Belonging is very important for your personal well-being. Interacting with other people is something that is in our natural need, and if you broaden that a little more, belonging to a group is also something that is part of our natural need. Belonging to a group also makes you more knowledgeable because you can talk to people about your needs.
To make sure you feel like you belong to the group you care about, I'm going to address the need to belong in this article.
Belonging
Joining a group has several benefits. There are several groups you can belong to in 1. For example, you belong to your colleagues at work, fellow entrepreneurs, your group of friends, the people you play sports with, and your fellow moms or dads in the schoolyard.
The advantage of belonging to such a group is that you can take advantage of their knowledge. This can be especially important at work, but also in the schoolyard. We often rely on judgments made by a group, even when it is not in our best interest.
For example, if a majority of a group says it is best to print out a text instead of checking it on a screen while you want to save the trees, you can still go ahead and implement the group's advice.
This may have to do with the fact that collective knowledge of a group is often the right knowledge. For example, scientific experiments show that if a group has to estimate the weight of a cow, the average answer is often the correct answer.
The more different people there are in a group, the closer everyone is to the right answer to such a question. Yet it is difficult to say this for every group. If the average qualities of a group are low, then the answer will also be below average on such a test. Indeed, if people can adjust their answer after hearing what other people are answering, this can actually cause the answers to be even worse and make the group more homogeneous(1).
Only if you as an individual heard the average response of the rest of the group could you observe an improvement in results.
This is also why it is so important to hear opinions from many people before jumping to conclusions about the right solution to a particular problem.
In this way, a group often makes you behave more and more like the group you belong to. For example, at companies with a reorganization, people may react stressed, after which over time everyone who works there is stressed, while at other companies everyone remains calm.
This is also because our opinions and beliefs are influenced by the group to which we belong. Evidence that underlines the opinion or belief is found through the group, and also someone's testimony, someone telling what they experienced, can cause you to adopt their opinion and belief about what happened.
Feeling of not belonging
On the contrary, if you feel like you don't belong, you can't take full advantage of the benefits of belonging to a group. You will not get the sense of security that being part of a group normally gives you.
You don't feel like people in the group you want to belong to also want to support you in achieving your goals or even in achieving the group's goals, such as at work.
Feeling like you belong somewhere often requires only a few things at first. Research shows that if you have the same birthday as someone else you can already feel more connected to that person or even if you are just assigned to a group(2).
Having a common goal often also ensures that you belong to a group in the first place, or at least that you feel that way.
The feeling of not belonging may not always be true because this is a very personal feeling. If you have a strong need to belong, this feeling may be aroused while other members of the group to which you belong believe that you do belong.
Test need to belong
To check if you have a strong desire to belong to a group, you can indicate for the following statements whether or not they are recognizable to you.
- When other people don't seem to accept me, it bothers me.
- I do my best NOT to do things that might make other people reject me or think I'm stupid.
- I often worry about how people think about me.
- I need to feel like I can count on people in emergencies.
- I want to be accepted by others.
- I can't stand being alone.
- I hate NOT seeing my friends for extended periods of time.
- I hate it when people don't inform me of their plans.
- I quickly feel hurt when others don't accept me.
If you recognize yourself in many of these statements, affirmation is important for you to feel a sense of belonging. Unfortunately, this can also cause you to inadvertently exclude yourself.
Recognizing yourself in this list does not automatically mean that you are a shy and insecure person. People with high scores also tend to be extroverts and often agree with other people. You tend to have strong emotions when faced with rejection, have strong values about how relationships are supposed to work and sometimes people with high scores also have characteristics of personality disorders, but by no means always.
Generally, people with high scores are seen as social people by other people(3)(4).
Excluding yourself
Feeling left out can cause you to experience loneliness . Research shows that lonely people often prematurely reject other people who do seek closeness. As mentioned above, people with a high need for affirmation are often actually seen as social, but it doesn't have to feel that way for the needy person.
Perhaps you want confirmation from people in a certain group too quickly. Because that affirmation does not come quickly enough, you feel rejected and, as a result, you often then reject that group or person as well.
This behavior causes the group or that other person to feel rejected as well, and in this way no one actually feels connection.
Confirmation Search
So to seek affirmation, it is actually best to give the affirmation yourself to the other people in the group. By giving affirmation, rather than rejection, you yourself will get the affirmation faster.
Ways to give affirmation include:
- Going beyond business interaction, such as telling something about what you've done in your private time.
- Offer help, such as filling in when someone needs a day off.
- Giving someone the benefit of the doubt (don't be impatient if you want confirmation).
Feeling left out
So feeling left out and actually being left out do not have to be the same things. To avoid feeling left out, you can take the following steps.
Don't be too hard on yourself
You may have already noticed in this article, but a lot of how you see the world is down to your own beliefs and it doesn't have to be recognized at all by those around you. By not being too hard on yourself, but having self-compassion , you can actually reduce the feeling of not belonging.
For example, ask yourself how bad is it now if you don't belong? Not belonging also allows you to pursue your own goals instead of someone else's.
This, in fact, allows you to make a unique contribution to the world or your environment.
Release
The feeling of not belonging can be generated by past anger and negative thoughts about yourself, such as "I'm not good enough." By letting go of these kinds of thoughts and anger, you actually make it much easier to accept yourself and, as a result, you are more likely to feel that you do belong.
What do you want to belong to?
If at some point you feel just right with yourself and can be fine on your own, you can still think about where you actually want to belong. Remember that you get infected by what you hang out with. For example, by hanging out with vegetarians you are much more likely to become a vegetarian, or by hanging out with successful people you are much more likely to become one.
Thinking about this carefully will also help you know which people you want confirmation with and which people you don't.
Also watch this video about belonging:
Want to learn more about mental techniques for accepting yourself and helping others? Then come to the free online hypnosis master class and check out the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training courses.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
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