What Would Happen if You Stopped Needing External Validation?

The need for external validation can stop you from achieving your biggest dreams.

What would your life be like if you no longer needed validation from anyone but yourself?

The need for external validation is probably one of the biggest obstacles my clients face. And it’s not always obvious until we dig into the layers of what’s keeping them stuck.

But once we find it, we can start recognizing it in multiple areas of life and start changing those thinking patterns. And that’s where freedom can be found.

What would happen if you didn’t let rejections shut you down?

What would happen if you didn’t need anyone else’s approval?

What would happen if you could get comfortable with receiving criticism and praise?

I mention criticism and praise because they are opposite sides of the same thing. I have seen that those who do not want to hear criticism also don’t always feel comfortable receiving recognition.

I had a client whose dream was to write a book. She loved writing and had a valuable story to tell. She started writing her book and would often feel excited to share sample chapters with her friends and on social media.

At first, the positive feedback made her ecstatic. She was fueled by it, and it even kept her awake and buzzing at night. She couldn’t wait to get back into her writing and ideas would wake her up.

Until she got her first negative comment. And the comment wasn’t terrible, it was just someone who said they didn’t really like one of her sample chapters.

If I remember correctly, the “negative” comment was from a person she had known for a while who said that it didn’t resonate with them or something fairly neutral. The comment wasn’t mean, but the meaning was, “Your writing isn’t for me.”

This comment stopped her in her tracks. She shut down. She started doubting herself and her ideas stalled. She no longer wrote on a daily basis.

She said she was too busy with her day job and family obligations to write.

She found plenty of excuses as to why she no longer had the time to write.

But the real reason was that she was seeking external validation, both with the positive feedback and the negative feedback. And in doing that, she was ignoring her internal validation.

It took us a lot of work for her to start to see that she had to write for herself. She had to tap back into her heart and that message that it wanted to give to the world through her writing.

And she had to make a decision.

She had to decide if she wanted to let other people’s opinions get in the way of her dream.

Did she want to let a few peoples’ opinions stop her from sharing her gift with the potentially millions of people who wanted and needed to hear what she had to share?

She had to decide if she was going to seek external validation or internal validation.

With external validation, she felt heavy. But with internal validation, she feels forever free to be her true self in every way.

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