Sociometer Theory & The Confidence Gap
What I’ve learned about belonging, systemic barriers, and the year I lost my voice
Belonging is one of those words that gets thrown around so casually.
At work. In ERGs. In family group chats. At the company all-hands, someone puts up a slide that says “we value belonging” and everyone nods and moves on.
But belonging isn’t a slide. It’s not a benefit. It’s actually one of the most basic human needs we have, and when it’s missing, it doesn’t just feel bad. It does real damage.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Not as an abstract concept but as something I’ve lived inside of my entire life.
What does it look like to grow up brown in a country with a constant rhetoric that your people are the problem?
What does it look like to understand your sexuality in third grade and have no frame of reference for what that means or who that makes you?
What does it look like to volunteer at a voting station and have someone walk up and yell at you for wearing a sticker that says Abuelo Español, a sticker meant to help someone’s grandfather fill out a ballot in the language he understands?
What does it look like to be queer but not fit the version of queer that gets celebrated? Not feminine enough, not interested in open relationships, not the archetype.
What does it look like to build a company and find out that Latino founders receive under 2% of all VC funding, and then sit in a pitch meeting and wonder if the hesitation across the table is about your idea or about your face?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. These are the things that quietly build a case inside of you that you don’t belong. And over time, that case becomes a verdict.
There’s a psychological framework called sociometer theory. The basic idea is that self-esteem isn’t just a feeling, it’s actually a social signal. It functions like a gauge that’s constantly measuring how accepted or rejected we feel in our environment. When that gauge is reading low, our confidence drops. Not because something is wrong with us, but because something is wrong with the environment.
I find this fascinating because it means confidence isn’t just an inside job.
It’s relational. It’s contextual. It responds to the rooms we’re in, the systems we’re navigating, and whether or not those systems were built with us in mind.
For a lot of us, they weren’t.
Last year I lost myself. I’ve said this before in different ways but I want to be specific about it here.
I lost my voice. I started hearing things in my own head that I hadn’t heard since high school. That I wasn’t good enough. That I couldn’t build this. That someone else could do it better. That I didn’t belong in the rooms I was in.
And I kept showing up anyway, which looks like resilience from the outside but felt like drowning from the inside.
What I didn’t fully understand until recently is that a significant part of what happened had nothing to do with me failing. It had to do with me operating inside a system that was not built for me, while also holding all the other weight that comes with being who I am.
The 2% statistic is not just a data point. It’s a door that’s mostly closed. And when you’re knocking on it every day, and you’re also navigating what it means to be a gay Latino first-gen founder who doesn’t fit the mold of what investors have historically backed, your nervous system keeps score. Even when your brain tries to push through, your nervous system keeps score.
That’s not weakness. That’s what systemic bias actually does to a person over time.
Here’s what I know about the moments I’ve actually felt confident from recent writings that I’ve shared with you:
Cape Town. Friends I made who had no idea where I worked or what I was building or how many investors had said no. They just liked me. I laughed on a couch with Josh and felt like a full person. Kyle made me feel included in spaces without making a thing of it. JC read my cards and told me something that scared me enough to want to change.
Those moments didn’t just feel good. They changed something. My gauge went up. And from there, I made different decisions. I went on hikes. I wrote more. I moved faster.
This is what belonging actually does. It’s not soft. It’s structural. It builds the foundation that confidence requires.
I’m building Kinnect because of all of this.
A private space where families can belong to each other, preserve what matters, and protect what’s sacred. But the more I build it, the more I realize even belonging inside a family is complicated. People want both connection and privacy.
…. > They want to be seen by some and protected from others.
I’ve heard from families that have separate groups that include everyone except one person. Then they switch between them depending on the conversation.
That contradiction is so human.
We need each other, and we’re afraid of each other. We want to belong, and we also want control over who gets to see us.
I grew up in a family with divorced parents who couldn’t be in the same room. I am building a family platform. I see that irony. I hold it.
But I also think that’s why I’m the right person to build it. Because I know what it feels like when the structures meant to hold you don’t. I know what it costs. I know what it takes to rebuild.
I’m 34. I’ve traveled through more than 30 countries. I worked at Nike, LVMH, Hilton. I ran Division I. I’ve built things.
And I am still working on my confidence.
Not because I’m broken, but because confidence for someone like me has never just been about believing in myself. It’s been about pushing through environments that send mixed messages. Again and again.
The work isn’t to stop feeling it. The work is to know where it comes from. To understand that my gauge dropping in a room that was never designed to welcome me is not evidence that I don’t belong there.
It’s evidence of the room.
I’m building spaces that give people the kind of space where they can actually feel like themselves. Where they can be seen without shrinking.
Because I know what that costs when it’s missing.
And I know what it feels like when it’s there.