“Why We Seek External Validation” comes from Chapter 6 Take Back Your Self-Esteem in Take Back Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil.
This was a helpful framework that I simmered on so wanted to share it here. Not to knock on my people pleasers, but it makes so much sense why we turn to others for validation. First, there’s a desire to please and then the feedback loop: wait, did I do enough? Was that right? Ugh….
“ No matter what we want other people to think about us or how we want them to behave, it usually comes down to believing that we can’t be happy until they think or act a certain way, and often it has to do with our thoughts about our own value and worth.”
Take Back Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil
She goes on to elaborate: “there are three big problems with trying to base our self-worth on other people’s opinions of us.” Here’s my recap:
- It’s ”extremely inefficient to try to manipulate the world into being a certain way just so we can give ourselves permission to think a certain thought.”
- A.k.a. You don’t need others to cooperate for you to think and feel how you want to.
- “People do not usually cooperate with our desire to use them as validation vending machines (which is very rude, but that’s the thing about free will).”
- Sometimes people just won’t like or approve of us, even though we want them to.
- Other times they do love us, but they are not going to show it the way we want…
- And even when you ask people directly to say certain things or act a certain way, it doesn’t always work out.
- People generally don’t like being obligated to behave in a specific manner to try to manage your feelings, just like we don’t really like being manipulated or controlled to manage someone else’s feelings.
- “Even when you get this kind of validation, it is temporary…
- Think about how many compliments you’ve gotten in your life on something you are good at, or an outfit you wear, or anything else.
- Do you fully believe in the awesomeness of that talent or your appearance now? No. You don’t.
- Because the high of external validation always fades and your self-critical thoughts come right back.
“The key to self-worth is not to just get better and better at manipulating people to keep the flow of validation coming. The solution to a dependence on external validation is to create our own internal validation for ourselves. When we have real self-confidence, we are able to walk away from the vending machine. We don’t need to spend all our time feeding it quarters, much less kicking it when the validation gets stuck coming out. When we need external validation to feel okay, we make everyone’s behavior a referendum on our worth. When we know how to create self-confidence from within, we can stop trying to control other people and connect to our own worth anytime.”
Take Back Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil
Ready to kick out your self-critic and stop relying on external validation?
Tune in next week to find out about one of the biggest barriers.
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