Imagine this scenario:

You’re at the office and your colleagues are yukking it up about the big sports game that everyone but you seems to have watched the night before. You didn’t watch it because (a) you’re not a sports fan and (b) you had a big cultural celebration with your family. Because you’ve never talked about your culture or how much you hate sports with your work colleagues before, but you also don’t want to feel like the odd one (which you already do!), you smile and nod vigorously, and pretend to know what happened at the game. But you feel like crap as you do this.

Or how about this:

You’re getting ready for an interview for your dream job. You’ve been wearing your hair naturally for the past few weeks and loving it. You briefly consider keeping it that way for the interview, but you worry it might not be “professional” enough and that you won’t be taken seriously. In the end you decide to straighten your hair for the interview in the hopes it’ll help you land the job. You feel frustrated that you have to this, but you do it anyway.

If you can relate to either one of these scenarios, you’re showing up as what I call your Performing Self. By “performing” I mean that life is a stage and you’re an actor on the stage, putting out a curated image of yourself. To put it simply, performing means that you’re changing who you are and masking your Authentic Self to gain social acceptance even though you don’t want to do this — and it feels awful to do!

I know firsthand how difficult it can be to perform all day long, day after day (as I laid out in my book, The Authenticity Principle). I struggled with being authentic for years because I was deflecting bias by putting out a curated image of myself and performing. It can feel disempowering and exhausting to constantly change how you dress, behave, speak, and more in order to “fit in”, or to shield against judgment or bias. So what can you do?

In this video, I share exactly how to push out of your Performing Self so that you can live your best, authentic life.

Watch now!

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Through belonging, we experience feelings of acceptance, love, connection, meaning, purpose, inclusion, kinship, and more. But belonging actually isn’t about fitting in, which some of us mistakenly believe it to be — it’s about being accepted for who we are.

In Brené Brown’s important book on vulnerability, The Gifts of Imperfection, she shares her insights on the significance of belonging, which she defines as “the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us.” She notes that “fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

As Brown eloquently highlights, we are inclined to alter our behavior to become whoever we need to be in order to fit in and be accepted into a tribe. Our desire to belong may cause us to perform so that we can better access the experiences and feelings that come with membership in a tribe. The challenge is that, when we perform in order to belong, we’re not accepted based on who we truly are. It’s a false sense of belonging, which causes us to feel continued pressure to conform and mask — because if we don’t, our membership in the tribe may be threatened.

And this difference between fitting in and belonging strikes at the heart of the Authenticity Principle: the Performing Self is about fitting in because you feel that you have to change your behavior or mask who you are in order to be accepted by others, while the Authentic Self and the Adapted Self are about belonging because you’ve chosen to behave in such a way that reflects your authenticity and needs, and others have accepted you on the basis of this truth.

In practicing authenticity and fulfilling your related desire to belong to a range of social tribes, it’s essential that you have a clear understanding of

• why you seek membership in a particular tribe,
• to what extent you are able to be your Authentic Self and Adapted Self in order to belong in that tribe, and
• the negative impact of performing.

Key message here: never let fitting in take the place of true belonging.

***

This post is an excerpt from chapter 4 of The Authenticity Principle: Resist Conformity, Embrace Differences, and Transform How You Live, Work, and Lead. Learn more about the book here.

The post Why “Fitting In” Is Different Than Belonging appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

I’m sure you’ve now heard through many different channels that living authentically is critical for both experiencing joy in life and for experiencing overall wellbeing. So given its importance, why is it that so many of us struggle with living more authentically?

Based on my work and research, I can you that it ties back to the relentless pressure that so many of us feel to change who we are in order to be accepted by our friends and family, by our work colleagues, and more. We want to experience belonging but at times we feel like we have to change who we are to do so.

But there is a way to be more authentic even in the face of the pressure to conform.

In this video, I take you through a powerful framework I set out in my book The Authenticity Principle, which you can leverage in any situation or moment. This framework will help you to unlock your authenticity and navigate the pressure to conform in a way that feels truly empowering.

Watch now!

The post The Three Selves — The Secret to Living Authentically appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

When I was a little kid, the Toronto neighborhood I lived in was very multicultural. My neighbors included people from across a range of cultures, as well as lots of other South Asian families. It felt safe and comfortable. It felt like home.

But then my parents decided to move.

In my new neighborhood I stood out, but not in a good way. I was surrounded by affluent white kids, who weren’t used to cultural diversity. Let’s just say that my long black braids, dark brown skin, simple clothes, and chicken curry lunches were not well embraced.

I endured a truckload of racist bullying, which caused me to want to reject my cultural heritage. And unfortunately, this was in tandem with the challenges I was having on the home front with my parents in reconciling the clash between my Canadian identity and my Punjabi identity.

I felt lost, confused, and trapped between cultures — what I call my “ethnic identity crisis” — like I didn’t belong anywhere. This experience continued for many years until I changed the way I think about my identity and about what it means to find belonging.

In this video, I talk about my challenges with my ethnic identity and what led me to find peace in who I am.

Watch now!

