“No one is more or less important than anyone else.” ~Bev Pugh
When I was young and growing I had buck teeth, a flat chest, and grew overnight to be 5’5″. All of this happened at a very early age! I felt awkward and funny looking. I am sure I looked it! I began to develop ways of coping to handle my unpleasant feelings.
We all had times growing up when we experienced unpleasant feelings. Whether it was related to our bodies, relationships, expectations, or family dynamics.
I wonder what experiences you had and what your coping techniques were? We develop ways of managing our emotions. Positive habits are learned and negative habits are also adopted. The latter we want to extinguish as we get wiser.
Looking to others for validation and confirmation that we are okay can become a repetitive coping technique for dealing with our emotions. We have all experienced the feeling of wanting other people’s approval. For some of us, it can become a way of life. This we don’t want.
When we are approval seeking we are looking for a need within us to be met, and we are going outside of ourselves to have that need met. If we continue to look to others for love and affirmation, we lose the opportunity of developing a strong friendship with ourselves.
Approval seeking can be a way of dealing with a belief that we are not good enough in some way… so we give ourselves away to other people’s approval, with the hope of feeling important or loved or good enough.
When we are approval seeking several things happen:
1. We loose our personal power and give it to the other person.
2. We get out of touch with what we really think and feel.
3. We miss so many opportunities to love ourselves unconditionally because our focus is on others rather than on ourselves.
4. We can abuse ourselves because we are not honouring what we need.
5. We loose confidence.
6. We can loose our vitality.
7. We don’t develop a real friendship with ourselves.
This gives us so many reasons to start immediately noticing in our lives when we are seeking attention or approval from others, and call ourselves on it immediately.
But how do we turn all of this around?
The most important thing to remember is that we all have the innate capacity to love. As you are reading this, feel the love and warmth in your heart for someone you really love. It’s a beautiful open-hearted warm feeling. It’s a matter of turning that warm loving feeling to yourself and allowing yourself to receive it.
Somewhere in our history we began to judge ourselves for being “less than” in some way. Remember that judgment is a mental concept. It’s not the truth. We all have beautiful intrinsic value. But our judgement of ourselves keeps us from having that unconditional friendship.
Self acceptance and self love are the antidotes for approval seeking.
There are many ways to build our relationship with ourselves. The one I often relate to is feeling the love I have for family and nature, and then turning that beautiful love inwards to myself and allowing myself to receive it without blocking it with thought. Keep repeating this and let yourself soak it in.
I would really chase this theme of approval seeking. It keeps us “little” when the truth is we are really “big” and we need to let ourselves expand, rather than stay contracted in patterns that don’t serve us.
Enjoy developing a true friendship with yourself!!!
