12 Tips to Stop Feeling Invisible

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on 12 tips to stop feeling invisible. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Now, part one of this series talked about reasons people might feel invisible. So if you haven't already looked at that one, I would suggest checking it out because it might help you understand how you got to the place where you feel invisible. In this video, we're going to talk about ways to start moving forward. So tip number one, it's important to know what people do or do not do that make you feel like you don't matter or you're not accepted or you're invisible. What is it? And I make one page for what is it that people do that make me feel invisible? Like talking over you or making decisions for you or assuming they know what you want. And then on another sheet of paper, what things do people not do that make you feel invisible? Like, maybe they don't ask your opinion, maybe they don't invite you to do things, whatever it is, but make those lists. Because until you understand specifically what what people do or don't do that is making you feel invisible, you're going to be hard pressed to address it. The second thing, connect with and stand up for yourself and your inner child. I know there's that inner child again. Often people feel invisible when they're not getting their needs met, but they can't ask for what they need because they don't even know. Connecting with yourself is really important. Using mindfulness multiple times a day, ideally to ask yourself, what are my thoughts, wants and needs right now? What would help me feel better? What would help me improve the moment right now? Those are questions you can start asking yourself once you become aware. Then you can either start doing those things for yourself or if it requires other people's input, you can ask for it. You can put it out there what your opinion, your thought, your need is. And to save people at first, obviously you're not just going to randomly throw it out there to the universe, but putting it out there so people have a chance to try to meet your needs is really important. It's also important to stand up for yourself and your inner child. You connect with that part of you. You figure out, what is it that I think, what is it that I feel, what is it that I need right now? And then if other people disagree, it's going to be important to be able to feel like you can stand up for yourself and go, that's okay, you don't have to agree with me, but I'm going To do it anyway. You know, I want Italian for dinner tonight. You don't. Okay, that's fine. Maybe we can compromise, but this is something I really want. I know that's probably not what you're going to have your first disagreement about, but it's the only thing I can come up with on this for the moment. But it's important to be able to stand up for yourself if you have preferences, not to always have your preferences. Take the back seat. Sometimes they're going to take the back seat. That's part of being in a relationship. There's a give and take. Sometimes your partner will get to choose, sometimes you'll get to choose. It's important to take turns to be respectful of one another. But again, stand up for yourself. So some of the time, I would venture to say, at least half the time, you're getting your thoughts, wants and needs met. What parts of yourself do you hide from others? In part one, I talked pretty extensively about the fact that in order to feel whole, in order to feel accepted, we need to feel like people see and accept all parts of us and not just this part over here or this part over here. Unfortunately, in our cancel culture, a lot of us have parts of ourselves that we hide from others. So think about, what parts of yourself do you hide from others, and does that contribute to you feeling invisible? What parts of yourself do you not want to see or accept? There may be obviously parts of you that not even you want to see. You're like, no, I'm not going to admit that that's there. I'm not going to see it. I'm not going to accept it. And so there's going to be parts of you that are invisible. You know, think about that. That section of you just kind of becoming transparent or invisible. It is important to use your assertiveness skills to ask for what you need or want and stop expecting other people to notice or read your mind. A lot of times we expect this out of our significant others. If we're having a bad day, we come in, we flop down on the sofa and huff. If you're expecting them to say, oh, gosh, you look upset, what's wrong? In an ideal world, maybe they would. But in reality, most people have a lot of stuff going through their head and a lot of stuff going on. And if you expect somebody to pick up on hints or clues, you may be sorely disappointed. I remember my daddy used to say, I don't pick up on hints. So if you need something, you got to tell me, okay? That was easy enough. I wouldn't hint or beat around the bush with him. If I needed or wanted something, I told him. And that is using those assertiveness skills. The same thing with salespeople. Sometimes you may go into a store and you're looking for something and you can't find it, and you're looking for something and you're obviously not finding what you're looking for, but the salesperson does not come up and say, hey, is there something I can help you find? And then you take that personally and you say, I'm invisible. They couldn't even be bothered to help me. Well, I encourage you to think about what are other alternatives for why they may not have asked you what you needed or wanted. Some salespeople just don't want to be bothered. It's not that you're invisible. It's