E036 Presence & Perception: Nobody Is Watching You as Much as You Think. Here's What's Really Happening

Have you ever walked out of a room replaying something you said and convinced everyone noticed it? What felt huge to you in the moment may not have even registered for anyone else. This episode explores why that happens and why people are usually paying far less attention to you than you think.

We often assume our experience of a situation reflects what was actually happening around us. In reality, the way we interpret people, environments and interactions is influenced by far more than the room itself. The $7 Season Mapping Quiz will help you understand where you're at right now and how your current season may be shaping the way you experience situations like these.

Presence & Perception: Nobody Is Watching You as Much as You Think. Here's What's Really Happening

In this episode, I explore the spotlight effect, why your brain fills in gaps when situations feel uncertain and what people are actually paying attention to when you're in a room. We also look at co-regulation, social mirroring and why genuine presence has far less to do with performance than most people realise. 

📋 What we covered:

• What twenty years in group fitness taught me about human behaviour in rooms
• Why most people are paying far less attention to you than you think
• The spotlight effect and why we overestimate how much people notice us
• How the decisions we make are often shaped by that overestimation
• What co-regulation is and how nervous systems influence each other
• How social mirroring affects the energy in a room
• Why your brain fills in gaps when situations feel uncertain
• What people are actually responding to when they meet you
• The difference between genuine presence and performed confidence
• Why confidence built through familiarity feels different from trying to impress people
• Why feedback is one of the fastest ways to develop self-awareness
• How your season affects both how you perceive others and how they perceive you 

🧭 Season Mapping Quiz

Identify your current season and understand how it may be shaping your capacity and window of tolerance right now. 

👉 https://gawellness.myflodesk.com/seasonquiz

🌟 Key takeaways:

• Most people are thinking about themselves far more than they are thinking about you 
• What feels obvious to you often goes completely unnoticed by everyone else 
• Presence starts long before you say a word. 
• People are more likely to remember how they felt around you than the exact words you said 
• A single moment rarely tells you everything you need to know about a situation 

🔁 Episodes referenced in this episode:

E035 Presence & Perception: Why Certain Rooms Make You Feel So Uncomfortable (It's Not What You Think)

E032–E034 Boundaries in Business Arc

🎧 Related listening:

E008 The Myth of Balance: Let's Talk Seasons 

E020 Create Calm On Purpose: Finding Intention and Equilibrium for 2026 

E035 Presence & Perception: Why Certain Rooms Make You Feel So Uncomfortable (It's Not What You Think)

If you've ever walked away from a conversation convinced it went badly, this will help you see those moments differently. More importantly, it will help you understand why your experience of a room is not always the same as what's actually happening within it. 

📱 Let’s Connect 

• All links, resources and ways to connect are here https://linktr.ee/GAWellness

🔔 If this episode spoke to you, lovely, please:

• Follow the podcast.
• Leave a quick review (it truly helps!)
• Share with a bestie who’s ready to reclaim wellness on her own terms.

