MMS_BeingSeenwithoutShapeShifting_AUDIO
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] Because real confidence isn't about being seen. It's about not disappearing when you are being seen.
Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and this is Mindset Medicine. February's monthly theme is Confidence in practice. I really feel this is strong. Confidence isn't something you either have or you don't have. It's something that you have to practice, reinforce and embody. Over time this month, we're moving confidence out of the head and into lived experiences, into decisions, boundaries, visibility, and how you stay with yourself when pressure is present.
Not confidence as a vibe, not confidence as performance, but confidence as something real, something practiced in ordinary moments. So let's talk about that. There's a moment that happens for a lot of people. The second that we are [00:01:00] seeing or more visible, when you're in a room, when the decision is yours, when eyes are all on you, you might feel this subtle pull to adjust this little sense of discomfort.
To soften what you're trying to say. Maybe to explain a little more than necessary, which we talked about last time, to smooth the edges so no one feels uncomfortable. Most of the time it happens so fast that we barely even notice it. That's not a confidence problem. It's shape shifting, and I wanna be clear about this.
From the start shape shifting doesn't mean that you're fake. It means that you've learned how to stay safe, connected, and accepted in environments where being fully yourself didn't always feel possible. But here's where confidence starts to erode. Not because you don't know who you are, not because you're not capable, but because being seen slowly starts costing you [00:02:00] pieces of yourself.
This episode is about what it looks like to stay connected with yourself. When visibility increases, when you're out there and everybody sees you, and to be present without performing clear, without overexplaining, but solid without self betrayal, because real confidence isn't about being seen. It's about not disappearing when you are being seen.
So let's talk about what shape shifting really is. It isn't dramatic. It's not lying, it's not being fake, and it's not something that most people do on purpose. It's small. It's little adjustment. It's a little automatic, and sometimes it's unintentionally funny. Years ago, I was walking confidently down a hallway at work.
I was feeling professional, I was composed, I was doing my thing. When one of my male colleagues just started giggling a [00:03:00] little bit from the back and it wasn't stuttle, it was eventually full on into, I can't hold it together, giggling before I could ask what was going on. He gently turned me around, quietly fixed my skirt because my skirt was tucked into my underwear and my butt was fully out.
So yes, sometimes we think we're holding it all together and we're absolutely not. But here's the deeper part of that story. For years in my life, I spent an enormous amount of energy trying to fit in everywhere, trying to read the room, adjusting my tone, becoming the chameleon. And because of that, I didn't actually know my own voice.
I didn't know what I thought. I didn't know what I believed. I didn't know where I ended and other people's expectations began. I shape shifted in every moment, in every environment at work, [00:04:00] with friendships, with my family, with professional spaces, and underneath all of that I had a low self-esteem and a constant sense of never quite belonging, which makes sense because when we're always adjusting.
Fitting in. There's no solid place for us as individuals to land. That's what shape shifting really is. It's not about clothes or tone or behavior. It's about survival. It's a nervous system that's saying you better blend in. Don't stand out. You gotta be acceptable. Don't give anyone a reason to reject you.
For a long time, I lived in that performance and perfection. Well, I thought it was perfection, right? I tried to say the right things. I tried to look the right way. I tried to be impressive enough, polished enough, safe enough. I didn't realize how exhausting that [00:05:00] was until I stopped. Over the last decade of my life now as I'm ending my fifties, I've worked intentionally to be as authentic as I can be at home with friends and at work.
And what surprised me the most was how much lighter everything felt. One of the hardest things for me was shooting videos for all my social media without makeup, because I thought people would judge me. But I found out if I put my sunglasses out, go stand out in the sun. Nobody could really tell. Anyway.
I was holding myself back. So without a script just showing up, I just did it. It was uncomfortable. I was afraid people were gonna reject me, that I might be misunderstood, and that maybe some people thought I was foolish or unprepared. And here's the deal. Eventually I didn't care because I practiced it enough.
And people didn't yell at me. I didn't get any kind of negative feedback. Maybe somebody [00:06:00] thought it, but here's the deal. I stepped out of my discomfort and right into myself. All the noise that was going in my head before was just really loud. But once I practiced letting it go, something deep shifted inside me.
I felt more natural. I felt more human. I felt more connected. And I realized something really important. For many years, I had been perceived by people as too hard to approach. I'd been told that I was intimidating. Come on folks. I'm four foot nine. I thought to myself, how could I be intimidating? But I had such a strong self protected veneer in place, and it was hiding the fact that I cared.
It looked like I didn't care. I might have looked put together. I might have sounded confident, but I wasn't accessible to my employees. [00:07:00] And here's the deal. When I stopped performing and I started being present, my connection with my patients and my colleagues and my coworkers really deepened. That's the paradox.
Shape shifting. Feels like you're protecting yourself, but what it's doing is creating distance. Authenticity does feel risky, I'm not gonna lie, but when you are being authentic, it creates a much deeper connection with your friends, your loved ones, your kids, and that's where confidence starts to begin to rebuild.
We don't shape shift because something is wrong with us. Again, we shape shift because at some point it worked. It kept us safe, it kept us included, it kept the peace, and most people learn this very early on, long before we have words for it. We learn it. As a child, you may have noticed what got [00:08:00] rewarded.
You might have learned which version of you was more acceptable, and then your nervous system adapted. That matters because shape shifting is often treated like a character flaw and it isn't. It's survival, especially for people who grew up in environments where being agreeable mattered more than being honest.
Where being helpful mattered more than being whole. In professions like healthcare, leadership, service, work shape-shifting is often repetitively reinforced. We're taught to be calm. Capable, unflappable, and there is value in that, right? Until it turns into self erasure, we start feeling erased. We're not being seen for who we are, and the problem isn't adaptation.
