172 Why You're Way More Attractive Than You Think

What if you needn't change a single thing except your thoughts to be more attractive immediately and belong in every room you’re in?  It’s true…

Listen to learn how:

• To create a sense of belonging no matter the group setting: team meeting, a dinner party, or *cough cough* a group coaching program!
• To “become” more attractive without changing a thing about your appearance
• The ‘Liking Gap’ is impeding how likeable you currently see yourself 

• Shape Shift Program LEARN MORE
• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I am Paula Parker. My work is here to offer you specialized mind and body practices to shift into the next version of you. So I am currently creating my new group program called Shape Shift, and so I've been thinking a lot about what that will include.

Because I really want it to be a program that I would love to join, that I would love to be a part of. And also I've been thinking, just reflecting on how I get the best out of my programs so that I can create that group experience for everyone that joins. And it's different than a private experience

in the sense that there is a sense of belonging and there's more opportunity for self-criticism. Like people think after, oh, I talked way too much, or that was awkward. Or other people think I'm too this or too that, or whatever. So today I want to teach you how to create a sense of belonging. In any group, organization, dinner party you're in and help you see that you are actually way more attractive than you think.

And of course, attractive. I'm not meaning just looks, I'm meaning your overall, how compelling you are as a person, like how attractive you are. So let's start with belonging, and I'm gonna start by just telling you a little bit of a weird story that. I have actually never told anyone before, so this is gonna be the first time I'm telling this story on the podcast, which is kind of funny.

So years ago, this is like late two thousands, I worked for Lululemon, and you probably don't know this because this was really early days in Lululemon, but they had a sister brand and it was called Oqoqo, and it was spelled O-Q-O-Q-O. It focused on more day-to-day wear, less athleisure, less athletic wear, and it was more sustainable.

So we used like bamboo materials and organic cotton, and the store was just a couple of doors down from the original Lululemon, the first Lululemon store in Vancouver. And so I worked at that store. And when you are working at Lululemon, I don't know what it is like now, it's. Uh, who knows? I have no idea.

But at the time, chip was very much involved and he was very much into team building leadership workshops, and I believe it was his sister-in-law. Now, I totally could be mistaken, but this woman who was a coach, so I was introduced to coaching early on. Named Suzanne came and she did a little workshop with us.

I was assistant manager of Oqoqo, so she did a little workshop with all of us managers and she said even the most personable, confident, positive people experience a sense that they don't belong or that they are the outsider and. Here's what I wanna tell you. As soon as she said that, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

And so I turned and I looked and there was no one there. So you can make of that what you will, but I felt enough sensation on my shoulder that I turned to see who had tapped me on the shoulder. Now. What I make this to mean is that that was something for me, a note to pay attention to because I had that exact experience.

Even though technically I belonged in this group of managers and in this company, I always had that sense that like I didn't really belong. And so that's what I wanna talk about today because maybe you have experienced. The same feeling where you see everyone else acting normal and comfortable and you think, well God, I must be the only person in this group that feels a little unsure, a little awkward, and like, I don't really belong.

And again, this is going to apply to you whether you're going to be in shape shift or not, because you are in many groups already. You are probably in work groups. If you work, you have a book club, your family is a group. Maybe you're part of the PTA, your church, the gym, or a friend group, right? Like maybe you're at a dinner party.

So no matter what it is. You want to feel like you belong. You want that sense of belonging. And this makes sense as humans, it's our human nature to want to fit in and. It makes sense in terms of, if you look at this from an evolutionary standpoint, if you didn't fit in with a group, you would be booted out of the tribe and you couldn't survive on your own.

So it makes sense that our brains would be wired to look for this and to be very sensitive to it. . I've also been in a program where we talked about this being a core human need, so we have a powerful need to feel accepted and included. It's just hardwired in us.

It's a primary human need. We also wanna get the most out of the groups that we are in based on whatever purpose that group has. So we want to learn if. The program is there, or the group is there for us to learn something new. Maybe it's connection to something with your friends or your family,

Having a certain experience, like a celebration or getting the transformations. So far in shapeshift, this would be getting the transformation. There's this book called The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, and she says that there are two things that determine the sustainability and health of any group, and one is that you feel like you are getting value.

From the group. And the second is that you feel like you are contributing. You are an asset to the group, so you are contributing value. So this is really important to understand if you are within an organization or within any kind of group, because what can make this hard? What gets in the way is cognitive biases.

We have a negative bias affirming we don't belong, and then we find evidence of the confirmation bias. So for example.

Let's imagine you're at a dinner party and you kind of have a suspicion that everybody else gets along. The other couples get along with each other, or they're maybe closer, and then. You come outta the bathroom and you see them all talking and you walk to the group and nobody talks to you, like everyone's just talking to themselves and they don't include you in the conversation.

Your brain is going to be like, see, yeah, they, they don't care about me. I don't belong to this group. They all have a whole deeper relationship and a whole social structure that I'm not a part of. Right. I knew it all along and here's the evidence. And because our need to belong is so strong, our brains are gonna be noticing this stuff.

It's gonna be hypersensitive to any sign of exclusion, even when they aren't actually present. So nobody actually noticed that you joined the group, or they didn't even think to make an effort to include you in the conversation because they're so self-conscious about what they're talking about, right?

