“Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.”
~ Laoz
In my work with my clients, I help them uncover and transform behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, and more that are the drivers of how they uniquely relate to others. This often includes patterns of people-pleasing, which is a common habit for many caring individuals. These patterns impact business and corporate relationships as well as romantic, familial, and friendships.
Continue reading to find out how this pattern can cause challenges in your personal and professional life, and also how you can shift it to your benefit!
Meet Sarah, a client who I worked with a couple of years ago. Her external approval seeking in her relationship had caused her partner to pull back, as he was tired of her “neediness” for approval. It actually drove him away, while she felt incomplete and unloved a lot of the time. The relationship ended badly, similarly to a few previous ones she had – as we all tend to repeat patterns through multiple relationships (a clue for where we are going in this article!).
As she and I worked together on this pattern she was experiencing, I invited her to meet with her inner self at a younger age – to have an inner dialog between her adult self and her younger self to create safety and understanding.
In one breakthrough session, she had a memory that at age 5 – when her brother had been born – her family life had changed.
To her young mind then (and now), it seemed all her parents’ love that she had enjoyed up to this point had been subtracted, and all of it then given to her newborn brother. Shortly after this, she had begun to find ways to get her parents’ attention, to seek out their love. It became a hunt for approval from them so she would feel better – more connected, and loved.
This experience in her session with me, conversing with her younger self, was the first time Sarah as an adult had realized this. She was then able to see that this hunt for approval had become an automatic and unconscious behavior from a part of her childhood through to her adulthood, trying to heal the initial hurtful experience. The hunt and love-seeking from this part had continued in – and undermined all –of her love relationships, right up until she and I worked together.
This is why “patterns” (and the impact they have) can be shifted, released and repaired using a skill like “parts work.” In simple terms, this skill can uncover and shift unconscious patterns by having conversations with our inner younger parts.
With some deep work and continued intimate conversations between her adult self and her young self, Sarah grew into being a caring and wise parent to her young self: showering the latter with approval, understanding, new ways of seeing things, and love. I suggested she make this a daily practice as well for any time she recognized she felt the need to seek approval from anyone else (something we all do, no matter how “aware” we are).
Her newfound self-approval then delivered dividends beyond what she expected.
She became self-reliant and self-supportive. She chose to be single in a healthy relationship with herself until she met a partner who could stand with her and honor her where she now is. And a surprise bonus? Sarah received a promotion at work, as her new way of being strong and secure in herself was being noticed by her managers.
When you grow your internal resource of self-approval, you will also discover a powerful and elegant way of relating to and supporting yourself. How you interact with others will elevate, too.
Maybe you’re curious how I knew to work with Sarah’s pattern of people-pleasing and outsourcing her approval by talking to her younger self. It’s not always a straightforward leap from one to the other!
My background in Spiritual Psychology provides me with my well-honed blend of skills to facilitate the journey of my clients who want help in romantic and self relationship. A book I recommend that illuminates some of this skill set is No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz, where he explains the Internal Family System we all have – the “parts” I spoke of. Navigating that internal system and the experiences we had in our past sheds light on many aspects of our behavior – including how and why we seek approval from others.
What Schwartz calls Exiles and Managers are parts of our Internal Family System that, in this example with Sarah, have been born and taken on the role of sourcing approval from outside as a form of protection to avoid internal trauma, or pain from younger years.
This behavior of external sourcing, often in the form of people-pleasing, is usually tied to childhood memories of needing to belong, wanting to be accepted, and wanting to fit in – and not actually receiving the fulfillment of those needs. We all have these needs! Yet when they are not met, or we are not taught how to meet them ourselves, in positive and useful ways, our Exiles and Managers step in to create methods to get them met as best as they know how.
This is why Dr. Schwartz says there are no bad parts. Because even if these behaviors we currently experience and exhibit are not creating the life we want or getting us where we want to be – and often have negative consequences – they are simply trying to help us as best as our younger self could figure out while we navigated that pain. And now that you are an adult, these beliefs and internal parts may be replaying, unconsciously, in your life.
