Are you living to your fullest potential or are you shrinking yourself to fit other people’s expectations of you? Many times we live in fear of what other people–typically the people closest to us–will think of us. We fear their judgement. But really, they’re misunderstanding our actions. Kristen’s sharing why people misunderstand us and what to do about it!
- Why we feel rejected when people misunderstand us
- What core/primal feeling is triggered when we’re misunderstood
- What it means if you’re uncomfortable picturing the most successful version of yourself
- Why some people are more afraid of success than failure in life
- What to expect when you take the less beaten path in life or business
- When we decide that we don’t belong we self-sabotage to make ourselves more palatable to others
- Why deciding how you’re going to think and feel when someone misunderstands us ahead of time allows for your most epic growth
When you’re doing the unconventional thing–such as growing a successful direct sales company–you have to learn to be okay with the judgement/misunderstanding from those who want to stay on the conventional path. Get comfortable with being misunderstood and your success is inevitable.
If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out my live coaching program!
The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Interested in Kristen’s exclusive mastermind for six-figure earners in the network marketing industry? Get all the details and join the waitlist here. Download the 3-Day training SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS for SOCIAL SELLERS where Kristen will be going to be giving you the exact tools you need to have success in today’s social selling landscape. Without creating more confusion, complicated algorithms, frustrating funnels, or sales scripts. Check it out here.
Transcript of Episode 51: Misunderstood
Kristen Boss (00:05):
Welcome to purposeful social selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service based industry. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller, who is tired of feeling and authentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business in today’s social media landscape. In this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way bosses. Welcome to another week of the podcast. So excited. You’re here. Glad to have you back before we get started on today’s podcast and the topic I want to make a really important announcement.
Kristen Boss (00:59):
That’s really vital that you hear it. I’m going to be wallpapering the internet with it for the next 30 days, but it’s almost like you all knew this was coming because I get a lot of messages in Instagram. And my support team gets emails. People are always asking, okay, when’s the price of the academy going up? When’s it going up? It’s like people knew that it was going to happen because we keep adding to the program. Initially, when we launched the social selling academy, it was quite simple. There wasn’t a ton to it, but we have added so many assets. We keep adding new trainings. We have added so much more. It is extremely robust. It’s not a standard little mini course or a bootcamp. It is still a lifetime program, but starting on July 1st, the academy price is going up to $2,000. It is still a one-time payment.
Kristen Boss (01:51):
There’s no monthly membership on top of it, but we have doubled the assets in the materials in there. There is so much available to you in there. So starting on July 1st, the academy will be going up to 2000. So if you have been listening to this for a long time, and you’ve been waiting for a sign that you need to take your leap this month is your month to do it. Because after that, it will be doubling. So it’s important that you make your decision and you take the leap when you are ready. The doors of the academy are always open. So we have that there for a reason so that when you were ready and when you’ve decided that it’s your time when you were, when you’ve decided that you want to learn the tools to have massive success in this industry, and honestly enriching your life.
Kristen Boss (02:40):
All of my students will tell you that they experienced so much more peace, joy, and fulfillment in their personal life and in their business when they joined the academy, because they learned to work from a different place. And they go through the very healing work of better understanding themselves. I have someone that calls me the business therapist, and it kind of does feel that way because you uncover a lot of things that aren’t serving you to help you get to where you want to be in your life and your business. So starting July 1st prices going up, all right, and you can click the link in my show notes that takes you to the academy and you can enroll today, but July versus when it goes up. Okay. So now I want to talk about the topic for today and I feel like it’s going to be such a soothing and maybe comforting topic for me to talk about and for you to hear, because when you set out to create an extraordinary life and you set out to build a business and do things differently, you are going to experience the pain of being misunderstood, or at least feeling misunderstood.