The post Confused About Your Cultural Identity? Here’s What You Can Do appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

For many years, about once a year, I would find myself facing what I call an “ethnic identity crisis” — specifically, a feeling of being confused about who I was ethno-culturally. In these moments, I would ask myself, “Who am I?” And I didn’t know the answer.

My crisis was usually triggered by a feeling of disconnection from the people I was spending most of my time with, whether that was mostly White people through my work (given that I was, and still am, working in a largely homogeneous corporate world) or mostly South Asian people (the ethno-culture of my parents).

Luckily, this now happens to me only occasionally, and when it does, I know what to do. I call my sister Komal, who knows that I need a listening ear while I share my confusion and hurt. In talking out how I’m feeling, I’m able to exhale — because I realize something that gives me great comfort: that I’m a mishmash of cultures, and that’s perfectly fine.

But it took me a long time to get there.

Growing Up Confused

I grew up in a household run by my Punjabi parents, who immigrated from India in the early 1970s. While my siblings and I were born in a very multicultural neighborhood, when I was eleven, my parents moved us to what I jokingly refer to as the “whitest neighborhood they could find.” They could have moved us to where most of their Punjabi friends lived, but they believed that moving to a White neighborhood would benefit us by teaching us to shift cultural codes, giving us access to more powerful networks, and providing us with a better education.

They weren’t wrong about the benefits, but this also meant growing up around mostly White kids as one of the only Brown kids in my school. I was immersed in White culture at school and at play, and I also experienced extensive racist bullying. Both of these experiences were very challenging. My ethno-cultural differences were vilified — the direct and indirect message was that being Brown was “bad.” So I learned to mask and change aspects of my identity that attracted racism.

I constantly felt like a “loser” and desperately wanted to fit in with my White peers. I would beg my parents to allow me to do the things that my White peers were doing, like going on sleepovers, staying out late, and dating boys. But my parents, who themselves were still adjusting to life as new Canadians, struggled with how to raise us and how much autonomy to give us. In fact, they oscillated between moments of being relaxed and hip (“Have all your friends over anytime you want!”) and being excruciatingly strict.

I also received mixed messages about when it was okay to act “Canadian” versus when I had to adhere to Punjabi ways of behaving. For example, as a kid I was (and still am, proudly!) loud, boisterous, extroverted, and feisty. I was rewarded for this behavior at school and with my peers. But this behavior at home attracted all kinds of negative discipline even thought it was, in part, the reason I was excelling academically at school. To say that I was culturally confused would be an understatement. I eventually found myself railing against Punjabi culture (for example, I deliberately avoided making friends with other Indian kids). I didn’t want to be Punjabi and didn’t see myself as such.

The moments when I felt the best about who I was happened when I was surrounded by friends from other recent immigrant communities, other kids of color in particular (mostly West Indian kids). I felt connected to them because they too were experiencing what I was going through, and there was a similar spirit to Punjabi culture of family-centeredness, community, spirituality, music, and food. But I knew I was just a guest in those communities no matter how much I was drawn to them.

All of this to say that starting from a young age, I felt like an outsider. And this feeling stayed with me throughout my twenties, and even into my thirties.

Redefining Belonging

Teaching about culture and inclusion for a living has helped me to develop a clear understanding of what was happening to me as a child and even as an adult: a struggle to find belonging.

In researching the experience of belonging for The Authenticity Principle, I learned that we all crave belonging as humans — it’s as natural as breathing. As animals, human beings are a tribal species, and we want to feel like we’re truly part of a group. But for me, growing up feeling like an outsider in a number of cultures (including being othered and bullied by some), thwarted that basic feeling of belonging, and sometimes still does.

Thankfully, after many years, I’ve developed a different approach to how I view belonging, which has helped me to feel more grounded in how I self-identify. I’ve learned that belonging doesn’t have to be viewed in a binary way — and that for most of us, an “I’m either X or Y” way of thinking simply won’t work.

I know now that don’t have to identify as 100% Canadian, 100% Punjabi, or 100% anything — it’s ok to be a mishmash. And, in fact, being a mishmash of cultural identities is beautiful.

There are aspects of several cultures that I feel connected to, and it’s in those aspects that I focus my attention and find my sense of belonging. I find these moments in many different places. For example, I can be on a train in India and feel profoundly that I’m with my people. I can also be at a bhangra jam with amazing music and dear friends and feel profoundly that I’m with my people. Or I can be watching a Team Canada hockey game and be bursting with joy (ok, I’ll admit that I only watch gold medal hockey games, but still!). There are countless situations that I feel truly comfortable and authentic in, and when I recognize that feeling, I know that’s what true belonging is.

At the end of the day, choosing the aspects of the cultures that I want to embody and that work for me is how I find my belonging. Mostly, I identify as a woman of color, because the impact of my gender and racial identity has been instrumental in shaping who I am.

If you grew up across cultures, perhaps this is resonating with you. If so, it might be interesting to investigate your own cultural confusion. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What cultural confusion are you feeling?

• What has caused this cultural confusion for you?

• Which aspects of the many cultures that make up who you are do you want to focus on embodying?

• What’s your mishmash of cultures?

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