From the Girl Who Never quite Fit In to The Connections Coach

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we become who we are at the heart level.

Not just the good things that shaped us, but the awkward seasons. The rejection. The relationships that surprised us, the ones that hurt us, and the places where we spent years trying to fit before realizing maybe we weren’t supposed to.

When I look at the work I’m doing now through Connections Coaching, I can trace so much of it back to experiences I never would have connected at the time.

The truth is, I definitely didn’t become a Connections Coach because relationships have always come easily to me.

Quite the opposite, actually.

I was actually very shy as a child. Like, painfully shy.

For the first twelve years of my life, I was an only child, and I never quite felt like I fit in. I attended one of the wealthiest school districts in Tulsa while growing up in a single-parent home in a not-so-affluent area of town. From the literal first day of kindergarten on through elementary, I was bullied or at the very least, left out because I didn’t live in the right neighborhood, didn’t wear the right clothes and definitely wasn’t part of the “right” crowd.

I remember genuinely wondering if I would ever find my people.

By my early teenage years, though, something really beautiful happened. I found the other kids who didn’t quite fit either. The artists, the skaters, the kids who marched to their own beat. Some people probably considered them outcasts, but to me, they felt like freedom.

They welcomed me exactly as I was.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I think that was the first time I realized I didn’t have to become someone else in order to belong.

The funny thing is, I was still attending the exact same school where the social hierarchy felt straight out of a John Hughes film. (think Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club…I was Molly Ringwald in one and Ally Sheedy in the other.) The groups were VERY defined and the lines between them were very real.

Then my parents made one decision that changed everything: they moved me to a different school district.

And suddenly I was in a completely different world.

The skaters were friends with the athletes. The hippies talked to everyone. There wasn’t the same racial divide, and people didn’t seem nearly as concerned with what neighborhood you lived in, what you wore, or what kind of car your parents drove.

I had room to breathe.

And more importantly, I had room to figure out who I actually was instead of constantly worrying about who everyone else thought I should be.

Then I went to college and, apparently, decided I had friendship all figured out. I joined a sorority because, honestly, what better way to make friends? And I know for some women, being in a sorority is one of the greatest experiences of their lives.

For me…Not so much.

A handful of those women remain dear friends to this day, and I’m incredibly grateful for them. But I also found myself feeling like that awkward little girl all over again sometimes.

I wanted to rebel against the expectations instead of embracing them. And while we shared parties, social calendars and plenty of experiences, we didn’t always share values, interests or the kind of authentic connection I was beginning to realize mattered so much to me.

Eventually, I learned something that has followed me through pretty much every season of my life since: You cannot force belonging.

A square peg never becomes happy pretending to fit inside a round hole, and real friendship shouldn’t require pretending.

Things shifted again when I became a young mom. Suddenly I was surrounded by women who were walking through the exact same season of life I was. We were figuring out motherhood together. We were tired together. We were growing up right alongside our kids in a lot of ways.

And some of those friendships became the roots of my adult life.

Over the next two decades, those roots grew deeper, and so did my understanding of friendship.

One thing I’ve learned is that while diversity in friendship is beautiful—and I absolutely want people in my life who are different from me—our deepest relationships often grow where there is some shared ground.

Shared values, interests, seasons of life, experiences… and probably most importantly, the freedom to actually be ourselves. That doesn’t mean all of our friends should look like us, think like us or live exactly like us. God, how boring would that be?

But mutual understanding creates safety and safety makes real connection possible.

Of course, if you live long enough, life will also give you a few crash courses in friendship that you never signed up for.

I’ve experienced deep disappointment from people I truly believed would walk beside me forever. And if you’ve lived long enough, you probably have too.

Hardship has a funny way of showing you things you couldn’t necessarily see when life was easy.

• Who can genuinely celebrate with you when something wonderful happens?

• Who can sit beside you when your whole world falls apart?

• Who only has capacity for the easy version of you?

• And who can hold space for all of it?

I’ve also learned that not everyone is supposed to occupy the same place in our lives, and I actually think there’s a lot of freedom in understanding that. Some people are wonderful acquaintances. Some become incredible networking connections. Some are exactly the right companions for a particular season.

And then there are those precious few who somehow become family.

One of my favorite examples of how unpredictable friendship can be happened at my 30-year high school reunion. Several women who were simply my acquaintances/party friends back then have become some of the safest, funniest and most treasured friendships of my life now.

I tell them all the time how rare it is to find people you can laugh with until your stomach hurts one weekend and then call when your whole world is falling apart the next.

Those friendships are priceless.

And honestly, they’ve also taught me something I wish more women knew:

It is never too late to find your people.

When I look back over my life now, I can see this thread running through all of it that I absolutely could not see while I was living it.

The lonely seasons. The rejection. The painfully awkward stages. The friendships that surprised me and the ones that deeply disappointed me. The seasons when I felt completely surrounded by people I loved and the seasons when I wondered where I belonged at all.

All of it taught me something and somewhere along the way, God was quietly preparing me.

Not just to build meaningful relationships in my own life, but eventually to help other people build them too.

And that is exactly how Connections Coaching became such personal work for me.

I’m fascinated by helping people understand who they are, because I know what it feels like to spend years trying to figure that out. I care deeply about authenticity, emotional safety, boundaries, shared values and learning how to recognize the people who are actually capable of meeting us in healthy relationship.

I believe more than ever that finding the right people starts with knowing ourselves, because when we don’t know ourselves very well, we can spend an awful lot of time trying to fit into places that were never a good fit to begin with.

That’s also why I created The Connection Club, my 12-week group coaching experience beginning at the end of September.

And I want to be clear about something because this matters to me: The Connection Club isn’t simply about “making more friends.” Of course I hope friendships are formed there. But the work goes much deeper than that.

Over those 12 weeks, we’re going to dig into who you are, what you actually need in relationships, the patterns you’ve developed over the years, what healthy connection looks and feels like, how to recognize emotionally safe people, how to stop settling for relationships that leave you feeling lonely even when you’re not technically alone, and how to intentionally build the kind of community you actually want around you. Because there’s a huge difference between having people around you and having people who truly know you.

Truth be told, I know this next season is going to stretch me too and I am here for every bit of it.

I don’t ever want to get to the place where I think I have relationships completely figured out. I don’t.

I’m still learning. Still growing. Still figuring out what it looks like to choose people well, to be a good friend, to recognize what’s healthy, to let relationships change when they need to, and to love people well while also allowing myself to be loved well in return.

Maybe that’s why I love this work so much. I’m not teaching it from some place of having done relationships perfectly. I’m teaching it from decades of living it.

So if you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit, or you’ve been hurt by friendship, or you’ve looked around and wondered why everyone else seems to have “their people” while you’re still trying to figure out where yours are…

Or maybe you’ve wondered if, at this point in life, you somehow missed your chance.

You haven’t.

Some of the most meaningful relationships of your life may still be ahead of you.

I know that because some of mine were.

When I think about that painfully shy little girl now, there’s one thing I wish she could have known much earlier: The goal was never to figure out how to fit everywhere.

It was to know herself well enough to recognize where she genuinely belonged.

It took me a long time to learn that.

And now, somehow, I get to help other people learn it too.

There’s something pretty beautiful about that.

You have not missed your chance to find your people and you do not have to become someone else to find them.

In fact, I think it may be just the opposite.

Maybe the relationships you’ve been looking for begin when you finally stop trying to fit—and start showing up fully as yourself.

XXOO Jeanna