that they hate their job and they don't want to be there. So before you take it to as a personal insult, before you take it to mean that you're invisible to them and they didn't even see you, think about what other things, what other reasons might motivate that behavior for them? The same thing at work. If you are overwhelmed with everything that you've got going on and you need assistance or you need your boss to give you some direction on prioritizing or something's not going well at work, it's important not to just assume that your co workers or your boss know what's going on or know what the problem is. It's important to communicate. And at the heart of feeling invisible for a lot of people is the unwillingness or inability to communicate with what they need. As soon as you communicate it, you've suddenly become visible. You've suddenly started making a little ripple in the time space continuum. Now they have a chance to ignore you after that. This is true, and that's a whole different issue. But until you start moving, until you start saying something, then you may be more invisible. Pay attention to your verbal and nonverbal communication. People tend to respond a lot more to confidence. Now you don't have to go in there, you know, 10 foot tall with your chest stuck out and all that kind of stuff. But it is important to hold your head high. If you're walking slumped over and mousy like, like you're trying to, you know, not be noticed, guess what? You're going to not be noticed. So it is important to pay attention to your nonverbals. Look people in the eye occasionally. You don't have to Glare at them or stare them down, but make eye contact. Have a, what Linehan calls a half smile. If you're walking down the hall and you've got an ear to ear smile that you're just holding like this, people are going to think what's going on. But if you have a just a pleasant expression on your face, which a half smile, it can be much less intimidating, maybe even inviting to other people to acknowledge you. You know, walking down the hall, you might find that if you make eye contact with somebody and even just nod, that they'll nod back. Oh my gosh. You might try an experiment one day just doing that and seeing how many people respond positively. Not everybody will. Some people won't even notice because they're lost in their own thoughts. Some people have their own issues and they may just, you know, bristle at it. But you might be surprised at how many people find it liberating or I don't know what the word I'm looking for here is. If you just acknowledge their mere existence verbally, pay attention to your verbals when you're talking too. Even if you're talking, if you're using lots of hedge words or you're talking really quietly, then people may not hear you. They may not notice you. Put your opinions out there. If you have an opinion, this is what I think. Okay, not. Well, I might think, if nobody else minds, that the longer you take hedging, the more people are going to drop off. Get to the point. Say what you think, say what you feel. You're not encroaching on other people's boundaries. You're not going to say your idea is stupid, you're not going to do that. What you're going to do is say, my opinion about this particular issue is you may have a different opinion. That's cool. Let's just put all those opinions out there. Nurture your relationships. If you don't reach out to other people, if they always have to reach out to you, it feels like a very one sided, energy intensive relationship for them. It's important that you reach out to them and they'll reach out to you too. But it should be a balance. It shouldn't be one person always doing the reaching, one person always doing the planning, one person always doing the asking. So it's important to nurture those relationships. If you like rock climbing, for example, when you decide you're going to go to the rock climbing gym, calling your friend who likes rock climbing, maybe they can't go this time, but then the next time they are going to the rock climbing gym. They. They'll think about you and maybe they'll give you a call. Learn how to set and maintain healthy boundaries. This is another really important thing with feeling invisible. A lot of times people who feel invisible have very, very weak boundaries, and people just walk all over them. It's important to feel confident in your ability to choose who you let in through the boundaries and who you keep the door shut for. If you've watched my video on setting and maintaining boundaries, you'll understand the metaphor of boundaries as a house. And you can choose whether you answer the door at all, whether you answer the door but don't let people come in, whether you answer the door and let people into, like, your foyer area, or if you let them have free roam of the house. Those are different levels of intimacy, different levels of boundary penetration, if you will. And it's important to recognize your right to set and maintain those boundaries, even if people don't like it. It's important to feel safe enough to assert, this is my boundary and it's not okay to cross it. Address thoughts and feelings associated with social anxiety and rejection. Sometimes people feel invisible because they're afraid of putting themselves out there. So think about, what are you afraid of? What would you tell the child you. So if you're the child you was in front of you right now, and they're like, I don't want to go play on the playground with those people because. Or I don't want to tell you this because what would you tell the child you. To help them feel safe in asserting their thoughts, wants and needs. When you put yourself out there, you know, if you have fears