 © 2026 GA Wellness with Georgia Ann® . All content is for educational purposes only and is not medical or psychological advice. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Have you ever walked out of a room convinced that everyone noticed that awkward thing you said, the pause that went for too long, or the moment you wish you could just take back? Or have you wondered why some people seem to walk into a room and just draw people in without even trying? In this episode, we're going external, into the room, into other people's nervous systems, and into what presence actually looks like from the outside, what people are generally noticing while you're there, what creates that magnetic quality some people have, and why the energy you bring has a lot more to do with your internal state than anything you're consciously doing. Welcome to the GI Wellness Podcast. Small steps, lasting change. I'm your host, Georgia Rand, a health coach, solo mum, and a woman who's lived through the chaos, the curveballs, and the craving for something steadier. After 20 years in the fitness industry and my own journey through grief, motherhood, and starting over, I've learned that real wellness isn't about doing more, it's about doing what matters. Each week we cut through the noise and get real. With simple, doable tools to help you feel stronger, calmer, and more like you. This isn't about perfection. It's about steady, soul-led progress. Because you deserve wellness that fits into your whole life. Not just one version of it. Let's dive in. Hey lovely, welcome back to the GA Wellness Podcast. And if we haven't met, welcome to My Space on the Net. See what I did there? Seriously though, this space is somewhere I created for real conversations about real things that are actually happening in your life right now. It's those moments where you walk into a room and you're not quite sure what people are thinking of you. Those moments where you've got a hundred things going through your head and wondering why am I feeling like this? It's those moments where you can't really pinpoint what your body is actually telling you. Like, why am I perspirating right now? Why is my heart running 100 miles an hour? I don't even know what happened for that to occur. So around here we talk about what's happening in those moments. And specifically today, we're going to talk about what's happening in the room, in other people's nervous systems, as well as your own, and the gap between what you feel and what is actually going on. And this is so then you can stop overestimating the scrutiny, stop shrinking from it, and start understanding what your presence is and how it's perceived from the outside. So this is our second episode of the presence and perception arc. And if you haven't listened to last week's episode yet, I'd really love for you to start there because it sets up everything we're building today. But the short version, your nervous system is always reading the room before you are, and it's through a filter of your personality, your past experiences, your expectations, and the seasons you're current currently in. That's your internal state. Today we're on the external side. What is actually happening out there, like in the room itself and with other people. And I hope you've got a notebook handy, because as I say, writing notes is the best way to remember all the nuggets I'm about to give you. And of course, grab your cupper as well. Okay, so I want to take you back into the Greek fitness room for a second. Because this is where so much of what I'm about to share today really crystallized for me. So I started teaching Greek fitness when I was 19, and I didn't stop until I was about 38. So we're talking a really long time. Thousands of classes, thousands of rooms. And one of the things I got really good at from standing at the front was reading what was happening in a room while I was in the middle of running it. And what I noticed constantly was this. New people would always go to the back, always. And they'd be secretly terrified that everyone was going to see them get the moves wrong. And I'd have people say to me afterwards, and that's really even if they even did come up to me afterwards, oh so worried, everyone was watching me, and I didn't know what I was doing. And I tell them honestly, it's nothing to worry about, because trust me, they're not looking at you. Everyone is either looking at me or they're looking at themselves in the mirror. But here's the part that I love. Even the looking at me part wasn't really happening. A chucker, I know. I mean, what? Not even looking at the instructor. Yep, and something really funny too, and I can tell you from direct experience that there was absolutely classes where I was mid-move and realized I had no idea which part of the choreography I was on. And I just kept going. Nobody noticed, nobody came up to me afterwards and said, hey, you clearly blacked out a bit there, because they were just so absorbed in their own experience, their own mirror, their own body, that what I was doing in any given moment barely registered. Now, I think about that for a second. If even the person at the front of the room, the one everyone supposedly came to watch, can literally lose the plot and have absolutely no one notice. What does that tell you? That nobody's watching you either way you think you are. Nobody. And I find that genuinely freeing because you realize that the spotlight you've been standing under exists almost entirely in your mind. Now, doesn't that bring a sigh of relief? So let's talk about what this spotlight is all about. So, yes, there's actually some science behind this, and I love this because it's it's an actual name for what you're experiencing. It is literally called the spotlight effect. It was first studied by psychologists Thomas Gilvick and Kenneth Savitsky in the late 90s, and what they found was that we consciously overestimate how much other people are noticing us, our appearance, our behavior, our mistakes. We feel like we're standing under a spotlight and everyone in the room can see exactly what we're doing. But the research to date consistently shows that people are noticing us far less than we think. In one of their