Kristen Boss (03:48):
And it’s one thing to be okay with feeling misunderstood by strangers on the internet and having people think poor thoughts of you from there. But that’s often not the opinions that we most fear when we are putting ourselves out there with our dreams and our goals and the life we want to create. That’s often not the fears that we are that we’re most afraid of experiencing like, oh no. What some stranger on the internet is going to think about me. That’s not, that’s not really, what’s keeping you back. Oftentimes it’s our fear of people that have known us for a certain period of time or have seen us in a certain light and what we think they will think of us stepping into our journey and to this extraordinary, to this bigger version of ourselves. And we tend to fear the people. We love the people that we’re around.
Kristen Boss (04:45):
It’s often not the people we don’t know. It’s not strangers. And I think some people think like, oh, I’m so afraid what people will think of me. And they think it’s strangers and nobody they’ve ever met before. Oftentimes it’s, we’re afraid of people who have known us or seen us a certain way. And we fear how they will perceive us in this new light, in this new thing we are doing. And the reason why that feels terrifying is because rejection. Because if, if we think people don’t understand us, don’t like us don’t support us. We often interpret that as rejection and last I checked, nobody loves the feeling of rejection. It feels really hard. It feels lonely. It feels sad. It can feel very triggering. This is why sometimes I think like our stories or our life experiences will come back sometimes to haunt us in our business.
Kristen Boss (05:40):
Because sometimes we have this deep fear of abandonment that has been reinforced by life circumstance that we have gone through. And when you have the core fear of abandonment, then of course, you’re going to feel terrified, putting yourself out there and telling people that you know, and love and feel safe with that. You’re doing something new and different. And you thinking that they are in supportive, it is going to feel like abandonment. And that will likely trigger that core fear of yours, of being abandoned. And, and, and sometimes we can’t separate feeling like someone having an opinion of us and they don’t gum, just not agreeing with us and us making that like an abandonment issue. They’re abandoning us. And then versus us just seeing it as they just don’t agree with me, but they still love me. Our brain loves to think like we’ve lost their love.
Kristen Boss (06:39):
We’ve lost the respect. We’ve lost those things. So I want to talk about this idea of being misunderstood, because if you haven’t experienced it yet, you are going to experience it. And there are a lot of moving pieces in this were people who have known you for a long time will likely not understand what you’re doing. They might even have judgments about it. They might think what you’re doing is ridiculous. They might think it’s silly. They might think it’s a complete waste of time. They might think you join it up a Ponzi scheme or whatever it is, but your job in that is to be okay with yourself and not see it as them rejecting you. And oftentimes that’s why it feels so painful is because we really think that they’re rejecting us as a person that we’re not, we’re less lovable. And I want to tell you that as you continue to grow and learn things about yourself and work on your mindset and do big, scary things, the more you grow, the more people might misunderstand you.
Kristen Boss (07:53):
And that if you are fearful of people, misunderstanding you, that might be why you aren’t seeing results in your business. Like you can be doing everything on paper, but if you have this deep fear that my friends are going to leave me, my family is not going to love me. People are going to hate me. Then of course, you’re going to start playing small. And I’m really subconscious level because you fear abandonment because you fear being misunderstood. You fear judgment, you know, belonging as one of our core needs as a human being in the world. So anything that threatens belonging we’re going to want to run from or protect ourselves from that’s just how we’re designed. So I think we can have some self compassion on ourselves and realize, okay, my desire to run away, my desire to hide my desire, to not talk about my business, not talk about what’s going on in my life is because I am fearful of not belonging anymore.
Kristen Boss (08:54):
And that kind of me of when my mastermind members, they were all challenged before the mastermind even started. And I told them all I said, you need to decide right now, they were all sent a video before they ever got in a room together. And I said, you need to decide right now that you belong in that room, that you belong there, that you deserve to be there and that you have something to offer. Because the moment we start believing that we don’t belong. We start playing very small and it invites so much shame. And we start self-sabotaging and we allow things like imposter syndrome and fear and shame and all those things, right? The narrative, instead of I’m okay. And I deserve to be here. I belong in this room, I’m doing big things. It is safe for me to be this version of myself.
