The need to belong is primal—a basic human need like food or shelter. The impact of belonging, and not belonging, is profound and strongly connected to both confidence and wellbeing. Read on to discover more along with five practical steps anyone can take.
Feeling you belong can improve relationships, performance, health, and well-being and the benefit can extend for years. Research shows a sense of social belonging can affect motivation and continued persistence, even on impossible tasks.
If you don’t feel like you belong, you are both less motivated and less likely to hang in there in the face of obstacles. [i] Isolation, loneliness and low social status can also harm your well-being, intellectual achievement, immune function, and health.
Belonging is felt – you can’t see it and you can’t force it. You only really know based on feelings, inferences, judgements, and symbolic meanings. You feel and know whether you belong based on what you notice about the interactions between you and your context, your context and you.
From Dancing with fear and confidence by laura walker
Walking into a new district, you look around, quickly taking in your surroundings—the faces, the vibe, the symbols, the response you get. You intuitively know if you fit or you don’t. It can be fun to be somewhere very different for a while, but it can be hard to stay there for a long time if you don’t feel comfortable.
The tribal beat in social systems is strong and can be very hard to resist. Walking down the street wearing headphones, you can’t help but match the speed of your walking to the speed of the music. [ii]
In organisations, people often adapt unconsciously, embodying the culture through the house style of communicating, the nuances of dressing, the preferred pace of working, or the collective sense of humour. Some expectations are explicitly discussed and described – in employee handbooks for example. Others are implicit or hidden – making them very tricky to navigate.
Belonging uncertainty can also be created by stigmatisation, discrimination and marginalisation. This uncertainty particularly affects those in negatively characterised groups. In this state, people can be more sensitive, influenced by clues about the quality of their social connections.
Black students can feel stigmatised in US academic settings. Studies found that mitigating their doubts about social belonging in college raised academic grades significantly. Conversely, when beliefs about having few friends in an intellectual domain were reinforced, their sense of belonging and potential dropped. There was no such effect for white students. [iii]
You can nurture your sense of belonging, and bolster your confidence. Instead of trying to force it (which won’t work):
- Deliberately pay more attention to similarities you have with others than differences – what do we have in common? How are our experiences similar? In what ways are we connected?
- Challenge the judgements you make about other people’s responses – are they really suggesting I don’t belong? What else might be going on? Am I over-generalising?
- Pay closer attention to when you feel a sense of belonging – what sensations do you feel in your body? What emotions are you feeling / not feeling? What are other people saying / doing?
- Avoid assuming belonging is all or nothing – you will feel a stronger sense of belonging in some situations / groups than others.
- Champion fostering an environment where everyone can belong, including you. Encourage conversations and actions that bolster belonging wherever you can.
Further reading
[i] Walton, G. M., & Brady, S. T. (2017). The many questions of belonging. In A. J. Elliot, C. S. Dweck, & D. S. Yeager (Eds.), Handbook of competence and motivation: Theory and application (p. 272–293).
[ii] van Noorden, M., Režný, L. Tempo and walking speed with music in the urban context. Front Psychol. 2014;5:1361. Published 2014 Dec 2.
[iii] Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 82–9
Fulfilling work 