden, but you don't have to keep believing them.
 
I'll put a quick YouTube video from Julianne in the show notes so you can check that out too if you'd like to. She has a couple of practices you can do whenever you think you can't do something. And then, lastly, number three - just notice this week when you're seeking approval from titles, people, or groups. You're trying to be right and make others wrong so that you can be on the side of good and earn society's approval. Where are you trying to stay hidden? Just notice. It always starts with noticing, my friends, and with awareness. So just notice this week, feel free to reach out and tell me what you find, and next week we'll talk about how to shake loose from that lizard brain, how to find the real you underneath it, and the real voice underneath it all because we want to hear it. That's what I've got for you today, and I will see you next week.
 
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.