482. When You Don’t Fit In

Do you ever just feel like you don’t fit in? Maybe it’s with the people you go to church with. Maybe it’s with the other parents at school pickup. Maybe it’s with your peers or coworkers or colleagues. Maybe they are a group of friends or even family members who you used to fit in with, but now you’ve evolved or made some changes in your life or achieved some goals, and suddenly you find that you don’t fit in anymore.

Your brain won’t like this if you have a healthy, normal human brain, but the good news is it’s not only okay to not fit in. It’s a really useful skill to learn how to master because the desire to fit in holds most people back from becoming what they’re really capable of becoming. And today I’m going to teach you what to do when you don’t fit in. This is episode 482. Here we go.

This is Better Than Happy. I’m your coach, Jody Moore. And on this podcast, my objective, just so we’re clear, is to change what you’ve been taught and have likely believed about yourself up until now. Here’s what I believe about you. I believe that what you think is real is mostly imagined And what you imagine is actually creating what’s real. I believe that in the ways you desire to achieve, you 100% have the capacity to succeed.

And finally, I believe that joy, love, and miracles are your God given natural state of being. And any time you feel far from them, the way back is much simpler than you think, but that’s about to change. Are you ready? Let’s do this.

Hello, world. Hello, podcast land. Hello, my friends. Thanks for tuning in today. I’m talking about this topic because it has come up maybe four or five times in the last two weeks. I always pay attention when that happens, and I do a podcast on it if I feel like I have something useful to add to the topic at hand.

So we’re going to talk about what to do when you don’t fit in, how to not fit in. A lot of times we think that we need to learn how to fit in, but I want to teach you how to not fit in and when that’s an appropriate strategy to pursue.

So before we do that, there are a couple of free webinars happening, free workshops, whatever you want to call them, webinar, workshop, I don’t know. We’re going to log into Zoom together, and I’m going to teach you and guide you and coach you through a couple of topics.

And they’re completely free, and it’s the last time we’re going to be doing free workshops like this, this year, because I want to really spend a lot of time with my peeps in The Lab. I’ve got several exciting things that we’re focusing on for the remainder of 2024. I need to be very available to them. And you know, it’s going to be the holidays, going to want to spend time with kids and all that as well.

So anyway, the first webinar that we are doing is called How to Be Your Own Best Friend. And this is probably something that everybody should attend. I’m calling it be your own best friend because I want you to learn how to be nice to yourself, how to be confident, how to enjoy being with yourself.

But I also want you to learn how to tell yourself the truth and have high expectations of yourself and hold yourself accountable. So all of that’s going to be included in How to Be Your Own Best Friend. You can register for that at jodymoore.com/friend.

And then the second one we’re doing is really just for people trying to build coaching businesses or trying to take their coaching businesses to the next level or who have thought about getting their coaching business going, but aren’t sure where to begin.

And it is called the Three Components of a Successful Coaching Business. There are three things that you must have and only three, actually, that you really need to make up to a million dollars in your coaching business. Once you get to a million dollars and you’re ready to scale beyond that, you’re gonna need other things. But you only need three. If you’re anywhere between zero and a million dollars, I promise. And I’m gonna tell you exactly what they are and how to get them set up so that you can make the impact you want to as a coach.

So you would head to jodymoore.com/success if you’re a coach who wants to come to that free class. Both of these are happening in October. I will let you go to the links and just find the details.

So again, jodymoore.com/friend for How to Be Your Own Best Friend, jodymoore.com/success if you’re a coach and you want help with your business.

Okay. So, truth time, I have a lot of practice not fitting in. I’ve spent a good portion of my life not fitting in. And as I was making notes for this episode, I asked myself, I wonder if that’s really, I mean, that’s just my thought, right? I’ve spent a lot of time not fitting in.

But what I was thinking is, I wonder if it’s really true if like, have I not fit in more than, say the average person, or do most people feel like they’ve spent most of their lives not fitting in because we’re sort of hyper-focused on wanting to fit in? I don’t know the answer to that.

But I’m really grateful, actually, that I had opportunities to not fit in. Some people have had much more challenging situations of not fitting in. Like there are people who have experienced racism, I haven’t been at the effects of racism when it comes to not fitting in. Like, I haven’t been fearful for my life or my safety.