Making these parts conscious and known to you is the first step to releasing and healing that old pain, and choosing a new path towards meeting your needs in ways that bring connection and deeply resourced contentment and joy.
And ultimately, this is the great news that my clients discover: you can choose differently, you can choose for yourself, you can choose you!
I invite and encourage you to fill up your own approval container from within. As you source approval of yourself from inside, this will alleviate your need for external approval, reducing and even eliminating any need of seeking approval from others at your own detriment.
We are human creatures, and will always require and benefit from connection with others; we just don’t have to do it at our expense. And how wonderful it is to be able to meet our own needs as best we can, and choose to have a conscious connection when we truly need help from others, including when we want to onboard people as clients and generate income.
This ability to be resourced from within makes it so much easier to prioritize the human over the transaction any time we are asking for help, prioritizing their experience over trying to extract something from them.
This also makes celebrating someone’s ultimate choice of helping us or not – even choosing to professionally work with us or not – so much easier when we are no longer equating their decision as a reflection of our value, approval, or worth!
Being inner-resourced relieves the pressure in a sales conversation, and our potential clients can actually feel that we are placing their needs in high regard. In turn, this actually makes them more likely to want to work with us. Because when we can separate someone saying “no” to us from our internal stories that tell us they’re rejecting us, disapproving of us, or in any other way causing us perceived harm… we can more easily relax, and hear their full truth and needs with spaciousness and divine presence.
And that is something everyone craves.
A beautiful result of filling up with our own approval first is that our self-respect automatically increases, as does our respect for others. Client relationships, peer respect, co-worker relationships, primary relationships – all thrive and become healthier. You will also experience a lot less pull from others, and you will feel more centered and comfortable in conversations or situations that are challenging.
The myriad benefits of self-approval include…
✓
You release perceived life-or-death attachments to how others respond, helping free you from neediness or codependent attachments (including in a business conversation).
✓
You can own your independence and trust yourself more fully, leading to clients and intimate relationships trusting you more in return.
✓
You establish much healthier boundaries, enabling you to make clearer and cleaner choices that serve you and others fully.
✓
You become more self-reliant, self-trusting, and relaxed even when others disagree with you or have their disappointments about what you choose to do or not do.
✓
You discover the gift of detachment – incredible for when finances feel tight or there’s a perceived lack somewhere in your life.
✓
You will be less at the whim of others, so you can see with clarity, and choose from integrity and wholeness.
How does this feel for you?
Prioritizing self-approval truly aligns with the overall philosophy of the Ethical Sales Institute. When we are resourced from within, and fill ourselves from our own self-approval faucet, we can be centered and generous in our conversations with potential clients (and anyone). We can honor and celebrate their choices without attachment to the outcome or emotional cost to us (and bounce back faster when we do experience attachment and emotions – because we’re human!).
Whether a prospective client says “yes” or “no” has equal weight for us.
The relaxation of not needing others’ approval to feel safe enables us to stay in alignment with ourselves – something that’s independent of work or play. We indeed serve more cleanly, and our sales conversations carry the same gift of detachment.
I invite you to reflect on your relationships with clients, with prospects, with friends and loved ones, and notice how you are with them:
Are you resourcing your own inner approval, or are you tempted to seek that from them instead?
You can have healthy boundaries and enjoy more success and give from a full “battery.” Are you ready?
“Many people allow their need for other people’s approval
to control their lives. They spend their lives worrying about
what others think of them.”
~ Rick Warren
Reference:
[1] Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts. Sounds True, 2021. https://ifs-institute.com/about-us/richard-c-schwartz-phd
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Barry Selby
Barry is a masterful relationship expert, author, podcaster, inspirational speaker, and spiritual guide, affectionally known as “The Love Doctor.” He guides his clients and audience to powerfully love themselves, regaining their wholeness, and helping successful individuals to attract their healthy and fulfilling relationship.
www.barryselby.com
www.youtube.com/barryselby