studies, participants were asked to wear an embarrassing t-shirt in a room full of people and then estimate how many people had noticed it. They overestimated by nearly double. So what have felt huge internally was barely recognising or barely being recognised on the outside. And I think about how many decisions get made from that overestimation. The class someone didn't go back to, the seat at the back that became a habit, the question no one asked in the meeting, the network event that was left early, all that driven by a spotlight that was never as bright as it felt. Now, even though everyone in a room is primarily absorbed in their own experience, what's happening around you is shaping you, and you're shaping it too. And this is where it gets really interesting. There's something called co-regulation, and it's one of the most human things I know of. Okay, so here's the science. Our nervous systems are not closed-off isolated systems. They are actually designed to communicate with each other. So Stephen Porgas's polyvagal theory describes how we have a biological system that is constantly scanning the people around us for signs of safety or danger and then adjusting our own state in response. This goes all the way back to infancy. As babies, we literally regulated our nervous system through the presence and calm of our caregivers. Their regulated state helped our nervous system find its own regulation. That capacity doesn't disappear when we grow up. It becomes more subtle but is absolutely still there. What this means in a room is that when someone nearby is generally calm and comfortable in their own skin, it has a radiating effect on the people around them. So if their nervous system is putting out a signal that reads as safe, other nervous systems in the space literally respond to that. And I saw this in my body balance classes consistently. When I was calm, generally calm, like in a good state myself, you could feel the atmosphere in the room. I even had people say to me if I was covering class and they saw me walk in, they felt completely different and excited because they knew what kind of experience they were gonna have. Now, people that were new to me might not have had that instant reaction, but over the first few minutes, as the warm-up found its rhythm, you could feel the whole room start to breathe differently. It was the environment and the energy inside that room. And I want you to lean in here for a second. The room has a vibe, and that energy is shaped by every nervous system inside it, including yours. And related to this is something called social mirroring, which I find really fascinating. And trust me, now you'll see it, you won't be able to unsee it. Our brains are built to mirror the people around us. When someone near you laughs, your face often starts to respond before your mind's even caught up with the joke. When someone in a conversation is warm and easy to be with, your own tone shifts to match that without you consciously deciding to or thinking about it. And when someone nearby is visibly tense or off, you might feel a shift in yourself that you can't really explain. And you know that thing where you're sitting next to someone on a plane who's anxious about turbulence, and even though you are completely fine before you start to feel a bit off, that's mirroring. Your nervous system picking up on their nervous system. I'm actually going to give you a little homework assignment here. The next time you're in a room with other people, like in a meeting, conference, or workshop, have a drink from your water bottle and watch how many other people will then pick up their water bottle too. Subconsciously they might be thinking, oh yeah, I need a drink. But this is literally social mirroring in real time. And it's how we build, it's deeply social, almost subconsciously communicating with the people around us. Which means what you bring into a room lands on other people, and what other people bring lands on you. This is why you can sense negative energy from some people and not others. It's a nervous system signal. Okay, so here's something I find really interesting. Okay, let's let's face it, I find all of this interesting, but this is really, really interesting, and I think it explains a lot of the experiences that can be quite confusing in the moment. And when there's uncertainty in social environments, people usually tend to fill in gaps. So if someone in a room is quiet and a bit hard to read, we tend to make assumptions about why. If we walk into a gathering and the energy feels slightly flat, we often take that personally, even when it has absolutely nothing to do with us. If someone doesn't respond the way we hoped to something we said, we immediately start running through what we might have done wrong when actually they just might be tired or in a hard season or carrying something completely unrelated to us. I've had so many conversations with women over the years who described walking into a room and feeling certain it was unfriendly. And when we actually unpacked it together, what happened is that they walked into an uncertain environment, their nervous system had looked for an explanation, and it had landed on a worst case scenario, which is why it felt the way it did. And it also felt like it was a fact. So this is because your nervous system would rather have a wrong explanation than no explanation. So it reaches for one. And that explanation is almost always filtered through your own insecurities rather than through what's generally happening in that room. In most social environments, people are managing their own experience. What feels like subtle judgment is very often just everyone else managing what their nervous system is responding to or what their response is. Okay, so what is it that people are actually noticing? Energy. Yep, I talk about energy a lot. And it definitely ranks in this sense. Before they register anything specific you've said or done, they feel whether you seem easy or closed off, if you're warm or a lot of effort. And that's registered before any of your words are. And there's a couple of things at play here when this happens. So the first is reciprocity. So when there's genuine back and forth, people