• 1 • We Are All Outsiders

You may not be able to relate to all of my story, but it’s not unique to me and how I experience the world. Maybe you don’t live in a different country like Korea, the United States, or Germany. Maybe you don’t stand out in your high school yearbook or in family photos. Maybe you don’t get asked where you’re really from. Regardless, we’ve all experienced times when we’ve felt like an outsider, moments when we’ve stepped into a room, felt the silence, and thought to ourselves, I don’t belong here.

The belonging conversation seems to be taking place everywhere right now. It’s happening around kitchen tables, in classrooms, and in boardrooms throughout the world. Belonging is a hot topic because so many people are realizing that having a seat at the table isn’t enough. We may have diversity in our workplace, and we may even have programs that give people the opportunity to be included. But despite these advancements, we have to keep pushing as there are still so many people who don’t feel that they belong. And if this is the situation we are experiencing, we need to question if we even want a seat at that table, or if it is time for us to build a new one.

To respond to this reckoning, many organizations have made diversity, equity, and inclusion a growing priority in their organizational strategies. The realization that we need to move from inclusion to belonging is finally rising in the workplace. But like anything new, we need to begin by asking different questions: Is our culture designed for people or with people? Is our culture something we as individuals have to adapt to in order to fit in, or is our culture a sum of each of our individual parts? Who is making the decisions about what our culture is and what it should be?

Creating cultures of belonging has been my forever work since, well, forever. No matter if I was working with teens, adults, artists, nonprofits, or corporations in the United States or globally, all of my jobs since entering the workforce have entailed designing and scaling cultures of belonging and ensuring everyone has equitable access to opportunity. I was asking myself these questions because I knew firsthand what the pain of exclusion feels like. I didn’t want others to experience that pain at home, at work, or in the world at large. To build cultures of belonging, many people skip the most important step. For decades, I know I did. I’m still working on it because belonging is a practice, not a destination. To create safe spaces for others, you must first belong to yourself. To discover others, you must first discover yourself and know who you are and how you want to be seen, heard, and valued on your own terms. You need to ask these same questions about your own life and how you show up in the world. This is the key and critical first step to building a culture of belonging—it starts with you.

It’s in the word itself: BE—LONG—ING. BE is to exist, LONG is the desire, and ING is the continual action. Each of us is actively longing to exist. Belonging begins inside each of us as individuals. It begins with you. This desire binds us together. It is a shared human condition. And in every corner of the world, it is this journey that unites us. But when we feel like an outsider and are denied this right by the systems and cultural norms that have been established that work for some but not for all, it hurts. To find and design new ways to be seen, heard, and valued on our own terms, we need to explore what makes us feel like an outsider.

Maybe you feel like an outsider at home. You feel out of place at a family dinner, or when your teenage kids tell you how uncool you are. Or maybe it happens in your community. You walk into a store, restaurant, or your neighborhood block party and immediately feel like you don’t fit in. Or maybe these feelings arise when you’re at school or at work. You enter your new classroom on your first day to a sea of unfamiliar faces, or you start a new job and you’re introduced to a new community of coworkers.

Your heartbeat spikes. You feel the quiet, cold stares. You feel the eyes looking you up and down like a virtual body scan. All of us experience this feeling at some point in our lives. When I ask people to tell me about a time they felt like they didn’t belong, they usually point to an everyday experience. Their responses start with “I was at work and I had to go to this meeting” or “I was forced to go to this party.” They all end the same: “I felt like there was a giant spotlight on me.” This feeling had little to do with their career, their role, or their stage in life and instead was simply a human response that has been baked in for millennia. These moments that shape our sense of belonging are hardwired in each of us, and many of us have to navigate these experiences on a daily basis. As an example, let’s take a look at my average workday:

• • I wake up (me).
• • Get the kids to school (family).
• • Commute on the Ubahn, the metro in Munich, Germany, where I currently live (world).
• • Go to work (workplace).
• • Go to dinner (community).
• • Come home (family).
• • Go to sleep (me).
• • Repeat.

On any given day, throughout each of these locations and situations, I am weaving in and out of feelings of inclusion to those of exclusion. I am always prepared for the worst while hoping for the best. Because of this uncertainty, my brain and body are constantly on high alert, and these sensations and thoughts could change even within the walls of these experiences.

