Namaskar.
Today we are going to discuss this habit of trying to fit in.
Which is the most exhausting thing you can ever do.
And let me start.
By asking you something.
And I want you to actually think about it,
Not just move past it.
When was the last time?
You were completely yourself in a group of people.
Not performing.
Not monitoring what you said before you said it.
Not checking reactions.
Just fully,
Carelessly yourself.
For most people.
The honest answer is not in a while.
Maybe not since childhood.
Maybe not since before you understood that other people were watching and forming opinions about you.
And the exhaustion you feel because of this constant performance is because you are doing two jobs at once.
You are living your life and you are simultaneously managing.
How your life looks to everyone else.
Two jobs,
One body.
No wonder you go to sleep tired.
I spend.
Here surround very wise people in the Himalayan mountains,
Men and women who had very little Live simply.
And were among the most sorted and rested human beings I have ever encountered.
And when I tried to understand why.
Why they are so happy?
I noticed one thing.
They were only doing one job.
They were just being themselves completely.
And without apology.
In every moment,
They were not trying to impress people.
They were truly Expressing.
Who they really are.
So that is what we are going to do.
Talk about today.
First,
Let us be honest about what fitting in actually asks you.
Because it is not a small thing.
It asks you to notice what the group considers acceptable and then adjust yourself to match and when the group changes,
You adjust again.
When you are with different groups,
You adjust differently.
At home,
You are one version.
At school,
You are another.
At workplace,
You are another.
Online you are maybe a third.
And somewhere in all of this shuffling.
There is a real question.
Which is never answered.
Which one is actually me?
That question is important.
We'll come back to it,
But first,
What's the cost of this constant performance or acting or maintaining different types of versions?
The cost is not just your energy.
That is really a big cost.
The deeper cost is when you edit yourself to fit in.
You are training yourself to believe.
That the unedited version.
Is not okay.
Every time you swallow something true and say something more acceptable instead.
A small message goes inward to your subconscious.
Which says The real thing,
The real version of you is not welcome here.
And if that message goes inward enough times.
You start to believe it.
Even when no one is watching.
That is how people end up in their 20s,
30s,
40s and even old age still unable to say what they actually think.
Still monitoring.
Filtering.
Adjusting.
The habit started in your early days.
Fitting in felt like survival.
And it did feel like survival.
I am not dismissing that.
I also went through that.
When you are in school,
The social group is your entire world.
Being excluded feels genuinely dangerous because to a young brain,
It is.
You are wired to belong.
That is not weakness,
That is biology.
The instinct to fit in kept your ancestors alive when being cast out of the tribe meant death.
But here is what your biology did not account for.
You are not going to die from not being liked by the particular group you happen to be in right now.
You are going to die a slow different kind of death.
If you spend the next 60 years making yourself smaller to fit spaces that were never built for the full version of you,
That's like a slow poison.
And peer pressure has a strange trick.
It makes you feel like the pressure is coming from other people and partly it is but mostly This is the part nobody tells you.
The pressure is coming from you.
And let me explain what I mean by that.
Other people are not actually spending that much time thinking about you.
I know that sounds harsh and maybe a little deflating but it is also If you really let it land,
The most liberating thing you will hear all week.
The person you are convinced is judging every move you make is mostly just managing their own anxiety about what everyone thinks about them.
Everyone in the room.
Is secretly watching everyone else for cues about whether they themselves are okay.
How are they being perceived by others?
It is like a room full of people pretending to be confident,
Secretly waiting to see if someone else is going to go first and be real.
And because everyone is waiting,
Nobody goes first.
And the performance continues.
It is the story you are running inside about what would happen if you showed up differently.
What would they think?
What would they say?
Kurtipulla way.
Would you be left standing there exposed without the protection of belonging?
Would they find you weird?
These kind of assumptions run in your head.
And that fear is old.
And it is worth examining.
Think about the moments in your life when you did show up genuinely.
