Without knowing it, we can externalise our sense of confidence and self belief.
....meaning we rely on the positive feedback or approval from others in order to feel stable and confident in ourselves and what we are contributing.
It’s a challenging place to live and work from.
It sends us on an emotional rollercoaster - we get a boost or lift when we receive the feedback or praise we desire, and then we don’t, it can send us into a spiral of second guessing ourselves and our value.
Inside this episode I’m discussing:
How to break free from the cycle of seeking external validation
How to be your own source of approval which will lead to greater feeling of stability and ease in your work life (and life overall!) and dramatically grow your confidence and self belief.
A really powerful weekly reflection practice that will really help you embed all of this + more.
If you liked this episode, check out Elevate The Mastermind. My 6 month mastermind program here to help you deepen your self belief and create career success in a calm and sustainable way. Applications are open now for our next enrolment.
Without knowing it, we can externalise our sense of confidence and self belief.
....meaning we rely on the positive feedback or approval from others in order to feel stable and confident in ourselves and what we are contributing.
It’s a challenging place to live and work from.
It sends us on an emotional rollercoaster - we get a boost or lift when we receive the feedback or praise we desire, and then we don’t, it can send us into a spiral of second guessing ourselves and our value.
Inside this episode I’m discussing:
How to break free from the cycle of seeking external validation
How to be your own source of approval which will lead to greater feeling of stability and ease in your work life (and life overall!) and dramatically grow your confidence and self belief.
A really powerful weekly reflection practice that will really help you embed all of this + more.
If you liked this episode, check out Elevate The Mastermind. My 6 month mastermind program here to help you deepen your self belief and create career success in a calm and sustainable way. Applications are open now for our next enrolment.
If this podcast serves you, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review.
Share this episode with a friend who may enjoy it too.
Speaker 1:
Hi, it's Annabel Matzin and welcome to the Steep your Soul podcast. Soulful guidance for women who are seeking deeper truth and meaning to their lives. If you're ready to move past what's been holding you back and awaken to your full potential and purpose in life, then let's get started. Hi, it's Annabel Matzin here and welcome back to the podcast. Inside this episode I'm going to be talking to you about healing, the need for validation and how this shows up for us in work and life, and really how healing this creates so much more ease and stability in our lives. Life feels less like the ups and downs, big highs, big lows. We feel more stable within ourselves, more certain of ourselves and our value and our worth. It really sits at the core of this picture of making work feel lighter. So if you're in a place where work is feeling stressful, hard, you feel pressured a lot in your work. I always say that stress is a surface symptom. So, yes, we can recognize on the surface that we feel stressed or pressured at work, but what I'm most interested in is what is driving that stress and to actually look at that second layer underneath the stress and understand what's driving the stressful experience that we're having on the surface and so much of it, and really what it comes back to is a lot to do with our own belief systems and how we feel about ourselves and the value that we're bringing to what we do and our work and perhaps the people around us. So let's talk a little bit about this. So often what's happening is there is a underlying belief that we might be operating from that we don't feel enough. And when I say this and when I introduce this concept to clients is I'm always drawing you to that second layer of thinking. So it might not be that you're wandering through your day to day life with a conscious story or thought pattern of I'm not enough. It might actually be sitting a little bit more subconsciously, but it's that belief that's driving some of this need for approval from the people that you work with, from other people in your life. So just kind of be curious about this. Even if you don't sort of hear that as a conscious story, understand a lot of the time it is that second layer of thinking and it's more evident in how we're feeling at work and in life and the actions that we're taking. So we can often identify it that way.
