How do you show up in a group?

I’ve recently signed onto a new group coaching programme and the first question was…
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How do you show up in a group?

Seems like a rather innocuous question to start with but when you sit with it for a while it can be quite a revelation.
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As a default setting new groups make me feel anxious. In order to feel less anxious, I will try to assess my “place” in the group. Once I have come up with some arbitrary stuff that makes me feel more secure of my place I can then feel more at ease. I can pin point this back to “the soap dish incident” when I was five (a tale for another day).
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Bringing awareness to my default and where it has come from has been the turning point for how I show up in new groups.
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If a conversation goes quiet, I have a tendency to want to jump in to ease the awkwardness. What I have discovered is that other people are not feeling awkward in silence, they are thinking and processing. Again, it is my own discomfort that I am projecting.
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This is why I now attempt to show up in new groups without judgement (for myself or others), fully open and to sit with any discomforts I feel without the need to fix or change them in the moment.
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