Why your brain’s desire for social connection is sabotaging your brand-building efforts
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I spend a lot of time thinking & reading about our brains. I’m fascinated with how they’ve evolved, how they keep us running on auto-pilot. How they protect us. How they give us the capacity to achieve seemingly impossible things over and over.
But in the human brain’s efficiencies, we also go into auto-pilot in areas that aren’t always so helpful.
When it comes to business and branding, I see this all the time.
Our brains have evolved to seek out the safety of community and connection. And part of that safety involves blending in with the community.
A function that served our ancestors beautifully. But us, as business owners and entrepreneurs? Not so much.
This default opperating system that is brilliant in terms of social connection, can actually become a hinderance when building and growing your personal brand.
The good news? Once you’re aware of it, you can decide to step out & stop blending in in ways you didn’t recognize you were before.
Listen to the episode below:
This episode discusses topics like…
How human brains are wired to seek out and participate in belonging & acceptance.
Why this basic human need for belonging & community can actually become a hindrance when building a personal brand.
Studies that show how social rejection is registered exactly the same as physical pain in the brain.
How to start building up emotional pain tolerance in order to step into new roles & possibilities in your life and biz that will cause you to stand out.
Why being willing to be rejected by large amounts of people is necessary in order to connect really deeply and meaningfully with the group of people that your message really is for.
Links from the episode:
Follow me (Sarah Ehlinger) on Instagram for honest conversations about business, mindset, and my life.
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Thank you SO much for being here, friend. See you in the next episode!
xoxo
Sarah
Episode transcription
You're listening to the brand spanking new podcast. My name is Sarah Ellinger, former creative director and strategist for multi-million and billion dollar brands. Turn entrepreneur after spending over a decade, building my own freelance and online businesses. I know that creating a brand around yourself.
It's a heck of a lot different than building one for the big companies. It requires diving deep into your mindset, going beyond generic tips and strategies and throwing out the script in order to do things your way. Are you ready to get into it? Let's go.
Okay. So today I want to talk to you about. Y you're blending in Y your brand and your business is blending in and why that's kind of not your fault. So a lot of what I see going on out there, and I'll talk about this in another episode, is people. Looking around at what other people are doing and then just kind of copying, or maybe like not outright copying, but just like doing, like, taking the same strategies and techniques and just kind of trying to rinse and repeat them for themselves.
And like I said, we'll talk about that in a whole nother episode, but what that does is it just causes you to blend in, like you just. Blend into a sea of sameness because everybody is doing that. But before I even talk about that, I want to talk about why, why are we doing that? And I say, we, because I definitely have done this before.
I'm sure I'll do it again in the future. Like it's just something we do as humans. And there is a specific reason for that. So, Our brains are kind of wired to work that way. So if you think about it, you know, if you go back to, um, you know, when we were living in caves, when we were really part of these tribal communities, we did not want to do anything to stand out.
We didn't want to do anything. That would cause us to get kicked out of that tribe or that community, because if we did, it meant certain death, like we needed the community, we needed the tribe in order to survive, we needed it for food and shelter and you know, all of those basic needs that you need to stay alive.
Being part of that community was very important. So that's number one. We're, we're wired for that. Okay. So that was then, and this is now why is this still affecting us? Well, the same way that we have a basic need for food and shelter. We also have a basic need to belong to a group and form relationships.
You know, like we want to be in loving relationships. We want to fit in at school or at work. Um, we want to join clubs or. Societies to avoid rejection and loss. We want to see our friends and family do well to be cared for, um, to have those people to share good news with we connect with people, our greater community, even through.
You know, sports teams or, um, things like Disney or, you know, there's just so many levels of belonging that we participate in as human beings. This is why social media is so fricking addictive because we're wired to tap into and belong with others. What I want to talk to you about today though, are some specific studies that talk about how this is still affecting us.
So, one thing that I found super fascinating was just the size of our brains as humans. So when you look at animals, typically the size of the brain relates to the size of the animal's body. So like an elephant would have a really big. Uh, mouse would have a really tiny brain. Well, when you look at humans, our brains are way bigger.
Like they're bigger than they should be for the size of our bodies. That could be for a wide variety of reasons, but it's been something that's been studied quite extensively. So there's some research done by an anthropologist of the name of Robin Dunbar and Dunbar found that the strongest predictor of a species brain.
Specifically the size of the neuro cortex, which is the outer, most layer of the brain is the size of its social group. So we have big brains in order to socialize. There's also the work by Matthew Lieberman, a psychologist and neuroscientist who wrote the book, social, why our brains are wired to connect.
