Tag Archives: peoplepleasing

Emotional Independence: How to Let Go of External Validation and Own Your Feelings.

In other words, how to stop being a chameleon.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

How it started

If you were a child that was raised in a volatile household you may have learned to adopt certain habits as a means of self-preservation…

Habits like trying to behave the right way, say the right things or even make yourself invisible in order to avoid unwanted, negative attention. The kind of attention that might result in anger, fear, or pain.


As children we obviously didn’t have the power to change our circumstances.


So instead, a lot of us became masters of changing our thoughts and our actions in order to avoid that negative attention, to avoid ‘rocking the boat’.

We learned how to think and act in order to control the only thing we thought we could – other people’s actions and emotions. 


In the process, our brains developed an equation: Act the right way = achieve the desired result:


Be the good girl = feel seen.
Get good grades = receive positive attention and praise.
Make someone else happy = feel loved and appreciated in return.


Through years and years of that repetition we developed the belief that controlling other people’s emotions was the only way to control ours.

How it’s going

While these behaviors may have served us when we were kids, many of us are still holding onto them as adults. 


How many of us as parents look to our kids for validation? While they’re young we want them to feel happy, “fit in”, or get good grades. Not just because we love them, but because we believe it means we’re good parents. If they seem happy and love us back then we’re “doing it right”.

And what about those of us whose children are grown and no longer live at home?


How many of us have had the thought “They’re not talking or texting me enough. They don’t want to spend time with me, which means they don’t love me. I did it wrong. I must have been a bad parent” –?


We apply that same thought process to our spouses and even our friends.
A lot of us also carry it into our jobs. We believe the more we do, the harder we hustle, the more appreciated we will be. And appreciation = validation, right? The feeling that we’re doing it right, that we’re worthy.


We’re repeatedly applying that same equation, that same thought error, to the people around us now, just as we did when we were kids, in the hopes that we’ll achieve the same results. 

But what served us then does not serve us now.

How Do We Get to There?

Imagine if we no longer gave other people power over our feelings of self-worth.


What if we were the only ones responsible for how we felt and acted?


What if we were the only ones who could provide ourselves with feelings of worthiness and “enoughness”?


(Okay spoiler alert – we are. We totally are).


No one else can give us something that we are unwilling or unable to give ourselves. 


No amount of external affirmation or validation, from anyone, could ever fill the void if our internal belief is that we’re not enough.


I am willing to die on that hill, my friends.


So how do we go about changing our internal dialogue? How do we turn off that negative belief of “not enoughness”?


I don’t believe that we should, or even could, ban negative thoughts completely. Mine have been running in the background of my primal brain for 50+ years, so that neural pathway is well-worn my friends. It’s become a part of who I am.


But we can develop new thought loops, new neural pathways (because, science). And, now that we’re adults, we get to choose those new thoughts.

On purpose.


I’m not talking about repeating daily affirmations about being worthy and enough (although I would highly recommend journaling them as part of the process).


I’m talking about taking a step back, looking at your current thoughts – without judgment – and just getting curious.


Discover the unintentional, negative thought loops that are running unchecked through your brain, thousands of times a day, and see how those thoughts are currently affecting your life:

  • Do you constantly second-guess everything you say and do?
  • Hustle all day to prove your self-worth?
  • Obsess over the reactions of others to determine what they might mean about you?

The thoughts running unchecked in my brain sound like this: 

  • “I’m not good enough”
  • “I did that wrong”
  • “This isn’t going to work anyway so why try”


Instead of ignoring my unintentional thoughts and pretending they don’t exist, I try to choose a thought that makes me feel a little better, one that feels true in my body: 

  • “I’ve gotten myself this far”
  • “What if there is no right or wrong way?” or “I can learn how to do it better next time”
  • “But what if it does work?” or “What if I just try it another way?”


 And I won’t lie, it takes work and commitment to change the thoughts you’ve been holding on to for most of your life.

It takes looking at the unintentional/unwanted results you’ve achieved so far, and deciding to do something different going forward to achieve intentional results.

Intentional thoughts = intentional results.

