371-The Safety of Conformity

Being different in a world that thrives on conformity can be hard and cause a lot of suffering.

Have you ever thought:  “but I felt much more confident when my body was smaller!”

When confidence is shaken by the size of your body, it’s not confidence you were experiencing: it was the safety of compliance. 

You felt safe because you had the thought you were protected from your fear of judgment and rejection.

The Safety of Conformity

When you seek conformity instead of accepting yourself and your difference from the “norm” you consistently:

• watch and monitor your conformity
• always wonder, “Am I enough?”
• work harder to meet the norm
• your happiness and life enjoyment is dependent on what others think of you.
• Feel constantly anxious… fear of losing acceptance because of missing out on conformity.

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on the Safety of Conformity:

• What is the safety of conformity
• Why we do not seek to conform in all parts of our life
• The anti-dote to safety of conformity

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Program

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Transcript

The Safety of Conformity

This is episode 371 of the Beyond the Food Show, and today we wanna talk about being different and why it is difficult for many of us to be different, and I’m gonna teach you about that through a concept that I created recently that is called the Safety of Conformity. So if you’re different, you gotta want to stay and listen to this whole podcast. Stay tuned.

Hey, my sisters welcome back to the podcast. We’re gonna talk about being different today, now being different. Is wide open, being different from your body size, being different in your looks, being different in your ability, being different in your skin color, being different in any possible way. So few. Think of yourself as someone different, and you are. Struggling with being different. You definitely want to stay tuned. I am going to explain to you why it is difficult in our current society to be different. And I’m going to introduce the topic by giving you an example that many of us share as a common experience in this community of going beyond the food.

Have you ever said, but I felt so much more confident when my body was smaller. I said that probably dozens of time, and I heard it hundreds of time from my client. Here’s the thing, what we felt back in the days when we said what, I felt so much more confident when I was smaller, when my body was smaller, what we felt wasn’t confidence. It was the safety of conformity. We felt safe, not confident, and we confuse the both. We confused safety and confidence, and when I say we felt safe, we felt safe because we had the thought that we were protected from fear and judgment and rejection. When we were smaller, so for sure living in a society that is focused on the thin ideal, a society that is fat phobic when you are in a larger body that doesn’t fit the thin ideal. there is a risk for you to be judged and criticized and even rejected, so you feel unsafe, and that’s what being different feels in today’s society. It feels unsafe. It’s not intrinsically bad to be different. It is for sure uncertain, unsafe, risky because you are exposing yourself voluntarily or not depending on the type of difference you are to criticism, judgment, and even rejection.

And I wanna say that. Women, people self-identified as women are uniquely affected by being different because women are socialized that are intrinsic value. Our intrinsic worth is coming from other people’s opinion of us. We are told directly or indirectly that in order for us to be valuable, to be good girls, good women, we need to meet other people’s expectations.

We are socialized to comply. With our body size to comply with our look. I’m 47 and I see the message all the time that I should be putting anti-aging stuff on my face and I should be covering my white hair, right? That. For me to please the world, I need to hide any type of aging sign, because we are socialized as women to comply to young, beautiful, and thin.

And it goes beyond the body and the age. As women, we are socialized to comply way back when we were in school with our grades. Right. We have to have good grades. We have to be good student and not disturb the class, and even, I’ll go back to my corporate days. For all of you who work in the corporate world, we are socialized as women in a work environment to not make any noise.

Not disturb the room, don’t say things that people don’t wanna hear. Right. We are socialized to comply to whatever standard are set for women in the particular environment. and I wanna be clear, like I’m talking to women and this shows about women, but men on the other hand are also socialized.

They’re just socialized to. Other standard and other, ideology. For an example, a man is socialized to provide, to self-actualize, to hide their emotion. Now, there’s a ton of coaches that coach men that have that conversation for men. So don’t think that socialization to compliance is only a. Woman thing.

is both a men and a woman thing, but just socialize to different standards. What’s different for us is that we are socialized to comply to the standards where men are not socialized to comply. They’re socialized to be who they are meant to be. So for us, it’s an extra layer that we need to. Build in ourselves when we are different to seek our own validation instead of the validation from the external. And that’s the work of body image, right? If I was to. Simplify the work of body image. It’s about building your own authority, your own autonomy, so you’re no longer looking outside of you for confirmation that your body is right, but you are giving that to yourself.

So it’s not easy for women to be different than what everybody around us. Thinks we should be to be different from the social norm. Now, in some aspect of our being different,

it’s actually sometimes things that we’re proud of. For an example, for me being different. And labeling myself and being labeled as a feminist doesn’t cause me any suffering because it’s not something when people label me as a feminist that makes me feel that something is wrong with me. It’s actually something that I’m proud of.

But on the other hand, for almost 30 years, when you talk to me about my weight and being different than the social norm around the size of my body, that caused me a lot of suffering. Why is that? We only see conforming. When we think being different means something is bad about us, that we are less than.

Because of that difference, we are less valuable. We are less virtuous because of that difference.