of social anxiety and rejection. And I'm not saying just go out and put yourself out there today. I'm not saying that, you know, don't just jump into the deep end. That's not going to be helpful. But think about times that you have put yourself out there and introduced yourself to somebody or asserted your opinion. What actually happened? Consider the person. If it didn't go well, was that a safe person to be asserting yourself with? And yes, everybody should be safe, but that's just not the case. And there are going to be people, you know, go back to those boundaries. There are going to be people that we share our deepest thoughts and opinions with, and it's safe to do so. And there are going to be people that we don't, because we don't know if it's safe to do so. But when you share your thoughts and opinions as appropriate what actually has happened? Most of the time, stop assuming you were overlooked. And we talked about this a little bit with salespeople, but a lot of times people assume that they were overlooked. They send an email to somebody and they don't get a response back. Well, they must be ignoring me. Or the email got caught in the spam filter, or you forgot to hit send, or. Or they accidentally deleted it because they got so much spam that day. There's a lot of reasons why somebody might not respond to an email. Same thing if you're walking past somebody in the grocery store and they don't respond to you. Even if you think you make eye contact with them, they may be so lost in their own thoughts that they don't even notice. Explore. Try to think of three alternative reasons why that person didn't notice you, or why you were overlooked in that situation. Maybe you apply for a job and you didn't get it. Well, is it you? Are you invisible? Or is it that you didn't have all of the qualifications that they were looking for, or there was a better applicant, or, or one other alternative? And don't over personalize people's behavior. And this kind of sums up a lot of what we've been talking about. But a lot of times if somebody is not paying attention to us or slighting us, it may not be about us at all. They are dealing with their own stuff. And it's so important to recognize that other people have stuff too. Other people may feel equally as invisible. And when you have two invisible entities that are trying to get noticed by one another, guess what? Neither one's going to notice because both are invisible. You can't notice something that's invisible. So it is important not to over personalize things. Look at your behavior. Say, all right, was there something that I did, or was there something that I could have done differently in order to be more visible in this situation or in order to be heard in this situation. And if not, then consider maybe it was more about them. Evaluate your current or potential relationships to see if you're discounting possible genuine connections. Sometimes we feel invisible. We feel like nobody notices or nobody wants to hang out with us or whatever the case may be. And it may be because they're waiting for you to approach them. Or maybe it's because you've just kept yourself so walled off that they've tried to reach out and they've just run into that wall. And sometimes we do this when we feel invisible. We may do this because we're afraid that if we reach out, they're going to reject us. Or we're afraid that if we say yes and you know, accept an invitation, then they may not end up liking us and we may be rejected. So sometimes we hide, sometimes we keep those walls up to keep from getting hurt. But at the same time, we end up feeling invisible and isolated. Evaluate your motivations. Do you sacrifice yourself to feel needed and prevent abandonment? Sometimes we feel invisible because we're not getting our needs met because we're so busy meeting everybody else's needs. We put ourself out there. We put ourself out there. We put ourself out there until we're burned out. And then we get upset that nobody's rushing to our aid. Well, you know, have we asked for help? And what part of this do we need to take responsible for? And I have the friendship test down here. Look at your behaviors and your motivations for what you do. If your friend were doing the exact same thing you are, would you caution them about self sacrifice in order to prevent abandonment? You know, it's important to kind of step out and go, if somebody else were acting like this, would I be concerned for their, for their welfare? Another thing you can do is enhance your self esteem. If you know what you want and you can assert your thoughts, wants and needs, then you give people the chance to meet them. You also give people the chance to say, no, that's not my cup of tea. That can be really scary. If you enhance your self esteem, then the minority of people that say, yeah, no, not for me, okay, it's not going to be that big of a deal. But if you're the only way you have esteem, the only way you feel okay is if everybody likes you all the time, you're going to be in a state of anxiety a lot of the time. Write down a list of everything you look for in a friend and then go back over that list and identify the qualities that you already have. And this can help you recognize what a valuable person you already are. Many people feel invisible because they were raised not to make waves. They have a fear of rejection or being canceled. Or maybe they don't know how to communicate their feelings, wants and needs. The first step to visibility is to become visible to yourself. Other people can't meet your needs if you don't even know what your needs are. The next is to start becoming visible to others through assertive communication and radical acceptance.