feel this in their body, even when they can't tell you what it is. A conversation that's mutual has a completely different quality to one where someone is working really hard and getting very little back. The second is consistency. When someone seems quite different from one moment to the next, it creates a kind of low-level uncertainty in the people around them because they really don't know where how they're going to show up in any given day. And that makes it harder for the nervous system to read. What they're largely not noticing the moment you stumbled over a word, the pause before you responded, the question you're worried sounded silly, the thing you said that you replayed 12 times on the way home. The things that felt enormous from the inside, but from the outside, they're honestly barely there. Okay, so I want to talk about something that I think is the most interesting part of all of this, because this connects everything we've covered today. You know those people who walk into a room and something shifts? You notice them, not necessarily because they're the loudest or the most conventionally confident, but because there's something about their presence that registers and they feel magnetic. So I've watched this happen so many times in fitness classes, at events, in group settings, and what I notice is that it's rarely about what they're doing, it's about their state that they're in. People who feel magnetic in rooms are almost always in what polyvagal theory calls a ventroval state. The social engagement state of the nervous system. It's where you're open, regulated, and genuinely present. And when someone is in that state, that other nervous systems in the room literally pick up on it. So remember co-regulation? That's what's happening. Their regulator state is broadcasting a signal that reads is safe and warm. And other people are drawn towards that without even knowing why. And here's what's interesting: the magnetic quality has very little to do with extroversion. And I've seen quite introverted people carry this. If you think this is talking more or taking up more physical space, it's really not. So most of the time, these people are generally present in themselves and are actually there in the moment. Now the flip side is also true. High energy that comes from an activated, anxious, or performative place is also the nervous system which kind of has big energy and it's working really hard to be noticed. So when this happens, it creates a subtle discomfort in the room. And people can sense that and it can feel slightly off, even if they can't pinpoint as to why. So the nervous system picks up on this long before the mind does. So what creates genuine presence in the room is actually that first one, which is a regulated calm energy. And I'm sure we know at least someone in our life who comes in and shows the complete opposite. They take up a lot of space, they seem incredibly sure of themselves, and something about it just feels off. And what you're picking up on is performed confidence, and it's very different from the real thing. And I've watched this play it out in so many rooms over the years, and it has a really consistent quality to it. The person performing confidence is usually working really hard, and there's a kind of real effort to it. The jokes that land a beat too late, the eye contact that's held just a little bit uncomfortably too long, the way they talk over people without realizing it, and the tendency to make everything a bit or maybe a lot about them. And here's the thing about performed confidence, it almost always comes from a lack of self-awareness. They believe that they're coming across the way they think they are. The gap between how they see themselves in the room and how they're actually landing is significant. And because they don't have the self-awareness to fill this gap, they just keep going. So from a nervous system perspective, what's happening is that their big outward energy is actually a stress response. It's activated energy masking uncertainty, and other nervous systems in the room pick up on that. So people don't always know why they feel vaguely uncomfortable around the person or why they feel themselves stepping back, but their nervous system always knows. So genuine presence doesn't need to announce itself. So it it just needs to be real and the room can feel the difference. And I want to get really personal here for a second because I think it's relevant. I know how I'm perceived in a group fitness setting. I know that I come across as confident, capable, someone who really knows what they're doing in a room. And I want to be really honest about why that is. It's through years of practice, years of perfecting my craft, years of learning exactly what to do with people in front of me. That's where it comes from and it was built over time, and it was not something I was born with naturally. So I've had many comments over the years that have stayed with me. So people saying, You make me feel really good. I've never felt this with another instructor before. I've even had someone tell me that they've been going to a chiropractor for years, and it was coming to my class that they finally understood proper spinal alignment, and that made so much of a difference for them. So those kind of stories I've heard over the years, and I've heard so many of them, and I'm aware of how I'm perceived in the moment. But here's the part I want to be really clear about. That awareness has never gone to my head. I don't take it for granted because I know that what people are responding to isn't some elevated version of me. It's me being completely myself in an environment I know deeply. That's it. I'm not trying to impress anyone, I'm just being exactly who I am in a space that I've known for years and just have an understanding about. Now, this is available in all of us, in the rooms we know and in situations that we know. The confidence that comes from familiarity and self-knowledge is a completely different thing to performed confidence. And people feel that difference, even when they can't tell you what it is. And that doesn't mean you need to be perfect in or have a perfect state of presence, but it does mean that the