I have not struggled with extreme poverty at any time in my life. And that’s a version of not fitting in that is, I think, a primal sort of survival-based fear, right?

I don’t wanna downplay how simple and easy overall my life has been, but growing up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was formerly known as the Mormon Church, maybe more commonly known to many as the Mormon Church, I was an odd child.

I grew up in Spokane, Washington. There weren’t a lot of kids who were members of my church that I went to school with. And so that made me really weird, especially as I got to be a teenager.

As a young girl, really the only time it kind of came up was when people wanted to do things on Sunday, and we don’t do a lot of things on Sunday that other people do in the name of observing the Sabbath day. And so at times I had to say, oh, I can’t come to your birthday party on Sunday, or I can’t play on Sunday, or what have you. But it really, really landed more when I was a teenager.

And as a teenager in high school, my friends now were all starting to experiment with all the things that teenagers often do. Drinking and drugs and smoking was a thing when I was a kid. We weren’t vaping back then, we were smoking.

They were smoking, I should say, I wasn’t. Little bit of marijuana here and there and a lot of, you know, promiscuity and whatever else. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but stuff that I was not supposed to participate in.

So this made me weird, right? This made me different. This made me not fit in. This brought up all kinds of questions. Wait a second, you’re not gonna drink? Like not ever? Have you ever had a drink? Are you ever going to have a drink?

Now that went on all the way through my corporate career. The whole fascination and mind blown, I can’t believe you don’t drink alcohol thing was an ongoing thing. Now that I’m not working in corporate, I’m not really exposed very much to it, but it’s definitely still out there in the world, right?

I’m really glad, like I said, that I had that opportunity because I had a lot of practice not fitting in. And I have experiences that I can draw from now when there are other areas of my life where I find I’m not fitting in.

And maybe you can relate to this. Like I said, this has come up several times in the last couple of weeks. I was listening to a coaching call where a woman who is a member of the Islamic faith was saying how she really honors her faith and she really wants to follow the guidelines that she feels are appropriate in terms of how she dresses and how she lives her life.

And that members of her own family who claim to be of the same faith don’t follow it as strictly and they are sort of annoyed by her or just questioning why are you so strict about it? Why are you so over the top? Why don’t you just relax and loosen up, right?

So sometimes it looks like that. It looks like us really wanting to go all in on something like a religion or a faith. Other times, again, I coach a lot of people or talk to a lot of people who are members of my own faith and say things like, I just don’t think I fit in there because I just don’t believe all of it or there’s certain parts I don’t feel like I want to implement in my daily life, in my routine.

You know, I’m just not like them. I don’t fit in there. So definitely something like religion that has lots of lifestyle recommendations for us gives us an opportunity one way or another to not fit in, right?

Another time I see this happen a lot is when somebody changes one of their habits. This is common with food, right? Maybe overeating, let’s just say, or eating foods that aren’t really serving your long-term health goals.

And if you decide to make a change, then suddenly there’s gonna be times when you maybe don’t fit in. And people are gonna notice, right? And they may say things like, wait a second, what do you mean you’re not eating dessert? You don’t eat dessert anymore? And they may feel uncomfortable. And then they start saying things like, oh, sorry, I shouldn’t be eating this in front of you. Or, oh yeah, you’re right, I shouldn’t be eating this either.

Now they’re feeling like their own guilt and shame. And you’re just sitting there trying to follow your eating protocol. You’re not trying to judge anyone. But they’re turning it into this big dramatic thing, right? I see that happen really frequently.

Maybe you – this is something that I experienced also when I was a young mom and I first started having kids, is I worked full-time. I worked in corporate. And most of the other women that I knew at the time, my friends my age that were also having kids, they were stay-at-home moms.

And I remember just feeling like, oh my gosh, I don’t fit in with these people. And sometimes I was sad about that. Like, I was sad to be missing out on going to story time at the library or taking our little kids out for a play date or down to the beach or to the park or whatever. I was living in Huntington Beach at the time.

And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I’m missing out on something here and I don’t fit in and they have all these stories and experiences that I’m not a part of.