And he talks about looking at brain scans. So when you look at the brain scans of people doing active projects, so, you know, like solving a math problem or putting together a puzzle, all of those active things that take active engagement with our brains, they look one way, but then he wanted to study.
What do the scans look like in those, like in between time. Like, non-active just kind of kicking back, chilling out moments. And what he discovered I think is fascinating is that during these downtimes, even if it's just for a second, our brains fall into this default network. And then he discovered that this default network looks almost identical to another brain configuration.
And it's the one that's used for social thinking or making sense of other people and ourselves. So why would the brain, which forms only 2% of our body weight, but consumes two when he percent of its energy use its limited resources on social thinking rather than conserving its energy by relaxing. Well, Lieberman says that evolution has made a bet and that the best thing for our brains to do in any spare moment is to get ready for what comes next.
In social terms. And like we already know that when it comes to being social, there are so many payoffs, you know, people with large social networks and meaningful friend, family, and community connections tend to be happier, tend to live longer. Um, Lieberman also did a study along with his wife that I thought was fascinating, and this was called the Cyberball study.
So in this study, the participants. It was like a computer game and there was three people playing this game, but unbeknownst to the study participant the other two people playing the game were actually part of a computer program. So in the study, they would be tossing this ball between the three of them.
And after a little while the other two kind of fake computer-generated players would just start tossing the ball to each other and they completely excluded the member who was in the study. So what happened is that when these people would get out, like come out of the study, They would talk about how distressed they were thinking that, you know, these other two people in the study just completely rejected them and ignored them.
And some people were really, really dismayed. Now the fascinating part of this study is how their brains actually processed this social rejection. So to the brain, social pain feels a lot like physical pain. And the more rejected the participant said that they felt the more activity there was in the part of the brain that processes the distress of actual physical pain.
So this social rejection was actually being registered as physical. Social pain, equaled physical pain. And then there was a follow-up study where they had participants take Tylenol every day for three weeks. Leading up to the well, half of them took a placebo. Half of them took Tylenol every day for three weeks leading up to when they would go in and participate in this study again.
So people were equally distressed. Fell just as reef rejected and pained is those in the initial study, but the people in the Tylenol group totally immune to the social pain of feeling left out like crazy. So what does this all mean? Well, obviously you can start to see how. Stepping out is going to register actual physical pain.
So of course, you're going to look around and see what everybody else is doing and do some more of that because your brain is going to say, Hey, uh, no, I'm not signing up for pain. The pain of being rejected. What's everybody else doing. Let's do that. That seems to be working great, done, but then that's going to keep you blending in.
So you see how you get in this like crazy self-fulfilling circle. Well, what you have to start doing, and I call this building your, I don't give a shit myself. Because there are certain things about your appearance or your personality or style of communication or whatever that you just don't care about.
Like, and I mean, you don't care about it in the regard that if people criticize you about it, you don't care. You're like, yeah, I don't care. That's just how I am. That's the way I wear my hair. I don't care. I don't care if you think I have blonde hair and you think my hair should be brown. No. I don't want it to, for me, that is a lot of times swearing.
I swear in real life, I swear a lot more in real life than I do on social media or at a context like this. But I also don't care then. So if I do swear in this context, I, I don't care because when I swear in my real life, if someone's like, oh my God, I'm so offended by that. I'm like, well, then you can go fuck yourself.
I just don't. It's not something that I'm going to change about myself because of, you know, somebody else, because there's lots of people who I'm friends with, who are in my community, who. I don't care about that. Who, you know, to say that you connect over. So I can't, I think it's weird. Just say you connect over swearing, but you know what I'm saying?
Like, it's just something I don't care about and you'll have plenty of those for yourself. So think about what those things are and maybe like, keep it separate from your business, um, for the sake of this example, but like, what are those things in your life that you're like? Yeah, I don't care. I don't care.
This is who I am. I'm not changing myself for you. You have to start working on taking that same feeling and applying it to your business and building your brand. You have to start looking at it through that lens and realizing that you're going to have to step out in some ways you're going to have to do certain things.
You're gonna have to test messaging, test positioning that feel real and genuine and true to you, but also feel a little bit scary because you are nervous about how it's going to be received. And spoiler alert. That's probably a pretty good indication that you're onto something. If you have that little bit of.
Scariness or butterflies in your stomach before you put that piece of content out or start talking about that certain thing, because that is that part of your brain that's piping up and saying like, oh, I don't know if you should do this, but I'm going to offer you another way to think about it. Um, while you're doing this.