When you said something a little unexpected or admitted something true or maybe just stood in a room as yourself without the performance,
What actually happened?
I would guess that one of two things happened.
Either people responded better than you expected because authenticity is magnetic and everyone in that room was hungry for permission to stop performing.
Or some people did not respond well and you discovered something useful.
Those particular people were only interested in the performance.
Not the person.
Which is not loss,
It is information.
There is a question underneath all of this that hardly anyone.
.
.
Is asking because everyone is too busy managing the external.
The question is,
What do you actually value?
Not what your group values.
Not what your parents want you to value.
Not what gets the most approval.
What do you,
When you are completely alone and completely honest,
Actually find interesting,
Beautiful,
Important,
Or worth spending your time on?
You might not know the answer yet.
That is completely fine.
But the fact that most people have never sat with that question not because They are shallow,
But because the social environment is so loud,
The question cannot be heard.
That it is worth noticing.
Because Here is what I have observed across many years of sitting with people of all ages and from every kind of background.
The people who are most comfortable in their own skin.
Are not the ones who are the most liked.
They are the ones who know most clearly what they value.
They have a center,
A core and because they have a center The social pressure can move around them without moving them.
They can be kind.
They can be considerate.
They can care about others.
But they do not dissolve into the group.
The group dissolves around them.
The wild flowers I think about when I think about real belonging are not the ones that changed their color to match the other flowers.
They are the ones that bloomed so completely in their own color.
That they became unmistakable.
And the forest was richer for it.
So you are not supposed to be the same as everyone around you.
You are supposed to be the fullest possible version of what you actually are.
And the strange paradox is that When you do that,
You find your people.
Not a crowd who tolerates a performance,
A smaller number of who recognize the real thing,
The real you.
And would you not?
Like to be surrounded by people who value you as you are?
Let us come down from the ideas and talk about what this looks like in your actual life.
On your actual weekdays.
You are not going to be able to stop caring what people think overnight.
That is not realistic and I would not ask you to try.
The social instinct is deep.
What you can do is start noticing the gap.
The gap between what you actually think and what you say instead.
The gap between what you actually want to do.
And what you go along with.
The gap between the version of you that exists when no one is watching.
And the version that shows up in public.
Just notice the gap.
Simple.
You do not even have to close it yet.
But naming it honestly is the beginning.
In small moments,
In low stakes situations.
Start to close it a little.
Say the thing you actually think.
Not aggressively and not to shock anyone.
Just because it is true.
See what happens.
Build evidence slowly.
That the real version of you is survivable.
In the world.
And then you notice yourself doing something solely because of what others might think.
When there is nothing in you.
That actually wants to do it.
Ask yourself one question before you do it.
Just a simple question.
Is this mind?
Is this really me or is this the fear?
You do not always have to act on the answer.
But knowing the answer.
Keeps you honest with yourself.
The people in your life who are genuinely comfortable,
Genuinely at ease.
Just watch them.
They are not the ones who are most liked in school.
They are the ones who decided at some point,
Maybe,
Consciously.
Maybe not.
They were going to spend their energy being themselves rather than managing their image.
That decision.
Made once and then made again every day.
Is the foundation.
Of every good thing that follows.
So,
Here is what.
I want to leave you with.
Fitting in is not the goal.
Belonging is the goal.
And belonging is what happens.
When the real you shows up.
And finds people who see it and stay.
That is a completely different thing from fitting it.
Putting in is shrinking yourself to match the space.
Belonging is finding a space.
That is big enough.
For what you actually are.
You were born as something specific.
You are unique.
And that's not a mistake.
That's not a work in progress that needs to be approved by a committee of your peers before it counts.
Something specific.
And unrepeatable.
The universe will not produce another version of you,
Another one of you.
And that Specificity.
That uniqueness is worth knowing.
It is worth protecting.
And it is eventually worth sharing with people around you without apology.
May you live.
A blissful life.
Namaskar.