And other times I felt like, ah, I just wish I had like someone I could talk to who has, you know, a more similar lifestyle to me so that we can talk about, you know, the stress and the overwhelm and just talk about our jobs and talk about some things that these other women just, it wasn’t part of their lives. And so we didn’t have the same opportunities to dialogue about it, right?

So just not fitting in. I had also guilt about it. I was like, maybe I shouldn’t be working or maybe I shouldn’t enjoy working at least this much. I should want to be home. Because all of them say, I don’t know how you do it. As though they wouldn’t want to do it.

And just this whole like, what’s the matter with me? Why do I have this drive and this ambition and why do I love this part of my life and what does that mean about me as a mom, et cetera.

For those of you who are building businesses, my entrepreneur, my coaches, you’re going to maybe have this threat come up of not fitting in when you start putting yourself out there, when you start sharing content, you start posting on social media or putting out a podcast or a YouTube channel or however you’re going to go help people, you’re not going to please everyone, right?

And this is a real fear people have of, I don’t want to offend anyone, I don’t want anyone to come after me and say that I’m wrong or I don’t know what I’m talking about. It holds people back from achieving success because if you’re going to say anything interesting, some people aren’t going to like it. There’s a good possibility anyway.

So if everybody likes what you have to say, that probably means you’re not getting anyone’s attention. And I’m not talking about being sensational, you know, and controversial just to get attention. I’m just saying if you’re going to teach something new and different and unique that’s going to be powerful to someone that they haven’t heard before, there’s a reason it’s new and unique. And some people will disagree with you or not like it. And so you’re going to have to get comfortable with sometimes not fitting in.

Okay. So again, there’s probably way more examples that I’m not thinking of, but I just want you to wrap your head around like, is there an area of my life where if I was able to be more comfortable not fitting in, if it was okay to not fit in, would that allow me to achieve a lot more of the goals that I want to achieve for myself?

If the answer is yes, then here’s what I want you to think about today. First of all, this part of us that wants to fit in is coming from our survival brain. The survival brain is a great thing. We need the survival part of our brain that just looks out for keeping us alive.

But it is the least mature, least evolved part of the brain. In fact, it’s the part of the brain that babies have when they’re first born. Little kids are survival focused in the beginning, right? It’s all about like, am I safe, am I fed, am I warm, am I loved? Like all the things that we need for survival is what a little kid cares about.

As kids get older, they start to care about more than just survival. It’s not that we don’t care about survival, we just add on other things that we also care about.

This morning, we were getting ready to head out the door for school. I was taking my two younger kids to school and my 10-year-old son, no, he’s 11 now. I don’t know how old he is.

My 11-year-old fifth grade son said to me, “Mom, my sweatshirt,” he has this one sweatshirt he normally wears to school every day. He said, “My sweatshirt’s in dad’s truck” and dad was gone with with his truck, surfing, for the record.

So at any rate, I love, by the way, I’m not saying that angrily, I love that we live where my husband can go surfing every morning, so fun. So I was like, “Okay, well, let’s get you a different sweatshirt, because I know you have a whole bunch of sweatshirts.” So we go up to his closet, and we start looking at the sweatshirts.

And he’s like, “No, not that one, no, not that one, no, no.” Now, there can be reasons why we pass on sweatshirts in our closet, But I happen to believe that the reasons weren’t, that one’s not comfortable, et cetera.

It was, that one’s not cool. He didn’t say it, but I just know it’s true because there’s one particular sweatshirt has Mickey Mouse on it. It says Disney or something. And it used to be his favorite. He used to wear it to school every day. But he’s getting older now. And so he not only cares about being warm with his sweatshirt, He cares about looking cool at school.

And suddenly, I just think he’s at the age where Mickey Mouse is not so cool anymore, unless you’re going to Disneyland that day. So his brain is evolving, right? He’s not only worried about survival, he’s also worried about fitting in. So this part of our brains becomes from survival focus to belonging focused, but it’s just a baby step beyond survival.

And beyond that, which by the way, some adults never get to, for the record, but beyond belonging focus is an overall desire to achieve and evolve and grow and contribute, right? These goals of contribution and evolution and growth are beyond belonging.

It’s not that we don’t care about belonging, just like it’s not that we don’t care about survival. There’s just a next level, higher brain, prefrontal cortex, more evolved part of the brain that can think about the bigger picture.