As I go from meeting to meeting, depending on the participants, shifts take place. In the mornings, for instance, I’m usually the lone American in rooms full of Europeans. When the United States wakes up and I head into virtual meetings, I’m the European in a screen full of Americans. In both situations I feel like the outsider. And this doesn’t stop with the country’s culture, as every meeting room is different. Some days, I am leading a meeting and sometimes I am a participant. Some days, I am the dissenting opinion and other times I am giving virtual high fives. This continues on my train ride home based on who shows up at the same time I do. Maybe it’s as simple as walking onto the platform and getting a warm smile from a toddler in a stroller. Other days, it is me shielding my daughter from a stranger yelling at us to get out of “their” country. Yes, this happens more often than I care to remember, no matter where I am in the world. It’s a roll of the dice.

During each of these moments, the brain categorizes the environment to determine if it’s safe or a threat. This response is part of our DNA, one of our oldest survival mechanisms. When this happens, our fight-or-flight response kicks in. We tense up. Our brains are telling us to run because there is a real and present danger. If it turns out that the perceived environment is safe, we start to calm down. Our heartbeat stabilizes. Things begin to normalize within our bodies. Our shoulders drop. The threat is over. But even so, the experience and pain that comes with it becomes hardwired in us because we never want to be in that situation again. As much as we might try to avoid these moments, they will always be a part of our lives. Feeling like an outsider is an ongoing human experience. And when it happens to us, it doesn’t feel good.

Researchers Geoff MacDonald and Mark Leary published a study in Psychological Bulletin that demonstrates how the feelings of exclusion share the same neural pathways as pain.2 It feels like actual, physical pain. If you’ve experienced this, you aren’t alone. It’s a normal response. It hurts. Often you can feel it before you can name it, because our bodies have been hardwired to tell us this too is dangerous. We go on high alert. Our brain signals that the situation needs immediate attention. This wiring of the physical pain and not feeling a sense of belonging is a danger sign. And we will do anything to avoid this state and not experience that pain again.3

When this happens, we are rooted squarely in survival mode. In response to not wanting to go through the internal panic and experience the pain from exclusion, over time we begin to make changes in an attempt to adapt to our surroundings instead of standing firmly in our Loved Identity. We start changing our hair. We choose different clothes. We change the words we use. Some of us even change our names. But in service of what? We push this pain from that moment down deep into our everyday life. It lingers and festers and grows. And that pain becomes loneliness, sadness, and despair. It turns from a warning into a disease.4 With so many people experiencing this cycle in their lives, a lack of belonging isn’t just a feeling—it’s an epidemic.

Dr. Arline Geronimus defines this prolonged effect of being othered with the term “weathering.” In her book Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life on the Body in an Unjust Society, she shares research gathered from her forty-year career in the public health sector, wrestling with racial and class injustice. Geronimus’s findings demonstrate how being othered and the accompanying stress that comes with it can not only wear us down mentally and emotionally but physically as well. The impact that weathering has on our bodies lowers our defenses, which in turn increases the rate at which we age. In short, othering is a killer. According to Geronimus:

Weathering afflicts human bodies—all the way down to the cellular level—as they grow, develop, and age in a systemically and historically racist, classist, stigmatizing, or xenophobic society. Weathering damages the cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, immune, and metabolic body systems in ways that leave people vulnerable to dying far too young, whether from infectious diseases like COVID-19, or the early onset and pernicious progression of chronic diseases like hypertension. Because of the physiological impacts of unrelenting exposure to stressors in one’s physical and social environment, as well as the high physiological effort that coping with chronic stressors entails, weathering means that relatively young people in oppressed groups can be biologically old.5

To remedy these feelings of exclusion, many of us look to the outside world to define our sense of belonging and fulfill this fundamental human need. We constantly search for proof points of belonging in our daily lives and allow others to define who we are and determine how we are seen, heard, and valued. To find belonging, we look for people that look like us, gravitating toward them as friends and coworkers. We look for social cues of acceptance, and we stay there. We look for moments of affirmation from others, and we go back for more. It is through that social proof of others that we get the feeling of safety. These are my people, we say to ourselves. They get me. This is totally normal.