Kristen Boss (09:53):
A lot of times embracing your growth journey is giving yourself permission to feel safe
Kristen Boss (10:00):
The bigger, better version of yourself. I want you to think about that. I want you to picture your most successful self version of you, your most successful, your most happy, your most free, your most impactful version of you. And I want you to notice what comes up, who comes to mind when you’re thinking of being that person. I just want you to picture that, like, get really clear. What is your life look like? What is your home life? Like? What is your relationships? Like? What kind of car are you driving? What kind of house are you in? What get really clear. And if this is feeling really uncomfortable for you, it’s because for some reason you have not made it safe for you to dream. You have not made it emotionally safe for you to explore what it might look like to be that version of you.
Kristen Boss (10:57):
And if you don’t feel safe having the dream, then why on earth would you be operating a business that would ensure that you reach that dream? Can you see how you would be out of alignment? If you’re saying like, yes, I want this business. And I want this time and financial freedom. And if I was to say, okay, let’s paint that. And let’s look at what that looks like. And you feel unworthy of those things, or you don’t feel safe to have them, or all of a sudden you think, wow, my family is going to think that I am full of myself. They’re going to think I, you know, that I’m better than everybody. They’re going to think that I suddenly got very greedy. They’re gonna think that I’m shallow. They’re going to think that I’m conceded. So if you have again, it’s that fear of being misunderstood of people, assuming things about you at that place in your life.
Kristen Boss (11:48):
So in order to protect you from that, you’re to very subconsciously sabotage your daily efforts, you’re going to sabotage your business in order to keep you from experiencing the results you say you want, because the results are not safe to you. And the results are not safe to you because you believe that you will, there will be lots of love from people, you know, believe that people will judge you, you believe that people will think you’re undeserving. So of course you want to protect yourself from that. But what if none of that is true? You know, I was thinking about this a lot. And I was just thinking, yeah, people are afraid of failure, but I actually think people are more afraid of success than they are a failure. And I think that because success means fully stepping into who they were made to be, it means shining their brightest.
Kristen Boss (12:54):
It means more [inaudible] freedom to be who you were made to be like that version of you having that massive success feels really vulnerable. And it’s so much easier to stay with what you know, and stay miserable thinking. I’m just failing. It’s so much easier to stay there, but success. I actually think that can be a really triggering thing for people being like, oh gosh, I don’t know my aunt Sue in, in Mississippi, she’s going to judge the crap out of me. When she sees me drive this car, she’s going to think I’ve sold my soul. And she’s going to ask if I’m still going to church, because she’s assuming that, you know, because I’m making money. I don’t, I don’t care about my spirituality. I just want you to notice if you have those thoughts, that is the fear of being misunderstood. And you have to actually be okay with that much earlier on in your journey.
Kristen Boss (13:56):
Like you might think, okay, when I get all the money, then I’ll deal with being misunderstood. But no, no, no, no, no. You actually have to do that right now. You actually have to get very comfortable with the idea of people not getting you and not understanding you and thinking things about you and you getting to the place where you’re truly okay with with that. And your first test of this is you choosing this business model, social selling people have a lot of thoughts. Some people have a lot of thoughts about social selling. I have a lot of great thoughts about social selling, but I know that there are people in this world that have poor thoughts about social selling. There are also people that have really awful thoughts about the coaching industry. There’s just bad thoughts available to you about anything. Just want you to think about that.
Kristen Boss (14:44):
Like there is crappy thoughts available to you about any potential job situation or business you, right? But your first test is you choosing this business model. And I think I see this a lot with my students is they have this deep fear of people misunderstanding them. Like this idea of people are going to think, I don’t want to help them. I’m just out to make money that I’m self-serving that all comes from this core fear of I’m misunderstood. And when we live in fear of being misunderstood, then we live in the energy of having feeling like we all, everyone in our life and explanation for our choices, like, well, I picked this business model because.dot dot, or here’s why this business model is better than everything else. Dot, dot, dot, like almost in this. Like I need to explain and justify and apologize this direction.