The only thing holding you back from living your fullest life is your thoughts. 


But I believe you can change that. 


Because you are beautiful and you’re worthy of an incredible life. 


We all are.

Discover what’s possible

Hustle, People-Pleasing, and Overwhelm

Here’s why you’re killing yourself at work, and how to stop.

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

I became a full-blown workaholic at the age of 18.

I had started working in fast food jobs at the age of 15 (I had to fake my application to say I was 15 ½, which was the minimum age to start working in California). I worked in a few different fast-food chains before starting a corporate job in the real estate industry at 18. 

And I’ve been in that same industry ever since, 37 years.

But my job/life balance looks drastically different today than it did back then.

It’s not that I loved working. It was more like every day gave me a new chance for me to prove my worth to my managers, bosses, and co-workers.

I would go into work early, stay late, work weekends, and even bring files home. Sometimes I wouldn’t log my time because “that’s just what it took” to prove my worth. Unfortunately it also meant sacrificing time with my newly born daughter when I was a single mom, and, later on, my other kids and my family.

I’m not proud of that. 

I’m only thankful that I had the opportunity later in life to re-build, or build, that relationship with my children as we all got older. 

Once, when I had been working my ass off in corporate for about 8 years, I had a meeting with our office manager to go over my yearly performance. I had established myself as a hard worker at that point, so I was expecting a good review.

We were sitting in his office, him seated behind a big mahogany desk in an over-stuffed chair, and me sitting on the other side of the desk in (of course) a chair that was smaller and lower to the ground. 

He knew who I was and I knew who he was, but we had never really had a conversation before.

During our meeting I remember him looking at me without speaking for what seemed like an uncomfortable amount of time. He finally said he appreciated that they could put me as an assistant with anyone because I seemed to get along with everybody, even the hard-noses that no one else wanted to work with. Then he tilted his head one side and asked “Are you a middle child?”. 

That was around the time The Birth Order book came out, and apparently this guy that I had never really spoken to before had me all figured out.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable and resentful at his question. I had never considered my birth order up to that point, or what it even meant, and I certainly wasn’t expecting that question as part of my review.

Unfortunately though, his theory was right, I was a middle child. And, although I never read the Birth Order book, I definitely grew up with an urge to make sure everyone else around me “felt okay”. I learned early on that was the best way to keep the peace and avoid unpleasant (and sometimes angry) confrontation. 

It was my way of making myself feel safe.

I have no idea how my boss had figured out so much about me, since I didn’t even understand it about myself at the time. 

But my review was favorable, and they rewarded me by making me the assistant of one of the mangers that was such a jerk no one else wanted to work with him. But I played my people-pleasing game and made it work out. 

I continued to be a workaholic and feed off of the attention and the accolades until I eventually burned out from it. 

And now, in spite of all the blood, sweat and tears I gave my job over roughly 30 years, I’ve learned that it could never give back to me what I desired most. It could never give me the love, attention, and value that I wasn’t able to give myself. 

Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate job knows the more work you do, the more work they give you to do. It’s like trying to dig a hole in the sand at the beach, the more you dig, the more it fills itself back in.

And when you burn out, it’s not your job’s job to save you. The Powers That Be will simply move on to the next hustler, and then you end up back where you’ve always been.

Responsible for your own feeling of self-worth and value.

And that, my friends, is a good thing,

You’re the only one that responsibility SHOULD belong to. You’re the only one who can control how you feel, and it’s because of the thoughts you’re thinking. It comes down to your beliefs.

You don’t need a job to feel worthy.

You need to believe you’re already worthy.

You don’t need a job to feel valuable.

You need to believe you’re already valuable.

And no job, no person, can give you that value, but they also can’t take it away. It belongs to you and only.

And once you anchor yourself  into that belief you will be able to establish boundaries to protect it. 

You will stop hustling to prove yourself. You will stop allowing others to dictate how you feel by what they say and how they act. You get to own your boundaries, your own self-worth, all of it.

THAT’S the work you should be focusing on. 

It will change your life.

Discover What’s Possible.