Who knows? There's also a negativity bias in noticing the differences rather than the similarities. For example, you might see someone and think, oh yeah, well she can do it because you know, she has this going for her or she has this unfair advantage or that, but when you actually, if you actually put A and B your lives up in comparison, you would have more in common than you would have differences.

But our brains are just wired to notice the differences. It's loss aversion. So what we're thinking. All of this kind of thinking, these thought errors, they create a sense of isolation. We're in this, I don't belong, we are in this, not enoughness. It might be I'm different or I don't fit in.

And then how this shows up is we. Reject them or we reject ourselves. So for example, we quit the group or we criticize them, or we criticize ourself, we ask for a refund or we show up, but we are only half-heartedly showing up. We are one foot in, one foot out. We're not fully committed.

We're just trying to hold ourselves back. We're a little bit cool, we're a little bit nonchalant. We don't wanna fully express ourselves because there's safety in holding back and being a little bit half in, half out. And then of course all of that reinforces, it creates more disconnection and reaffirms.

Yeah, see, I knew it. I knew I didn't belong to this group, so. We want something new. I wanna offer you a new perspective. The first is, now you just know, just me explaining this. You know that most people in the group, in the room feel like an outsider at least some of the time. That's normal. So just let your shoulders drop a little.

It's part of the human experience, and especially in a new group, the adjustment period at the beginning. But the second point I wanna make around this in terms of a fresh perspective on this, is I think more profound. And that's if all of this is in your own head anyways, a sense of belonging can be a decision.

I'll say that again. A sense of belonging can be a decision. When you make this decision. You belong. No matter the situation, you're the only person not eating the birthday cake or the only person not having a glass of wine. You still belong. Your friends are closer to each other than you are to them.

You belong

the other people on your team have been working together longer. Doesn't matter. You still belong. You've decided that you belong. You've made that decision. Okay, now let's switch gears. I'm gonna talk about attractiveness. What makes someone attractive? Of course there's looks, but realistically that's not a big component of attractiveness.

We all have seen that person, female, male, where they weren't conventionally hot, like they weren't conventionally really good looking, but there was just something about them, like they had an X factor. It was how they smiled or how they moved in the world. They weren't conventionally. Really good looking or attractive, but they were attractive.

You were attracted to them because of these other things that they had going on. You just liked them. Okay, so how do I know that you are more attractive than you think? Well, let, let tell you, there's a really interesting line of research showing that. People, everyone, all of us, we consistently underestimate how much others like us after our interactions.

Let's say for me, I'm like doing drop off and I might have a conversation with another parent and then after I'll be like, wow. I don't think she likes me. She, she really thinks you know this or that. She really thinks that I said the wrong thing or whatever. So psychologists call this the liking gap.

The liking gap is the tendency for us to believe others like us less than they actually do. There was a study at Cornell and participants were asked to have short conversations with strangers in a lab setting, and then afterward. Both of them rated how much they liked the person and how much they believed the other person liked them.

You can imagine what the result was, right? Complete mismatch. People underestimated how much they were liked, and not by a little amount. The gap was significant. Why does this happen? Well, we tend to focus on our mistakes. So if we stumble, if we trip during conversations, we notice. Every awkward moment, every pause, the thing that we said that we regret saying, we notice that.

We also assume that others notice what we notice. There's this thing called the spotlight effect, where we really think people are noticing everything about us, and if we look at reality, it's simply not true, right? Most of the time you can remember what you said in a conversation, but you cannot remember what the other person said, so you can remember what you asked them.

But you can't even remember what their answer was. How can this be? It's because we are very aware of what's going on for us, but we are just not paying that much attention to other people. We also carry a lot of social self-doubt. So if somebody worries about their belonging, the brain will then fill in the blank with.

Self-criticism and negative assumptions. And then lastly, again, like I'm mentioning, our attention is really inward While we're talking, we are self-evaluating. We might miss signs that the other person is enjoying the interaction. Okay? Because we are being so self-critical in the moment and when emotion is high.

Our cognitive ability is low. Okay, so despite your quiet. Or loud self-criticism. Statistically speaking, odds are people like you more than you think you are more attractive than you are currently believing. And a little PS here because when you join shapeshift, which is open enrollment right now, so you can sign up right now, we start in the beginning of April.

If you are listening to this in real time, that's April, 2026. I will be going over more tips like this and ways that you can get the most out of the program so you can have the best experience. For example, this group is a closed group, meaning there won't be people coming in and out for three months.

We'll be in it together and it will work best when you show up as the messy client that you are, right? We all get to be the messy client. Rather than thinking, you have to have everything figured out. You have to have everything polished and produce amazing insights for everyone else. No. The most magic happens in groups in which we are not trying to be perfect to look good.

We are simply being honest because that's what's most helpful, both for us and our internal process and our coaching, but also for everyone in the group. So if you've ever. Worried that you sounded stupid after speaking. If you've replayed a conversation afterward or if you've spoken publicly and then the next person talks and you completely ignore that because you're re, you know, saying what you just said, you're reflecting on it of what you just said, or you felt too self-conscious to share in a group.

Don't worry, I've thought about this all ahead of time. Okay, I've got you. I'm prepared for you. We will make it safe. That won't get in the way of what I think of as my goal for this program, which is for you to say this, this program changed everything for me. Okay. So you can check it out at mindfulshape.com/shapeshift and I will talk to you again soon.

Okay. Bye.