work of feeling like yourself in a room starts on the inside, which is exactly what we're gonna get into next week. And one of the most practical things you can do to start understanding your own presence is to seek feedback. So I know that can feel uncomfortable, but when you actually ask people how you come across, you start to get a picture of yourself that you simply can't see from the inside. It's one of the ways emotional intelligence actually develops. It's from staying curious about yourself and being willing to hear what comes back. Now, I went and did my bricks because I wanted to know and understand how it's being perceived, what was landing, what wasn't, but a personality test can only show you a snapshot of who you are at one point in time, and it can change as you change, and that's the whole idea. Okay, so here's something I don't think we talk about enough. Your presence is not fixed, it shifts depending on the season you're in, how prepared you feel, what you're carrying, who you're with, so all of this stuff. We spoke about all of this last week and again today, but here's another layer, and I find this one really interesting. The season the other person is in also affects how they perceive you. So just think about that for a second. Someone who is in survival season, who is overwhelmed and has a narrow window of tolerance, is going to receive your energy very differently to someone who is in growth season with plenty of capacity. The same you, the same room, the same conversations, but two completely different experiences on their end, depending on where they're at. So if you've ever walked away from an interaction thinking, I don't know what happened there, that fell off, and I'm not sure why, it's worth considering that it might have had very little to do with you at all, and more to do about their season, their state, their nervous system response, and in the moments that shaped what they were taking in and how they interpreted it. And this is also really important. So I want to sit here for a second. If you feel like you weren't perceived well in a particular moment, it could be that point in time only. A snapshot of where the person was at that particular day, which is exactly why Maya Breaks, I said only gives you a snapshot as to where you are at that point in time. And it's also very important to know that for that particular person as well, it might not have had any bearing on how they see you as a person overall. So please don't get too hung up on one instance, one interaction, one event, or one moment where something feels off. So people's perceptions of us shift depending on their own season, their own state, and their own capacity in that moment. Where it becomes worth paying attention though is if you start seeing a pattern when the same dynamic keeps showing up across multiple in interactions with the same person or in the same environment. So that's a different conversation entirely. And it's actually one we went into in quite a lot of detail when we spoke about in boundaries in business. So if you haven't listened to that one, episodes 32 to 34 are worth going back to because we really unpacked what it looks like when a pattern forms and what you can actually do about it. It. But a single instance, give yourself and the other person a chance. It might just be the season that they were in on a particular day. So presence and perception are really two separate things and they don't always line up. Okay, so I want to add one more thing here before because I think it's a little bit underrated when it comes to how you're perceived in a room. I mentioned last week about the dating event and I said that people described my presence as magnetic. And yes, part of that was because my nervous system was calm and I had no engender, but there was something else going in there too. I asked a lot of questions. I was interested in the people I was talking to and the people I was having an actual conversation with. So I wasn't in my head planning on what I was actually going to say next or asking questions just so I could get the next word in. I was actually listening and being curious on what they were saying. And people feel that, they feel it immediately because of how much your perceived inner room has very little to do with the external energy you walk in with. It also has everything to do with the person in front of you and if they feel seen, feel included, and if they feel like that what they're saying actually matters to you. Think about the people in your life who you love being around, who make you feel good about a conversation. I'm willing to bet they're the ones who ask great questions and actually wait for the answer, who make you feel like you're contributing something, or just make you feel just really happy in the moment. They're probably not the ones that are sitting there and waiting for their turn to speak. And that's because humans are deeply wired for belonging. We spoke about this last week, and one of the fastest ways to create a sense of belonging for someone is to make them feel like they matter in the interaction, like they're part of the conversation, not just an audience to it. And the flip side is also pretty easy to spot as well. You know the person who asks a question and you can't tell if they're really listening or not, they're already forming their next thought, and can you can kind of start seeing that in their head, and especially when their eyes start darting, and then you can see that they're nodding, and you're thinking, are you really nodding to what I'm saying, or are you just nodding because you're just trying to be polite? And then you can just tell that they're just somewhere else entirely. And I mean your nervous system picks up on it, and it doesn't feel great, does it? So if you want to think about the energy you bring in a room, it's the state you're in when you walk into it, how you carry yourself, and most importantly, how present you are once you're there. Are you actually with the person in front of you? Are you curious about them? Are you listening to respond or listening to understand? And that's what creates the kind of presence that people remember. Okay, one more layer before we