Kristen Boss (15:44):
I’ve chosen because I don’t want to be misunderstood, but here’s what I’m going to offer. You. You can explain it as much as you want. And some people are still not going to get it and you have to be okay with that. You have to decide how you’re going to think and feel about yourself right now, because these thoughts about what your friends from high school thinks, what your neighbor thinks, what your friends at church think what your, you know, what your former sorority sisters think of you. Like if you let their thoughts and their opinions. And actually what’s funny is oftentimes you don’t know their thoughts and opinions. I see most people just projecting them, assuming what the thoughts and opinions are. You know, a lot of times I’m like, okay, well, have you heard that person say those things that you are afraid that they’re going to think?
Kristen Boss (16:37):
No, I just, I just think they’re going to think that well, that’s just, what if they don’t like sometimes I think we project our own insecurities onto other people. Like I’m insecure about this business model. Therefore everyone’s Jew must be judging me about it, which is why I feel insecure. But what if that’s just not true? It’s like you are creating your own insecurity and you’re assuming everybody else has judgements about it because you are judging yourself about it. You have to neutralize or take your fear away from being misunderstood. When you set out to grow a business, even when you set out to do something extraordinary, when you set out to do something that’s different from the beaten path, expect judgment or thoughts from people who want to live on the beaten path, you’ve left that you’ve decided for something else. So as you’re walking along and forging a new trail, you have to actually decide right now I’m going to be misunderstood.
Kristen Boss (17:45):
And that’s okay. I understand myself. And that’s what matters. I understand my own decisions. And I love my decisions and I love what I’m doing. Even if people don’t get it and don’t understand and have judgements about it. And maybe you have people that you love, who misunderstand what you are doing, but don’t make that mean that they misunderstand you as a human and the misunderstand you as a person, they just don’t understand what you’re doing. And that’s okay. There are people out there with hobbies that I’m like, I don’t get it. I don’t know why you like it. Not judging them for it. I just don’t get it.
Kristen Boss (18:28):
So as you’re stepping out into, beyond your comfort zone and doing big, scary things, and you you’re doing the unconventional thing, you have to be okay being misunderstood or maybe judged by people who want to do conventional things. And that’s okay. So are you willing to experience the uncomfortable feeling of potentially being misunderstood as you are building the life you want? And then when you hit the results you want, are you willing to be misunderstood there too? You’re going to be misunderstood no matter what you’re going to be misunderstood when you start out and you’re going to be misunderstood when you arrive and you might be misunderstood by people. Again, like I said, people that you’ve known for a long time, that just don’t get it anymore. I’ll never forget. I, and I’ve talked about this a couple of times, but I remember that as I kept growing, I realized that there were people in my life who were not doing similar things or they didn’t value growth the same way I did.
Kristen Boss (19:44):
And they started to feel very uncomfortable around me. They started to feel uncomfortable with my growth. I don’t know if I said that wrong, but yeah, they started to feel very uncomfortable with my growth and they made it known. I’m not just guessing at that. They, they even said like, you know, I just don’t get what you’re doing. Seems like you think you’re better than everybody else. And I was like, whoa, this is a horrible thing to hear. But I just had to realize, okay, as I grow, there are going to be people in my life who do not choose growth that are going to be triggered and upset and not want to be around me because my growth reveals to them growth that they have not chosen to do themselves. And that, that that’s where triggers come in. Like I’ve had to realize, oh, I’m going to trigger people.