So. If you are like me, you probably spent a lot of time, your teen years, or maybe twenties, early twenties, just like really figuring out who you were, like separating yourself from your family unit and figuring out who am I as an individual. And as you did that, you probably experimented with a lot of different looks.
You experimented with maybe the way you dressed, maybe the way you did your hair, the music you listened to, the movies you were into, like all of the different things. Maybe you even experimented with like where you lived. Like I know in my early twenties I moved to Minneapolis and that was like, well, you know what neighborhood you lived in, said a lot about.
Who you were, who you wanted to connect with, you know, so you probably did a lot of that experimentation and you were fine to do that experimentation because you are actively looking to find other like-minded individuals you wanted to literally wear on your sleeve. This is the type of music I'm into.
And maybe you dressed like those artists, or, you know, you were putting out signs and signals in order to repel certain people and attract others because you were defining where you fit in within social circles. You were trying to find your place in. Society at large, you know, the, the perfect example of this also is always like high school.
Like everybody goes back to like, you know, where you, one of the jocks or the theater person or that, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it's like, it's experimenting with, what did that look like? Well, you have to do that in your business now, too. You have to actively wear on your sleeve, what you are about what you stand for, what your values are, what your positioning is.
Um, and in all of these ways, your messaging is going to get a lot more specific and it's going to actively repel some people, but draw other people in. And as you're doing this, you're going to go through a lot of push and pull with your brain because your brain is not going to want you to do it. But then you have to remember that in order to actually connect with those like-minded people and not blend in with a sea of sameness, you have to do a bit of repelling.
So it's a constant push of. With your brain. It's not, um, it's not hard work, but it's also not easy work. It takes a lot of just witnessing what's going on and witnessing when you're kind of pausing and putting things out or doing things that feel true to you and feel true to your business and your bank brand like.
Taking a pause and be like, why am I pausing on this? Because it actually isn't right. Or because I'm a little afraid of standing out. If it's, I'm a little afraid of standing out, then you have to do it. You have to do it. And maybe you decide later on. Ah, that's not what I'm about, but you'll never know unless you try.
Right. Because you can't be all things to all people and doing things like everybody else is just, it's so boring and there's just so much out there that the only way you're ever going to stand out is to actually stand out. Okay. So you can see how on the one hand you're blending in. Because your brain is literally wired for social connection and your brain wants you actually needs you to belong.
Not belonging will register as physical pain and your. This is why understanding this helps you see what you're up against. But on the flip side, we actually want to find really deep connection and build community with like-minded individuals. And the only way to do that is to do the thing that could potentially cause our brains to register as physical pain, which is rejection.
So it's a constant pushing. That's very ironic in order to combat this, we need to actively practice over and over and over again, building up that I don't give a shit muscle, and this is going to be an ongoing practice as you build your business and your brand, because as you evolve, your brand is going to evolve.
There's going to be more opportunities to kind of step out, stand out, be rejected. Actively work to be rejected so that you can attract those other people that you really want in your community, in your audience. But that's why, you know, when we look at people who are three or five or 10 years further down the entrepreneurial path, To us, it seems like, oh my God, their messaging and positioning just is like, it just feels so dialed in will that's because they were willing to do this work.
They were willing to be brave. They were willing to take the risk. They were willing to be rejected by large amounts of people in order to connect really deeply and meaningfully with the group of people that their message really is for. Now the side benefit of this, I would say is that my social connections have grown exponentially as I do this work and not just with like, oh, it's all about finding clients or customers.
Yes, that is why we were in business. But also as I do this work and connecting with more and more like-minded entrepreneurs, other people who are doing the same work as me, other people who understand what I'm going through, these connections that you're really going to need, as you are working on building up your brand, building up your business, you need that support.
So. So there's many, many benefits of doing this work. All right. That's all for this week. If you want to chat about it, hit me up on Instagram, DM me. Um, that's the best way to connect with me personally, and I will see you back here next week. Hey there, if you enjoyed this episode, the best way to support the show is to share it with someone else or post about it on Instagram.
Be sure to tag me at brand spanking use so I can show you some. That's at brand spanking you with an N not an ING. Go to brand spanking new podcasts.com for show notes and links. And if you're ready to take it to the next level, uncover your brand super power and leave confusion in the dust. Head on over to brand spanking new podcast.com/spark.
To learn all about my brand spark sessions in just 60 minutes. They've been known to completely transformed the way people think about their brands and let go of what's not serving them and their businesses. That's brand spanking you podcast.com/spark. All right, that's all for now. This is Sarah Ellinger and I'll see you next time.