And that’s the part of the brain that I want you to nurture and develop because you can do that. You can nurture and develop it by simply paying attention to what’s true, okay?

So let’s talk about that for a minute. What is true? This survival part of your brain thinks, “If I’m rejected by the tribe, I will die sooner.” That used to be true, right?

We used to need each other for warmth, for safety, for effectiveness in finding food, in building shelter, in fighting off danger of all sorts, animals, weather, natural disaster, et cetera.

In groups, we had a much higher chance of survival than on our own. And still to this day, I believe what it says in the Bible, which is it is not good for man to be alone, man slash woman to be alone.

We are tribal and we still need each other, okay? I’m not saying I don’t want you to have people around you, have community, have support. I want you to have all of that.

But what you have to know is that you don’t need everyone. You don’t need everyone to approve of you. You don’t need everyone to believe in you. You don’t even need everyone to like you. You really don’t. It’s not going to minimize your survival. It’s not gonna mean earlier death, like your primitive brain thinks.

In fact, trying to get everyone to like you just means you become vanilla ice cream. You become a watered down version of yourself, right?

This is what I see happen most often is that people don’t even know who they are. I think we’re all like that to a certain extent. I look at like how we dress and how we do our hair and everything.

And I’m like, do I like doing my hair this way? Do I like this hair on me? Or is this just the hair that I see that I’m supposed to have right now because it’s the year 2024. And that’s what I think hair is supposed to look like on a woman like me. I don’t even know.

Okay, so there’s a lot of that already happening, socialization, conditioning, et cetera, but there are certainly areas where if I step back and go, hold on, do I have this opinion just because everybody else has the opinion and I’m trying to fit in, or is this really my opinion?

And if you just slow it down for a minute and ask yourself and check in with what feels true to you, what feels right to you, what is your gut telling you, what is resonating for you, you will be able to find who you actually are.

And I just want you to lean into who you are, because who you are is who the world needs. That is always gonna be your best version of you is your most authentic version of you.

And I know those are like really fuzzy self-help words that we throw out a lot, but it’s the reality, and it’s super challenging to figure out who that even is and what that even is for each of us, okay?

So sometimes I just remind my brain, if I discover something like as a life coach, I know a lot of other life coaches, right? And I have lots of friends who are coaches and I love the coaching community. And I noticed that a lot of them like to participate in like online forums or groups of some sort. They like to have places online where they can connect, share ideas, get support, help one another.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. I just don’t like doing it. I just don’t like spending my time online in those forums. I love to talk to somebody in person and do some of that when it happens, when it’s possible, which is not that often, to be honest, but I don’t like online forums and those kinds of groups. I just don’t care for them.

But part of my brain says, if you don’t get in there and participate, you’re gonna miss out on something and they might think that you’re, I don’t know, that you think you’re better than them or that you’re, I don’t know, they might judge you in some way or they just might forget about you. You might become irrelevant and everybody else is doing it. You probably should join and get in there and participate.

Okay, and so I have to pause and remind myself, “It’s okay, brain. We don’t need them all to understand us or get us, even if some of them do.” Truth is, we always are way more worried about people’s judgment than what is probably happening in reality, right? Most people don’t even care.

They’re not thinking about you, Jodi. They’re not paying attention to the fact that you’re not there. But even if a couple do, that’s okay. You’re not going to die younger. Your business isn’t gonna die out sooner either. Like that’s just your primitive brain latching on to what is an outdated survival mechanism.

You don’t need all the other coaches to love you in order to be successful at what you’re trying to achieve. So it’s really just redirecting, re-informing yourself, right? Even within your own family. I remember this when I started my coaching business over 10 years ago, there were some of my close friends or family members who just didn’t get it.

And they were like, what are you doing? That’s okay, whatever. I mean, they mostly kept it to themselves, but I could tell by the lack of interest in what I was doing, right? By little subtle changes in tone and behavior and things, that they had some judgment for it.

And these are my family and close friends who I love and care about. And I had to remind myself, it’s okay for them to not get what I’m doing. It’s okay if they don’t understand the power of it. It’s not for everyone.