Now this is helpful for us to understand that. Not every bits that are different about us are causing us the same level of suffering, because when we can examine our thoughts and our belief about the things that we don’t give a shit, we’re actually proud to be different. Like me being a feminist. And what I think about feminism versus the thoughts and the belief that I have about my body weight and the size of my body, the reason why the different being different in my size and my body was causing me so much suffering is because.

Of the thoughts and the belief that I had around my weight and my size, what I chose to believe about body weight and body size is what triggered the suffering. So for an example, we’ll go back to feminism. My, my thoughts about being a feminist are actually. This is something really cool. This is something to be proud of.

This is something that makes a difference in the world. That is being a feminist helps other women claim their power in a world that disempower them. Feminism helps women move forward. These are thoughts that have been thinking and believing about feminism. Since I’m 15, 16 years old, since I started into the world and being aware of feminism, I’ve always had these belief and these thoughts, and in part it’s because in my family, in my social structure, I was surrounded by women that were. Strong in their power that were themselves proud to be feminists. So being a feminist in my world, in my environment was something cool. But my socialization, I. To body and weights as a woman was completely different. The same women that were strong and independent and. In the eighties was still something special.

They were all working and earning money, right? You guys, this is in the eighties. That’s like 40 years ago. Like you gotta think about that. That was like the edge all women earning money, like this is just 40 years ago. It’s amazing every time I think about that. But anyway, when. The same group of women, my family, my friends, and my surrounding had a completely different kind of thoughts and belief around body weight because they were all on a diet.

They were all trying to be smaller in shrinking their body. In fact, my second diet in my life when I was 15, I did it with all of my aunts and my cousin. We were a group of 20 women all dieting together. So because of my thoughts of being shameful and it meaning that I’m not trying hard enough, that I’m lazy, then being different than the ideal of thinness caused me a lot of suffering because I knew what people thought and people said about fat people.

I didn’t want people to think these same thoughts about me, so I myself thought that being fat was the worst thing that could ever happen. So for sure when I was in a larger body, when I wasn’t thin, I. I felt completely this empowered. I didn’t feel safe. I felt insecure. I felt doubtful. I felt I gotta fix this.

Oh my God, my life is terrible, and so on and so forth. Because when you comply, when you are in a smaller body, when you are able of all your limbs, when you are white in a white supremacist society, when you are. Like when you fit the ideal, you don’t have to worry about criticism, about judgment. You don’t have to deal with it.

You don’t even have to worry about it, let alone deal with it. Conforming doesn’t require very much of someone. However, now let me just precise before I go to the next step. It doesn’t require very much. From an emotional standpoint, it actually doesn’t require you to feel unsafe, uncertain, have to change your thoughts and your belief, like when you conform.

Yeah, when you think about the body, yeah, it does require effort for you to shrink your body and maintain yourself on a diet and shrinking your body, but emotionally it’s easy. On the other hand, living in a larger body in a different body does require a lot more of emotional and mental efforting in order for you to relieve yourself from the suffering.

But when you’re conforming, what it does is it makes your emotion dependent of others. I’ll come back to my example at the very top of the episode when I said, right, but I felt so much more confident when my body was smaller. That confident feeling is dependent on the size of your body, and when you lose that size of the body, then that confidence washes away.

So as soon as you’re not able to meet the conformity anymore, then the feeling of safety and happiness washes away. In a way, you could say that your experience of your life is not in your own control, and that is so true when it comes to body size. That the way you experience life, right? If you are having a happy life or an unhappy life, is not really in your control because it depends on the size of your body.

And as many of you know, listening to this podcast, we think we can control the size of our body, but we can but think about. People who are neurodivergent, people whose brain. Thinks in a way that doesn’t conform with the linear way that people expect brains to think, right? They’re thinking differently.

It’s completely out of their control. They’re born with these neural pathway wired the way they are, and people like me that are conforming in the way we think. I’m a very linear thinker. It’s not in my control.

Like, I’m just born this way. So the way we experience life when we try to fit in conformity and we live with thoughts and belief that conformity is the solution, it’s the place to be, and it’s the safety to avoid being different. The experience of our life is not in our control. So we can almost say that the conformity, seeking conformity and the feeling of confidence, the fake confidence we get, which is really the safety of conformity, is almost an illusion because we can’t control it in most cases. And if we think we can, it’s just an illusion. The safety of a conformity in a way. I like to think of it as an illusion. Because what is the standard today that we all seek to hamme? Again, we’ll take the analogy of the body size. We’ll change tomorrow. I guarantee you the standard of the body today will be different in 25 years from now.

What is the expectation today? May not be there tomorrow. So it’s elusive. You are not in control because the elusive happiness, confidence you feel when you are working so hard to conform to the standard. If the goalposts change that happiness and that confidence again washes away. So here’s my proposition to you today.