Speaker 1:
So what's happening with this need for validation is there's like a hunger within us, so we're feeling hungry and we're looking to be feed outside of ourselves. And so when is this hunger present within us? It means we are not giving ourselves the approval and the acceptance that we long for and that we really need as humans. And so when there's this hunger that exists within us, naturally we're going to look somewhere to satiate that hunger, and it's just like any other hunger we feel. Right. When we feel hungry physically, we are looking to go and satiate that hunger through a food choice somewhere. And it's the same with that hunger for approval, acceptance, validation. So if we are not in a practice of consciously giving ourselves approval and acceptance and validation, naturally we're looking for that hunger to be satisfied and satiated outside of ourselves. And so here's what happens is we're relying on other people to make us feel good and feel safe and feel stable in who we are and what we're doing.
Speaker 1:
And it's a wobbly place to be in, because what can happen is you might receive that so from a colleague, a boss, from a relationship, from certain people in your life. They might give you the feedback that you want sometimes and that might give you a temporary boost where you go like, yeah, okay, I am good at this, I am enough, I can do this, but then, not long after that, hunger strikes again. It's like we can only ride along that feeling and have that boost for a short term period of time, and then the hunger strikes again and we start to feel not enough again, like we're wondering whether we're doing enough, we're adding enough value. We start to doubt our abilities again. So what happens is it creates this big emotional rollercoaster of an experience, really. So it's like we experience that big high from receiving the feedback that we want and then, not long after, starts to wane and then we start to feel low again, we start to doubt ourselves, and that hunger is there and we're looking to be satisfied again from outside of ourselves, and maybe at this point we don't receive the feedback, we don't get what we need from people outside of us, from our boss, from our colleagues, and so we can go into this feeling of self-doubt and you're wondering whether we're adding enough value, and so the cycle continues and then we might seek that feedback Again. We get the boost and then we start to feel low again, and so up and down.
Speaker 1:
So you can see how this creates a really stressful experience of life and work and, how I said earlier, how stress is a surface symptom. So much of the stress that we experience really sits at this level. This is what's driving it. So the first thing around, healing this need for validation just really creates so much more ease for you in your work life and in your life overall. And it starts with identifying the belief that you might be operating from. That's creating that need for validation, and the spoiler alert is that it's likely to be a belief around I'm not enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not experienced enough, I'm not enough in some way. So that's what creates the hunger. That's the hunger we're looking to get filled. So it starts there.
Speaker 1:
I'd really invite you to think about what belief do I need to really be sitting in and reminding myself of, to start to fill myself up with the acceptance, with the approval, with the validation that I'm seeking outside of myself. This is about really beginning to give yourself what you're seeking externally, and there's enormous freedom that comes from this when you can start to be the source or the provider of that yourself. It means you totally step out of that cycle of big highs and big lows and relying on other people to feel good enough to give you that sense of approval, because it's such shaky ground to base our sense of self on other people's opinions. Because if others can give us that feeling of significance and approval, they can also take it away from us. And we want to be able to really sit in this place of knowing our value, knowing who we are, knowing what we're contributing, with or without the approval or validation from others. This is a really powerful place to operate from and a really loving place to operate from, a place that's just going to create so much more ease in your life.
Speaker 1:
So it starts with the beliefs that you're holding, and this can be as simple as just working with one belief. So the belief might be I am enough for the work that I do, I am good enough for my team, or I believe in the value that I'm offering here. So a simple belief like that and just sitting with that single belief and telling yourself that throughout the day. So maybe you start the day and you write it in your journal. Maybe it's a belief that you just filter through your mind as you're on your commute, on your way into work, if you feel like you're starting to get pressured at work. Come back to this belief, bring it through your mind, breathe into that belief. This is how we change our beliefs. This is how we change the way we think and how we feel about ourselves. So it always starts with the beliefs that we're thinking. So I really encourage you to think about what that belief needs to be for you and to start to be using it and integrating it into your daily life. And that is just going to create such a shift for you because, as I said earlier, it's giving yourself what you're seeking outside of yourself.