The problem is not knowing when you're allowed to stop shape shifting. So the strategy keeps running. Even when you're safe, even when you're capable, [00:09:00] even when you're allowed to take up space, you keep shapeshifting. This isn't a mindset issue. It's a nervous system habit now, and once you understand that judgment starts to soften, you stop trying to fix yourself, and you start updating this pattern of behavior, the cost of shape shifting doesn't really show up like a crisis.
It might show up quietly. I was never quite feeling settled. Even when things look good on the outside, it might show up in your career and how you show up with competence or respect. But internally, inside of our heads, we're constantly monitoring, constantly adjusting check to see if we're doing something right.
And that folks takes constant, repetitive energy. It's exhausting. And when we're shape shifting, our system is always on. Always watching people's reactions, always editing in real time, always checking our words, always [00:10:00] trying to stay one step ahead of judgment, other people's judgment. And afterwards we feel it.
We feel foggy. We get this drained feeling. We replay conversations in our head, second guessing what we should have said and didn't say. And over time we stop trusting our own voice. You know, preferences feel negotiable when we're shape shifting and our opinions might feel shaky 'cause we're not checking inside and into ourself.
We're not getting in and in alignment. And our sense of self suddenly depends upon the room that we're in instead of who we are. And that is exhausted and it erodes confidence. And we might start trusting the more polished version of ourselves more than the grounded one. This absolutely makes sense as a physician for me over the years, my colleagues, right?
We wanna see that polished version ourself walking [00:11:00] into the exam room. The last five years I was in medicine, people kept telling me, gosh, Dr. Bowlin, you just, you seem so much more relaxed. You seem I can connect with you more. And it, the only thing that changed is I just started being myself. You know, here's the deal.
When we are shape shifting, that version of ourself isn't secure. It's constantly guarded, it's constantly creating distance. People may see confidence, but they don't feel the connection, and there is a way to have visibility with other people without betraying who we are. So when I stopped performing so much, it's something really unexpected happened.
I could suddenly hear myself think. And when we're not busy managing how we land in front of other people or processing what we should say next, or pretending to be somebody [00:12:00] we're not, our intuition gets louder. And it's not dramatic, it's just clear. And sometimes it might say something like this, maybe you shouldn't say that, or.
This isn't your problem to carry. You see visibility without self betrayal starts looking less like bravery and starts looking more like restraint like we've been restraining ourselves, and that takes energy. We don't have to fill in the silence and conversations. We don't have to overexplain ourselves so people get it.
We don't have to feel like we're auditioning to belong. We're just. Quiet present, intuitively allowing our intuition to step up and it's being present. Conversations get easier. We say less. We pause more, and we begin to trust [00:13:00] that we didn't need to manage the room all the time. And here's the thing, nothing falls apart when we do this.
We fear it, but nothing falls apart. In fact, connections, deepen and confidence. Comes from a place of more quietness in our brain, in our mind, in our mouths, in our thoughts. It's steadier, it's relief because we're no longer working hard to be acceptable. We are just being present in ourselves. So let's slow this down for just a second.
Not to analyze, not to fix, just to notice. Where do you feel the pull to adjust who you are, how you think, what you're saying, how you're dressing, how you enter a room, and it might not be obvious, it might be quiet, such as the rooms where your shoulders tighten a little bit. The conversations where you start explaining things before anyone even asked like, [00:14:00] oh, I'm so sorry I'm late.
I had to do this and this and do this and this and this and this. You didn't need to explain yourself. Just say, I'm so sorry I'm late. Because there's no judgment here in the past, having to explain our actions, our lateness, our choices, our lack of choices kept us safe. We felt like people would get us if we explained ourselves away, and it did keep us safe to some extent.
But here the question is simpler. Am I adjusting to say safe or am I trying to stay aligned? Do we adjust who we are, how we dress, how we respond? To stay safe or am I being aligned with what I think, feel, and behave? And you don't have to answer this perfectly. I just want you to start noticing and loosening these patterns of how you think you should be.
And that's how confidence gets practiced. Being seen isn't the same as being validated or liked or agreed with. [00:15:00] Being seen means you stayed connected with yourself while being visible to other people, not disappearing, just to make things easier. And that kind of confidence builds and it doesn't announce itself.
It's not loud and obnoxious, it's quiet, it's steady, and it creates connection. And I'm gonna tell you, once I started doing this. People said my light and my energy was very attractive. People would come up to me as if I was their best friend for years, and I did nothing more than stop trying to fit in and just allow me to come forward.
That's a lot different than it was in the past when people were afraid to approach me because my veneer was so strong, right? My pretending so to speak, to be confident was so loud. Relaxing allows people in and people can feel that presence. They can feel that visibility. They can tell that you're [00:16:00] being yourself and not polished or perfect, just real.
And that kind of confidence can be practiced over and over again. One room at a time, one conversation at a time. So before we close, I want to gently place this episode back into the larger arc of this month. So far, we have talked about confidence as something you practice through actions. We've looked at how confidence shows up in our boundaries, and today we explored what happens when confidence is tested, when we're being seen or being visible.
When being seen creates pressure to perform or disappear versus being authentic. Next week we're gonna take this one step further. We're gonna look at confidence when the stakes are even higher and the outcome isn't guaranteed. Not confidence as certainty, but confidence as self trust. Pressure if this episode resonated.
Stay with me. Each conversation this month is [00:17:00] designed to build on the last layering confidence as something you live from, not something you wait to feel. Thank you for spending this time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about mindset medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
