Every day we are told not to care about what people think, yet we almost always seek validation from other people in various aspects. Do you seek approval from others? Looking for likes and comments on social media, appreciation from the boss or spouse or sometimes during the day, we ask others for their opinions rather than trusting ourselves. A healthy amount of external validation is needed for your mental well-being, but how much is too much?
What is External Validation?
External validation is when we need our friends and loved ones to acknowledge our strengths and emotions. We all often rely on them for support and encouragement or even their consent in daily life.
Approval Seeking Behaviour or External Validation
Do you have a hard time taking decisions on your own or feel unhappy and insulted when others disagree with you? Is it difficult to speak your heart out? Do you always crave for others’ opinions? Then you might be an approval seeker.
As a perfectionist and a creative person, validation has been a challenge in my own life. It’s a daily practice to stop myself from seeking approval from others for even a small thing, but I tell you it takes a conscious effort to tell myself to trust my thoughts and stop being an approval seeker.
Where does the need for External Validation come from?
The root cause of approval-seeking behaviour is low self-esteem. There can be further many reasons of low self esteem, but it starts to build up in childhood. When a child grows up not feeling valued, receives no praise or encouragement, or has gone through emotional neglect, they may have trouble regulating their emotions. Such children develop low self-esteem and insecurity as they grow up and later develop attention seeking behaviour as they mature.
They may:
- Seek Sympathy
- Have Jealousy
- Feel lonely
- Always in search of compliments and approval.
- Enhances and cooks up stories.
Some common behaviour seeking patterns:
- Finding it hard to make decisions, big or small, without getting approval from others.
- Feeling sad, happy, guilty, or anxious depending on whether others approve of you.
- Seeking excessive reassurance that you’ve done or are doing the right thing.
- Not confident about decisions you’ve made or are making.
- And later developing co-dependency on your partner.
The more we rely on others for their validation, the more disconnected we feel about ourselves, leaving us unhappy and unfulfilled. Looking for others’ validation to make us feel good is unhelpful and unhealthy.
How to stop relying on others for their validation
Don’t let your life choices be determined by others’ opinions. Trying to please people drains your energy.
A few things that might help are:
1. Practice Self-Validation: We seek approval from others because we aren’t sure we are enough, and doubt ourselves. Working on the relationship we have with ourselves is the first step towards getting better is Self Validating.
2. Use Positive Affirmations: Positive affirmations can be used for self validation. For example, if you want to boost your self-confidence, affirmations you might try include: “I am confident” or “I am enough.” Positive affirmations can help replace negative self talk with more mindfulness and empowerment.
3. Detox from Social Media: It’s always a healthy and wise decision to detox from social media for some time or days. When we disconnect from others, it gets easier for us to connect with ourselves.
4. Practicing Self – Love: Meditation and mindfulness may help improve your self-control. Pause for a while and go back and see all your small/big achievements. Count your blessings and see your worth. Acknowledge your self worth. Start by recognising that you are amazing, talented, beautiful and loved. Look in the mirror and say this to yourself every day.
5. Accept Yourself Without Judgement: Negative feelings can scare us and make us doubt ourselves. That’s when we look outside at others to validate us. When we begin to accept those feelings and understand that they don’t define us, we start feeling safe and secure.
External validation may be needed for your well-being, but self-validation can be important in cultivating and maintaining a healthy self-esteem. Engaging in self-care and healing modalities that best work for you and your needs can help you achieve this balance.
Remember, you are enough and you don’t need any external validation! So Just Shine On!!!
Good wake up call for all
Thankyou so much for bringing up this topic as with social media, we all look for external validation, but positive affirmation saying I am enough and believing in oneself would definitely help. Thanks once again for making us realize the same.
Very wisely written and an important topic.
I feel some amount of external validation will improve our self esteem and confidence, hence not a bad thing.
I like people appreciating me : )
Nice👍👍👍
Very nice thought and encouraging.
Thanks Sarika… You have covered a very Important topic for GenZ… Hope youngsters realise how worthless external validation is
I totally agree with this, people get misused by conniving people when they seek validation from the world outside, hope youngsters understand this and focus on self exploration.
Completely agree on that 👍
Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.