Speaker 1:
Another little practice that can be really helpful is it could be a daily review on your way home in the car, or it could be sort of like a weekly thing that you do. So something that you do. Maybe you set aside some time in your calendar, like two o'clock on a Friday, and you just take 10 minutes to reflect on your week. It might even be a little bit longer, but whatever time you have available, taking some time to reflect on your week and looking at where you've contributed value, what's worked well this week, what you're feeling proud of, what you can really sit in and feel good about. So, taking some time, get a journal out and actually write those things out. Sometimes we can like think about them and it's somewhat helpful, but I feel like it lands and it drops in in a different way if we write it down.
Speaker 1:
So take some time to reflect on what happened this week and start to really draw out things that you're feeling good about, where you feel like you've contributed value, what you feel proud of, and start to really connect with that feeling of being proud of yourself. So, rather than it just being a mental exercise, we want to connect to the body through this as well. So breathe in what it feels like to be proud of yourself, to feel that sense of fullness about who you are and what you're offering, that you can feel that breathing in that fullness when you look over what you've written, to take the time to breathe that in, give yourself that fullness, you can see how that really starts to feed you in such a profound way that you are full. You don't need to then go and seek it outside of yourself. You don't then need to go and look for other people to give that to you, which, just as I've been saying, creates so much more stability for you in your life. It means that you feel much more sure of your value and you move through your workday with that sense of certainty, with that sense of confidence, and, gosh, it feels so much easier and so much lighter. So that can be a really great practice.
Speaker 1:
It's sort of I was saying this to a client this week where this was coming up and it's actually come up recently in the mastermind as well, and I know when a theme like this comes up more than once that it's something that I need to talk about on the podcast because it's clearly circulating somewhere out there for other people. And what I was saying to this client is it's sort of inconvenient work that we don't really want to do, like we would prefer not to have to take this time to sit in this reflection and do this work, and so there's natural resistance there. But I promise you, if you commit to this, it will create huge shifts and changes for you. So, starting with your beliefs, in summary, starting with your beliefs, thinking about the core belief, to start to work with, filter that through your mind, be writing it down every day, start to really build that into your system, to start to believe that and let that belief fill you up and start to radiate out of you, and that alone will create some beautiful shifts for you. And then, secondly, that that weekly practice of looking back on your week and seeing what you feel proud of, what you can acknowledge and appreciate and validate yourself for, and fill yourself up with that praise and connect with that feeling of being proud of yourself, feel it in your body, feel, breathe in what it feels like to be proud of yourself. So much shifts when we take it from the mind to the body.
Speaker 1:
So I think, just in summary, it's just important to remember that it's a hunger, that hunger for approval and validation. It cannot be fed or fully satiated from outside of ourselves. It's nice when we hear feedback from others Like, of course it is and it is important to receive feedback. It's important that we're receiving that but it can't be the only place we're going to to feel sure about ourselves, to feel good enough about ourselves. So it's a hunger that can really only be met through ourselves, through our own practices. So I know committing to this is going to create just such a beautiful shift for you.
Speaker 1:
So if this is something that you're committed to applying in your life. I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me on Instagram at Annabelle Mattson link will be in the show notes. Send me an email. I would love to hear. And if this work resonates with you.
Speaker 1:
This is so much of what we do inside my Mastermind program, elevate the Mastermind, and applications are now open for our March enrolment. So we begin at the first week of March. It's a six month program which is really all about helping you create more calm, sustainable success to deepen into your self belief and really support you to move into your next level of success in a way that feels really good to you and to your body. So if you're interested in checking that out, I'll leave a link to Elevate the Mastermind in the show notes below. We do such beautiful work together.
Speaker 1:
It's an intimate group where you're connected with just a small number of women who are really on the same journey as you, who struggle with the same stuff as you, who want to achieve the same things as you but do it in a much lighter way. So learning how to work and to achieve your career goals in a lighter way, with deeper self belief. So it's been so much fun. I've run this program now twice this year. It's been such a highlight for me over this year and I'm really looking forward to welcoming in another group in March for our six month program. So go and check that out if that resonates, and I look forward to connecting with you soon.