Four Ways You Can Free Yourself from Wanting Too Much Approval
Get out of your head and let yourself enjoy life
I get it; you want to be liked. You want others to think well of you. You want to please them.
It’s a waste of time.
You should live an ethical life, but you are the only one responsible for it.
Why give the power to others if it’s you who pays for mistakes?
You don’t owe them anything.
Here is how you can start dealing with the excessive need for acceptance. You get a less busy mind, so you can focus on the only thing that matters:
What do you want?
Why do you seek approval?
We need the approval of others to survive. We’re social creatures; without our pack, we’d get crazy or die.
Thousands of years ago, being rejected meant death. Our brains evolved to thrive in social groups, and the fear of death is still in our heads. Circumstances changed, but evolution is still to keep up with them. Until then, we have to handle our fears on our own.
Seeking approval is not a bad thing in itself. The problem starts when we seek too much of it.
When do you need too much?
When you can’t function in the world.
When you’re crushed by overthinking what others think of you.
Then it’s too much.
Have you ever resigned from something because you were too afraid of how you looked doing that?
Like ordering another desert because you loved it?
Have you ever compared yourself to someone thinking you’re not good enough? That you don’t have enough?
Like keeping up with the Joneses.
Have you lived your life to please someone?
Like you have stayed in the job you hate because your partner wanted you to?
All of that boils down to caring too much for external validation. You should be likable, sometimes agreeable but sometimes aggressive, sometimes sad but sometimes happy.
Remember, you’re the only one who can live your life. It’s up to you to decide when it’s too much. I gave you hints. You do with them what you want.
If you want to take action, here are the steps you can start with. Every one of them made me a better person. Go, try them out, and fight for a better life.
Self-awareness
The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging its existence.
Being aware that something is wrong is a must. If you’re unaware you want too much approval, you’re going full auto through life thinking about how to please others.
We all have this itch that our image of ourselves matches the image someone has of us, especially if it’s good.
Imagine you think of yourself as an intelligent person. You quickly understand concepts, you find patterns, and you are smart. Others tell you the same. Whenever someone has a problem, you’re able to help.
Once you’re asked to answer some riddles. Just for fun, no stake involved. You vaguely remember you aren’t good with those. You start smirking. You start justifying yourself by saying you’re tired, even before answering one. You can’t answer most of them; you feel ashamed.
You want the approval of your self-image. Losing it makes you nervous. If you’re self-aware, you can spot that your ego trembles because the image of the intelligent person gets shattered.
Suppose you know what you’re thinking and why you can change it next time. Whenever you encounter a need for approval, you can inspect it, tear it apart and find out why you feel the need.
It’s always about ego and its story. Listen to that story. Check what it tells about you, and remember that it’s just a story. You’re not it. Your ego will focus on what others think of you. You being self-aware, can let it go.
Developing self-awareness takes time, but it’s worth it. You will feel what’s right thanks to contact with your inner self. Don’t know where to start? Create a journal.
Stop overthinking
Before developing self-awareness, you can use signs to decide if you want too much approval. The best candidate is overthinking.
Whenever you encounter a situation that faces us against the opinion of others, you have a choice. You can try to please everyone and worry about their approval, or you can do your best with faith that people will accept that.
The difference between those two is the amount of thinking required. When you go with pleasing others, you have to analyze many thoughts. You can fall into thinking about those opinions and get paralyzed by them. From there, it’s one step to thinking in a loop.
Imagine you enter a restaurant. It’s weird. You can’t see the menu anywhere. People are watching you. You see some standing in line to order and some looking at their phones at the tables.
What’s happening here?
How should I place the order?
Why are they looking at me?
Where is the menu?
These are pretty reasonable questions to think about. You’re in a new environment, and you need to map it to feel comfortable.
If you go with overthinking, you may be overwhelmed by these thoughts. You can get stuck at “Why are they looking at me?” and extend that to thinking, “What’s wrong with me?”, “Do I look weird?”.
If you decide to do what you can and hope for the best, you cut the number of questions you ask yourself. “Why are they looking at me?” gets an answer: “Oh, I just entered and made noise” or something similar, but rational.
You don’t overanalyze the details because you got here to eat. Your primary objective is to find a way to order food. You ask how to place an order.
Cut needless thoughts by focusing on what’s your primary objective in life. Do you want to make everyone happy, which is impossible, or feel great with yourself and make most of your environment pleased?
Get great at being rejected
Wanting approval derives from fear of rejection. You want to please others with your behavior to be a part of the group. You want to be accepted by the gender you’re attracted to because you fear being alone for the rest of your life.
Get rejected. Train yourself in being rejected. Try multiple times, and ask for many things.
Learn to treat rejection as an event, don’t take it personally. What others will do with your ask is just as mysterious as the Universe itself. It happens, that’s it. You can let it be and learn from it. Get resilient because most of the time, you’ll be rejected.
Are you looking for practical training?
If you’re a man, install a dating app. Create your profile, pump up your hopes, and get rejected—one profile after another. Be careful. With time you can learn that rejection is not bad. You do the same with others. You reject them because that’s how our monkey brain works. It looks for things that seem nice. There are a lot of people out there. You probably won’t match everybody. It’s not personal that someone doesn’t like you.
If you’re a woman, try to hire a developer on LinkedIn. You send a message hoping to get a response, and nothing happens. If the response rate is 10%, you’re happy. They don’t have time to respond because they’re not looking for a job. Does it make them rude? No, it does make them effective in doing what they care about. People do what they want. It’s not personal.
Practice being rejected. You’ll be many times in your life. The better you can handle rejection, the smaller your fear of it. You don’t have to be courageous instantly. You can build your courage with experience.
Become a stoic
When you think of rejection as an external event you have no control over, you can distance yourself. It is still going to affect you, but maybe without destroying you.
Stoicism is a way to do it. It’s practical and straight to the point. You have to study how other stoics approached life and do the same. Make your life an example by being a stoic.
You can start by focusing on two ideas.
If you are ever tempted to seek outside approval, realize that you have compromised your integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.
Epictetus
Be your witness.
You’re the only one in control of your thoughts and actions. No one outside can help you if you don’t do the job yourself. You and only you are responsible for your life. You and only you know what the right thing to do is. You always have a choice to focus on what you can control and let the rest be.
Acceptance or rejection is not in your grasp. You can’t control what others think of you. You can’t change them. You can only change yourself.
Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will — then your life will flow well.
Epictetus
Learn to want what you already have. Appreciate it. Love it. Care for it. You don’t have time to always look for approval.
Stoicism helps you focus on what is in your control and let go of the rest. Let it guide you like it guided others through centuries. Treat rejection like an event with no meaning outside of your interpretation. Work on yourself to change the interpretation.
Find freedom
Whatever way you choose, remember that you work toward a better life. It’s worth fighting for. It’s worth the sacrifice. No one, including you, knows how far you can get.
Make your path easier by mitigating the fear of rejection.
Self-awareness is the most general way, but you can start with stopping overthinking. Watch for a situation that causes it, and remember about your goal to limit excessive thoughts.
Practice makes perfect, or at least it leads in the right direction. Go out in the world and get rejected. It can be fun if you let it be. Become a master of rejection.
If you want to improve how you think of adverse events, appreciate what you have. Learn to want that.
Free yourself from the burden of wanting approval on your terms.