Instead of seeking to conform and have this elusive safety and confidence. What if you decided of your own standard in your life? What if you chose. What you want to become and what you want to measure yourself against. Now, when I propose that to my client, there’s typically a blank space there because as women socialize, do not divert from the standard and from what other people want from us. Having to create our own standard is not something that we are familiar with, something that we have experienced and something that we even have skills for. And the predominant skill that is required for you to create your own standard is self authority. Self authorization. This ability to decide for yourself, to authorize yourself to think what the hell you want.

It’s a skill. And I have a podcast on the feed that’s titled Self Authorization, so I would encourage you to scroll on the feed and find it, I’m gonna give you a few. On the side notes, iTune, if you’re listening to this on iTune, a number of months ago, iTune decided to remove the podcast number episode in front of the title.

So I used to be able to tell you, scroll up to podcast number 249, and then you would easily find it and be able to listen to it. I can’t do that anymore because they remove. Unilaterally the number in front of the podcast episode, so you’re gonna have to scroll through the feed and find the podcast title, self authorization.

And let me just tell you, I. That it’s a skillset is you have to build the ability to be the own authority in your life, and that’s gonna be the byproduct of a lot of discomfort. So for an example, I’ll come back to body size because that’s one of our common area. In order for you to be at peace with your body in a.

We’ll say in a bigger body, in a fatter body, in a plus size body, you are gonna have to decide to believe all bodies are good bodies. And that is not the traditional way that society thinks about bodies. That’s not how you were socialized years ago. Hence why you’re struggling with your body image today.

So you’re gonna have to go through the process. Of rewiring your brain, training your brain. To believe that all bodies are good bodies, or my favorite one when it comes to body neutrality, I have a body to experience life, not to be a sign of my worth. That’s what we call mindset work. That’s why. All of my programs start with mindset work, because I know the endpoint, I know the struggle, right?

I’ve been doing this long enough that I now know I have to give you the mindset tool first. So when you walk into. Making peace with your body or with food. You know how to change the belief to become the your own authority in your life, in order for you to stop the suffering and be at peace with being different, to be able to accept yourself in order for you.

To no longer seek the safety of conformity, the illusion of happiness and confidence because you’re conforming to the standard in the particular environment you’re in. The work that needs to done is accepting what is right now while still moving forward and still working on creating a better life. And building the skillset to be your own authority in your life, so you no longer seek outside opinion, outside standard.

You create your own standard and you seek to meet yourself in the way you want to live. And be example in your body or who you wanna be in your work. Do you wanna be the voice of difference? You want to be the voice of change? Or do you wanna be the voice of conformity? Right? This is from the corporate role, but I could do the same analogy when it comes to body image.

I wanted to talk to you about that because I use this analogy more and more, you’ll hear me use the term, the safety of conformity more and more, and for those of you who have been long time listener, I’ve been talking about that for a couple of years now, and I’m receiving a lot of question about it and what it means.

So I wanted to put this on the feed. So you have something to refer to when I talk about the safety of conformity. But most important, I want you to take some time today, tomorrow, and days to come to think about how much you seek to conform, how much of. The struggle, the discomfort, the despair,

the suffering you are experiencing is caused by you seeking to conform to something you were never meant to be. You’re trying to twist and bend yourself to meet someone else’s standards and someone else’s expectation. When you are meant to be this other way, you are meant to be different. And that was my life for 30 years with my body.

I was meant. To take space, to be big, to be tall, to be present, to be fat. That’s what I was meant to be. It started at 12 when I grew almost a foot in a year, and I started to have a belly, and I started to have broad shoulder. That’s who I was meant to be my whole life. But instead of accepting that, And making that who I was for the next 25 years.

And from 13 to 39 40 years old, I tried to end myself into conforming to the thin ideal,

and that caused me a ton. Suffering that I could have avoided would I had just accepted that I was meant to be different. Now I was 12 and 13 years old. I didn’t have the mental awareness and capacity to do that, but today I am. Today I don’t try to fix myself anymore. I accept who I am and my differences and my.

Quirks and I’m proud of them. I’m proud of my accent. I’m proud of the fact that I don’t speak English like everyone else. I don’t formulate sentence like everyone else. I am not. I’m tall. When I walk into a room, Huck, I move space. Everybody looks at me. It’s just what it is because I’m six foot tall and I’m built like.

A white person, not just in the size of my belly, but the structure of my body. I’ve got wide shoulders and I’ve got big arms. I was meant to be this way. This is who I am, and trying to be anything else’s, It’s not something that I aim for anymore. I have opinions and I share my opinion with the world, and that causes people to be upset with me, and I’m okay with that.

So I’m encouraging you to look in your life where you’re trying to conform, and is it possible that if you, simply with the help of me as your coach, but if you would accept your difference. Claim your authority and be proud of your difference, your life would be a lot better. That’s the work we do in my world. If you wanna do some of this work with me. I’d love to work with you inside of an diet at your life, and I wanna say it’s the same parallel for those of you that are professional. In my professional business where I train professional, I teach coaches and professional to do coaching differently and to do it in a way that’s aligned for them.

So if you’re different and you want to be okay with your difference and make it who you are and be successful with it, I’m here to help you. I Love you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast episode.