As if navigating our daily lives wasn’t already complex, we now live in a world where social media hasn’t just made this possible, it has made this probable as it’s curated for extreme sameness. Social media tells us the things we should buy based on our previous shopping history. It tells us the things we should listen to based on our last song. It presents news based on our search history. All of this becomes an illusion of comfort. That people see us. That the world is like us. But sameness is not equity. This algorithm of sameness is dangerous, and we are all paying the price.

These seismic shifts toward sameness are embedded in our interactions with the digital and the physical world. The algorithms identify what we consume and our perception of how the world is and is not. As these small nudges toward sameness compound, when opposing viewpoints, thoughts, ideas, or concepts go against this tsunami of reinforcing information, it feels like we are an outsider. All of the data and information going in seems to be saying that this is the norm. And the norm has been built on systems that work for some but not for all.

Our culture is also an algorithm. It is full of patterns and social cues that work like a predictable system that is reinforced by repeated choices. For example, here in Munich jaywalking is rarely seen, but not for the reasons I thought. I had assumed it was because Germany is such a “rules-based” culture. But what I learned is it’s really about modeling safe behavior for children, and they take that collective responsibility very seriously. I always tell visitors to be aware of jaywalking to avoid strangers screaming “child killers” at them when crossing the road.

When we think about our personal interactions, we do the same thing with the choices that we make. A few years ago, a woman invited me to speak about leadership to a group of executives. Before the speech, she pulled me aside and shared that she was struggling to find her identity at work. Like a lot of people, she told me she was suffering from imposter syndrome: a feeling like even though she had the job, she wasn’t qualified to have a seat at the table.6 She said she didn’t fit into the business world and that she wasn’t “professional” enough. I asked her to focus on the word “professional” and interrogate what it really means. After a long pause, she told me she’d never actually questioned that before. We examined how the term “professional” is viewed differently all around the world and how it changes from company to company and from border to border.

For some, “professional” means wearing a neatly pressed suit, not displaying emotions, and using formal language. For others, it means donning a black T-shirt and Vans, speaking in soundbites, and communicating through memes. “We need to define which aspects of ‘professional’ are meaningful to you,” I told her, “the aspects that bring out your own unique talents so that you can thrive.” A few months after that event, she told me how much of a difference that shift had made for her. Rather than trying to mold or shape-shift to the environment around her, she took a new job and now brings her full self to work, which has created space for others to do the same. Her new-found confidence may not be typical or the same as the other people around her, but it has worth, and it matters.

Although we may feel alone when experiencing these feelings, this woman’s circumstance is far from unique. So often, organizations within their own hiring strategies ask themselves if candidates are a “culture fit,” meaning they would fit in with the existing culture, or a “culture add,” meaning someone who will bring different ideas, perspectives, and experiences to the team. While “culture fit” could accelerate the algorithm of sameness, “culture add” though well-intentioned often puts people in harm’s way. They are often made to feel responsible for transforming the workplace, which can be lonely work when the nature of their role is rooted in pushing boundaries and establishing new ways of doing things within an existing work-place culture.

Social entrepreneur Maggie De Pree wanted to find a new way forward. For years she felt like she couldn’t bring her full self to the workplace. After hearing so many people inside organizations reinforce the narrative they didn’t feel professional enough, she cofounded in 2012 the League of Intrapreneurs. This community provides support for individuals who have been brought into organizations to push forward the most important initiatives of our time around people and the planet. Today the League of Intrapreneurs is comprised of more than twenty thousand changemakers who have committed to doing this courageous and necessary work. “We devalue transformational care-driven roles that are the future of work in favor of transactional work,” she told me in an interview.7 It takes courage to enter rooms knowing full well that people will roll their eyes when these changemakers and culture shifters voice their “wild ideas,” Maggie added. They are often considered “misfits” or “weirdos,” and this courage is under-recognized and severely underappreciated. She wanted to create a safe space where individuals could come as they are to recharge and share ideas and experiences to continue to have the energy to do this work.

Whether we realize it, over time the experiences of people not fully seeing our strengths, valuing our contributions, or allowing our voices to be heard shape the stories we tell ourselves about our own worth. In this way we give away our power. But our power is rooted in our own identity as we define it. When others strip it from our core, the choices we have in life change. This is why we all need to ask the hard questions. If we don’t, we are unintentionally putting our sense of belonging into the hands of others and we end up giving away our power.