bring this together. The season you're in right now affects everything we've been talking about today. Your co-regulation capacity, how much you're picking up from others through mirroring, how quickly you interpret uncertainty as threat, all of this is shaped by which season your nervous system is currently sitting in. So in growth season, you tend to have more capacity to stay steady even when a room feels uncertain. You can read the energy around you without feeling completely swept by it. And you've got enough in the tank that the spotlight effect doesn't come on or doesn't take too much of a strong effect on you. So in rest season, your nervous system is more sensitive. You're picking up more from the people around you through mirroring, which can feel lovely when the room is warm and easy, but quite overwhelming when the room isn't. The gap between what you feel and what's actually happening can get wider because your system is more activated and more likely to feel uncertainty with a worst-case scenario interpretation. And in survival season, co-regulation becomes even more important and also harder to access. You might find yourself really affected by the energy of people around you much more than usual. Rooms that feel chaotic or tense can be hard to stay in, and the rooms that feel calm and safe can feel like the most welcome relief. So knowing your season means you can give yourself appropriate context for what you're experiencing. Instead of thinking something is wrong with me, you can ask, is this where my nervous system is right now? And that question alone can be quite regulating. So if you're sitting there thinking, okay, but I actually have no idea what system I mean right now. This is exactly where the Caesarson mapping quiz comes in and what it's for. It is a really practical way to get clarity on where your nervous system is sitting right now and what that means for how you're moving through the world. So the link is in the episode description. Okay, lovely. So let me bring today together before we finish up. We went fully external this week. We looked at the spotlight effect and why people are noticing us farther than we think. We explored co-regulation, how nervous systems generally influence each other, and how a calm, easy presence in a room has a real effect on the people nearby. We talked about social mirroring and how much of what we pick up from other people is happening completely below conscious thought. And we looked at what actually creates magnetic presence in a room, which turns out to be a genuine regulated nervous system. We also talked about the flip side of that, performed confidence, which is when people are projecting confidence, what it looks like, why it creates that slightly off feeling in rooms, and how it almost comes across from a lack of self-awareness rather than anything intentional. We got into what people are actually responding to when they feel drawn to someone, and a big part of that was genuine interest. Are you actually present with the person in front of you? Are you listening to understand or just waiting for your turn? The quality of real attention is something people feel immediately, even when they can't put their finger on it. We talked about seeking feedback as one of the most practical tools for developing self-awareness over time, because emotional intelligence is really something that builds as you stay curious about yourself and willing to hear what comes back. So things like Maya Briggs, honest conversations with your team, noticing the patterns and how people respond to you, all of that adds up. And we looked at how the season you're in shapes everything we talk about today and really the whole of GA wellness as an ecosystem. Things like your capacity to stay present, how much you're picking up from other people around you, how quickly uncertainty tips into worst-case scenario interpretation. Your season affects your presence. And the season the other person is in also affects how they perceive you. So if something feels off in a particular interaction, it may have nothing to do at all with you, or it could be with the other person, it could just simply be what's happening in a single space in time. Where it does become worth paying attention to is if you start seeing a pattern. And if you want to go deeper with that, that's where episodes 32 to 34 and the boundaries in business arc is a really good place to go to because we really unpack that. Lovely, if this is all landing for you and you're wondering what season you're in right now, that's exactly what the season mapping quiz is for. It's a really practical way to understand where your nervous system is sitting and why certain things are feeling the way that they feel. The link is in the episode description. And don't forget, in most rooms, most people are generally focused on their own experience. The scrutiny you feel is almost always much bigger inside you than it is in the room around you. So next week we're bringing the internal and external together. What happens when your emotional and nervous system state enters a room and you're running on empty? And what you do from a nervous system perspective to feel like yourself even when you're not feeling your best. Until next week, be kinder to yourself. Don't be afraid to do that weird thing you think people are noticing. And as always, I am so glad you're here. Thanks for being here, lovely. If today's episode gave you a light bulb moment, helped you feel sane, or sparked a small step, I'd love to hear about it. Tag me over on Instagram at GareWellness and share your wins so I can cheer you on. And if there's a woman in your world that needs this kind of support, send this to her because wellness feels better when we do it together. Make sure you hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, and check the description for all the resources mentioned today. Plus the link to join my email list, which is where I share exclusive content, early access to offer some freebies, and little love notes are only sent to my community. If you love this episode, it would mean the world to me if you left a review. Until next time, take a deep breath and take care of you. With love, George Aran.