Kristen Boss (20:39):
Ooh. And I’ve realized that I can’t live my life terrified of triggering people. Because if I was terrified, triggering people, I would not have a podcast. Like I I’ve just come to realize, yep. I’m I talk anti hustle and I’m going to trigger all the hustlers out there. Okay. I’m triggering them. They’re going to have thoughts to think about me. Right. I have to do that work everyday being like, yep. I’m who am I going to trigger today? And how am I okay with that? Because I’m not thinking I’m actually not putting much time and energy towards avoiding triggering people. When I’m too busy, thinking about who I can inspire and who I can serve and who I could uplift and inspire them to live their bigger story too. When you start to play big people that choose to play small, don’t like it. And some, some of them will let you know, and you have to expect that and be okay with it. You have to make, been misunderstood and expected and safe thing for you to experience.
Kristen Boss (21:50):
So when you think about your life with these goals that you really want this life, you want to create with your family, these things you want to have, and then you picture yourself having done them. I just want you to notice whose opinions are you afraid of when you think of that life? Oh, my, my friend will probably say this. My cousin will say this bridesmaids from my wedding 10 years ago will think this. And then you have to ask yourself, okay. And what do I want to think about that? Because we only, if somebody says something and we’re hurt by it, we’re usually hurt by it because we’re in agreement with it. Like you’ve changed. If someone says to you, you’ve changed in a really condescending way and you feel bad and you start and you feel yourself shrinking and feeling like you need to explain yourself.
Kristen Boss (22:44):
That’s because you’re in agreement with them. Like, oh yeah, I’ve changed. Yeah. Maybe I should explain myself. You don’t have to explain yourself. You’re living a big, extraordinary life. Let your life do the explaining for you and understand that the more impact you make, those haters are going to start piling up. They come in, you’ll be ready. They’re coming. And they’re going to let you know, I have a feeling just because I’m saying this, I’m like about to experience 10 haters on my Instagram. I feel like my Instagram’s a really positive space. And I’m like, oh boy, I think I just like invited it. I just invited it. Oh, that’s fine. Okay. People can have their thoughts. What have you thought that what have you thought people are totally welcome and entitled to their thoughts about me. And I am also entitled to my own thoughts about me, but you don’t have to adopt or take on or agree with the thoughts people have about you.
Kristen Boss (23:45):
I don’t know if you know that, but you don’t have to agree with what people think about you. And some of you like end up living in agreement with it. That’s when we play small. That’s when we self-sabotage, it’s usually because we’re in agreement with other other people’s thoughts, opinions, or judgments about us. Right. You start making more money. Someone says, oh wow, must be nice. And then you feel guilt and then you feel shame. And then you’re like, oh, this is not okay. You’re right. This is not okay. I can’t have, can’t have nice things. Was that Taylor swift song can’t have nice things. Right. And we think, yeah, I can’t have nice things. And then we end up self-sabotaging to make our life more palatable to other people. Are you doing this? Are you making yourself smaller to be more palatable to other people?
Kristen Boss (24:44):
Are you shrinking back from who? You know, you’re meant to be the version of you, you know, that you’re meant to be so that you’re less triggering for other people so that you make them comfortable. I know that because I lived that for a while. So terrified. Just all I wanted to do was just make everyone comfortable around me. And I realized that I, it was the most inauthentic thing I could do. Let me give you an example of that. I was, I was working on a lot of my mindset and a lot of my inner work before any of this business came to be, I did so much work on myself and people started noticing the change and I had changed for the better. I am not the same person. I was five years ago. I have changed a lot, even who I was a year ago, I’ve changed so much.
Kristen Boss (25:41):
And I had this moment where I felt myself wanting to sink back into the old version of me to make some people more comfortable, like, Ooh, they know this version of me. And I did that for awhile. And I felt like I was dying because I’m like, I’m not being me, but I’m afraid to be me because me would make them really uncomfortable. And that is, that’s so painful. You can choose, you can choose one or have two different pains. The pain of living your fullest self and being misunderstood, or the pain of being the person you think other people want you to be so that you’re not misunderstood. And living the excruciating pain of not being your, the truest and best version of yourself, not being your most authentic self.
