Summary
Joe presents three strategies for breaking free from approval-seeking. First, see how your need for approval pushes people away—when you’re desperate for someone’s approval, you stop listening and start extracting, which repels people. Second, learn to let gratitude and compliments all the way in somatically rather than deflecting them; deflecting compliments tells the giver they’re a liar and stops the flow of appreciation. Third, feel the emotion underneath the approval-seeking—there’s always an unfelt emotion driving you out of yourself and into others’ opinions.
The deeper insight is that approval-seeking happens when there’s an emotion you don’t want to feel. Rather than being present with your own experience, you flee into managing how others perceive you. The antidote is simple: every time you notice you’re seeking approval, feel the emotion you’re avoiding, even for just a few seconds.
Key Concepts
- Seeking approval pushes away the very connection you want
- Receiving compliments somatically dissolves the feeling of unworthiness
- Unfelt emotions drive you out of yourself and into others’ opinions
- Chase your own approval instead of others’
Key Quotes
“When you’re seeking out approval you’ve stopped listening. You’re not actually with the person. You’re not present with the person. You want to extract something from them.”
“If you don’t receive the compliment, guess what it feels like to the person giving you the compliment? It feels like why would I keep giving you compliments if you don’t actually receive them.”
“There’s an emotion I don’t want to feel so I can’t be in myself so I’m going to go be in them and now I care what they think.”
“If you really take a minute and you say hey I’m just going to chase my own approval, it’s a whole different game.”
Transcript
Have you ever seen a high functioning team where one person is like hey everybody do you like me? Like it doesn’t work. What happens in a high functioning team or a high functioning family is that people are listening to themselves and they’re listening to each other and when you’re seeking out approval you stopped listening. My name is Joe Hudson. I was a former venture capitalist and now I’m a coach to some of the world’s most notable CEOs in Silicon Valley. In this video we’re going to talk about how to stop chasing other people’s approval. Let’s do number one: seeing how your need for approval is pushing people away. So the easiest way to understand how looking for people’s approval pushes them away is think about the person who wants your approval who’s desperate for your approval and notice what happens inside of you. You’re like uh get away or you’re okay with it for a while but then you’re like ah this is annoying. I don’t want to be the person who gives you approval. And when you’re seeking out approval you’ve stopped listening. You’re not actually with the person. You’re not present with the person. You want to extract something from them. It’s like asking them for money except you’re asking them for approval. And at some point they’re like God damn it buy your own lunch get your own approval. And so it pushes them away. How can you be friends with or trust somebody who’s just going to do what you want because that gives them approval instead of somebody who’s actually going to show up as them say what they mean mean what they say? That’s the people that you can trust. Just see how when you look for approval it’s pushing people away. Feel the hurt of that pushing away. Just doing it in and of itself bringing that awareness to the table is going to slow down your need for approval. So the second one is letting gratitude all the way in. So when somebody is looking for approval and they get a compliment here’s something that often happens: oh I’m not pretty you’re the pretty one. Oh that’s not really true. I’m not that pretty. They do something like that which is basically telling the person who gave you a compliment that they’re a liar. And the other thing you’re doing is not receiving the compliment. And if you don’t receive the compliment guess what it feels like to the person giving you the compliment? It feels like why would I keep giving you compliments if you don’t actually receive them. If you don’t enjoy them it seems like a horrible thing to do. So you stop getting the compliments. The other thing about receiving compliments is if you actually receive them somatically meaning in your body if you feel them instead of dismissing them they’re going to feel a little weird. They’re going to feel strange. You’re going to try to let them get all the way through you. It’s going to tickle some parts of you. It’s going to make you feel uncomfortable in other parts. You might find yourself getting rigid and you just like relax and let the feeling move all the way through you. And when it does, when it moves all the way through you, what it’s actually doing is taking the part of you that feels limited and it’s challenging it. It’s making the part of you that says no I’m not enough and it’s like wow there’s evidence to the contrary. And you have to deal with that and that creates an emotion. So if you feel that emotion it can process all the way through and it really literally destroys this egoic part of you that says hey I’m limited I’m not good enough. And you actually can’t believe it anymore if you let that feeling all the way through you. It really shows you who you are instead of what you think you are and that creates a lot of freedom. So the third way to let go of chasing approval is to actually feel the emotion that’s underneath thinking that somebody is better than you or worse than you. This is why putting somebody above us protects us from our emotions. Because if we feel our emotions then all we can do is really listen to ourselves. So when you say somebody’s better than me then you don’t have to listen to your emotional experience. And so then you’re really concerned about how they think about you. But if you can feel your emotional experience and you don’t need to protect yourself from that, then you care about what you think, what’s your truth. It allows you to be in yourself instead of over in them trying to figure out what will make them happy. And it’s really hard to be in yourself if there’s an emotion you don’t want to feel. So it goes like this: oh there’s an emotion I don’t want to feel so I can’t be in myself so I’m going to go be in them and now I care what they think. So all you need to do is every time you notice that you’re seeking out approval from somebody else, feel the emotion that you’re not allowing yourself to feel right there, right in the spot, even if it’s just for two three four seconds. Allow yourself to feel it and slowly but surely you’ll start paying attention to your truth rather than other people’s truth. If you really take a minute and you say hey I’m just going to chase my own approval it’s a whole different game. It’s a whole different game to say oh hey do I approve of that? If that’s your central question rather than do they approve of that? Do I approve of that? Does that make me feel good? Is this how I want to be? That is a life where you feel very empowered, very grounded, and very able to have the life that you want.