203: The Spotlight Effect: How to Stop Being Self-Conscious About Your Home
Maximized Minimalist Podcast
Katy Wells
4.8 • 936 Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
The spotlight effect describes how people tend to believe that others are paying more attention to them than they actually are—in other words, our tendency to always feel like we are "in the spotlight." This can cause midjudgment, social anxiety, fear, shame and lots of negative emotions, preventing us from ever inviting people into our homes. Tune in as I share a personal story around the spotlight effect and how I've liberated myself from being self-conscious and embarressed about my cluttered, messy and lived-in home. Enjoy!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What does it mean to live more with less? I'm Katie Wells and welcome to the Maximized Minimalist |
| 0:07.7 | podcast. If you found yourself caught up in the hamster wheel of modern day motherhood and want to |
| 0:14.1 | rewrite the script, congratulations you're in the right place. I'm here to be your guide and help you take |
| 0:20.6 | back your motherhood |
| 0:21.6 | and achieve a simpler, more joy-filled life. Cheers to being a maximized minimalist. Enjoy the show. |
| 0:29.4 | If you struggle with clutter, like I did, what is one of your worst fears? I think we can all |
| 0:35.5 | relate to the feeling of one of our worst fears being people dropping by |
| 0:39.6 | unannounced. And several years ago, I had this experience. I will never forget someone |
| 0:46.9 | dropped by unannounced at her house. And it wasn't someone who was like a good friend or a family |
| 0:51.9 | member where you just comfortably, they walk into your |
| 0:55.5 | house and you're like messy hair, messy home, don't care, take me as I am, we cool, right? |
| 1:00.3 | Like we're comfortable around each other. It's all good. It wasn't someone like that. This happened |
| 1:04.7 | to be someone we just began to work with. I didn't know them very well. And it was horrifying. It was so horrifying. I swear this |
| 1:13.3 | has to be one of like humans' worst fears. It's got to be up there in like top 10, right near spiders and |
| 1:18.9 | death. So I had no notice. I had no time to scramble and throw my clutter and random piles of junk |
| 1:25.8 | into my closet. No time to clean the kitchen, |
| 1:28.3 | to change clothes, do my hair. Oh my gosh, it was not a good feeling. And honestly, when she was |
| 1:35.8 | knocking on the door for a hot second, and this is so embarrassing, I was like, should I just |
| 1:40.9 | pretend I'm not home? Should I just hide behind the front door? |
| 1:51.9 | Hope she doesn't see me. And like, hopefully she goes away. But I had two screaming toddlers at the time. |
| 1:56.5 | And I know she could hear them through the door where she was standing on the front porch. So my cover was blown. She knew I was home. So I hesitantly opened the door. |
| 2:01.9 | I put on a smile and I'm like, hi, nice to see you. |
... |
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