Kristen Boss (26:41):
You can downplay who you are to everybody comfortable. And you will feel like you were dying inside, or you can step into the bigger, more, extraordinary, impactful version of yourself and deal with the discomfort of people not liking that. Which pain do you want? I know what pain I chose. And eventually I got stronger. Eventually I built a muscle to tolerate the resistance of people, not being on board. People not being excited. And I have just found, this is when you go out and you find a circle who will cheer your growth on. And oftentimes that circle are people who values their growth as much as you do. They are doing the work too. It’s why I’m. This is why I’m always going to have a coach. And I’m in a mastermind with 12 other women. And we’re all, very, everyone is a very successful coach and they all have paid my coach.
Kristen Boss (27:43):
We’ve all paid my coach. Excrutiatingly painful amounts of money, like not painful, but like a lot of money. And so I know every person that I’m in that room with values, their growth, as much as I value mine, therefore it is safe for me to be fully seen, fully known and to be the fullest expression of who I am. That is why it’s so important for you to be in circles who applaud your growth rather than circles, who are triggered by your growth and don’t want it and want you to stay the way they remember you because that’s more comfortable for them.
Kristen Boss (28:25):
And there might be some friends you lose along the way, not in a huge breakup, but just you’ll notice some distance. You’ll notice that there’s less to talk about and it just kind of drifts apart and you have to be okay with that. It doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong with you. And actually it doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong with them. It just means your life has taken you on now. Two very different paths and that’s okay. And there’s, there’s grief with that. I think there is grief. I have grieved. Some people I thought would want to cheer me on in this journey who actually haven’t at all or who just occasionally pop up every six months to a year to tell me what about my platform is disappointing to them. It’s it’s true. I get, I get probably one text a year from people I haven’t talked with in years that liked to tell me this is, this is what I think you’re doing.
Kristen Boss (29:23):
That’s harmful with your platform or why. I don’t think you’re doing a good enough job with your platform. Like, okay, thanks. I’m just going to file that away and not give any energy to it because I love this the same by Bernay brown. And I’m going to get it wrong, but it’s my favorite. She’s like, unless you’re in the arena, getting your kicked with me, I’m not interested in your opinion, in your opinion, I’m just not. So when you are feeling misunderstood, ask yourself, are they doing big, scary things that I, that I am doing in my life? Are they in the arena getting their butt kicked too? If it is okay, you might want to hear what they have to say. If not be done. Nope. Like you could just be like, okay, thanks. Thanks for letting me know. When people come to me thinking a very, very polite response, like thank you so much. Have a blessed day, wishing you well, but you are not in the arena, getting your butt kicked. It doesn’t matter.
Kristen Boss (30:28):
As you were seeking to live this big, extraordinary, impactful life, you have to be okay right now with being misunderstood. And I think that is probably the number one fear I see come up a lot from people is like, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I don’t want my audience to think I’m doing this. I don’t want my friends to think I’m doing this. I don’t want my family to think I’m doing this. You know what you’re doing? You answered, you answered to yourself and be like, what is my truth? What am I doing? Okay. I know I’m serving. I know I’m impactful. I know I’m doing big things. I know. I want to help other people experience this. You have to get there yourself because once you grow, your I’m going to call it your capacity for self-love and to stand up for yourself and be proud of yourself, you will become far less fearful of the opinions of others. When you truly love yourself. First, the opinions of others become way less scary. When you like your opinions of yourself first, you might be thinking like, well, do other people like me? I’d be like, do you like you? That’s what, that’s where we got to start. So as you go out and do big things, expect the pain of being misunderstood and let it be a sign that you are well on your way to living
Kristen Boss (31:57):
An extremity and impactful life. You misunderstood. Great. Join the club anus fund. We’ll see you next week. That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you love today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with the review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done at different way. And if you’re ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the social selling academy, where I give you all the tools, training, and support to help you realize your goals
Kristen Boss (32:36):
In the academy. You get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are new in the business or been in the industry for a while. This is the premier coaching program for the modern network marketer go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.