This work that I love, that has helped me so much, that I believe in, it’s not for everyone. It’s okay if they don’t get it. Even these people who I love, it doesn’t mean that I can’t still love them, and it doesn’t even mean that they don’t still love me.

Just in this one particular area, we don’t see eye to eye, and that’s okay. I don’t need them to see the power of what I’m doing, because I see it. I’ve got me. I believe in me. I like me. I’m being who I wanna be, who I like being, and I can still love them, I don’t have to reject them.

It’s totally okay. This comes up too with the church stuff a lot, right? I was just talking to someone the other day who was like, what do you think about energy work? And what do you think about law of attraction?

And all of these kind of other ways of talking about, you know, the way human beings are and the way we interact with the spiritual or the divine. And I was like, oh, yeah, I love all of that. I love energy work. I’m so fascinated by it. I don’t actually know it all that well, but I love everything I’ve learned about it. And I love Law of Attraction, and I love to listen to different teachers and things.

And yeah, you can get some people that are out there. You have to make sure that people have good intentions and all of that. But yeah, I love learning about all of that stuff and reading those books.

And I believe in all of that stuff. And this person happened to be a member of my church or has been at one time anyway. And she’s like, oh, I just feel like in our faith, like that’s really frowned upon.

I just remember thinking like, I just don’t spend very much time thinking about whether or not that’s frowned upon. Because first of all, I don’t think it is, for the most part. I just don’t think people understand it necessarily, or maybe it’s not for them, but I don’t think they really care if I choose to participate in it.

But second of all, at some point, it becomes irrelevant what other people think, right? I always say this, what other people think of me is none of my business. It’s just irrelevant to a certain extent. And so then it doesn’t become like, do I fit in with these people or not? I get to decide if we fit in or not.

So just be careful about believing that you’re seeing what’s true in other people’s opinions of you when a lot of it is just our own projection of what we are worried about, our own insecurities or our own judgments of others.

That’s what we’re really seeing more than what other people think. And again, if they do think that, all right, well, again, I’m not for everyone. What are you gonna do? I’m not vanilla ice cream. I am tin roof sundae with chocolate and nuts. Not for everyone, right?

Last thing I wanna tell you about this topic is I want you to pause on occasion when this comes up for you and ask yourself, why does it feel so important to me to fit in with this group?

Are these the people that I really wanna be like? And I don’t mean this in a judgmental way, okay? I don’t mean that you should step back and go, I don’t wanna be like them anyway.

But in this certain area of your life, you may not. I was coaching a woman today who said, when I go out with my friends now and they eat double fudge brownie sundaes and I don’t eat one, they think I’m weird and they feel now guilty eating it in front of me and I just don’t fit in with them anymore.

And I want you to ask yourself, is their lifestyle when it comes to food and health, et cetera, what I want? And I don’t mean that they’re unhealthy. I just mean, is eating brownie sundaes going to create what I want in my life?

Because if you want to fit in with everyone, the truth is the majority of people are struggling, right? Like, we’ll just take food as the example. The majority of people are eating in ways that they know don’t serve them, and they would even say they wish they could change their habits.

They just don’t know how. They just haven’t been able to. So why do you want to fit in with those people who even themselves admit that they wish they could be different?

Okay. You have to be willing to not fit in. You’re going to be the odd one out. You’re going to be the weird one. If you’re going to go achieve goals that are hard to achieve, or you’re going to change habits that are hard to change, or you’re going to just own being who you are instead of just being like everyone else.

You’re going to stand out. But isn’t that what you want in the end? Don’t you want to be your best version of you? Your best version of you and my best version of me are not the same.

That means we wouldn’t necessarily fit in with each other in every area. Okay? But I think that the more you figure out who you truly are, who are you meant to be, what are you capable of becoming, what do you want to create, and then you lean into being her or being him, the more you will find that you don’t fit in.

And that does not mean you’re on the wrong track. In fact, in most cases, in many cases, it will mean you’re on the right path and you just have to be willing to not fit in. All right, thanks for joining me today, everybody. I will see you next week. Have a beautiful, amazing week.

If you like this podcast, I would be so honored if you would share it with your friends, screenshot it, tag me on the socials so I can re-share, leave me a review, make sure you’re following or subscribed to the podcast. That’s the most important thing. And again, thank you for being here. I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.