5 Odd Signs You Are Still Seeking Approval From Others

If you have grown up feeling invisible, and if you were never taught to believe you were enough, you may not realize that you seek approval outside of the self. In this episode, Lisa A. Romano, creator of the Rapid Consciousness Transformation Process, teaches you about the warning signs of seeking approval.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

Namaste dear ones.

So today we're going to be talking about the five signs that you're still seeking approval.

So today we're tackling this idea about seeking approval.

This is when we find ourselves looking for something outside of us to make us happy.

And it makes sense,

Right?

We're born to physical human beings,

To a physical world.

We've come from a non-physical place,

Right?

You can't get something from nothing.

So we are this something,

This little tiny infant that came from something and now we're here.

We're on planet earth.

We have earthlings as parents.

And it makes sense that we believe or we are programmed or our brain has these default settings that have us feeling like something outside of us should be taking care of us.

We are defenseless,

Powerless,

Innocent human creatures,

Right?

And we cannot fend for the self.

So when we're born,

There is this understanding,

This genetic biological understanding or presupposition that I will be born defenseless and the people that I am born to will take care of me.

I will belong to a tribe.

This tribe will be healthy and they will love me and they won't just love me sometime.

They will love me all the time.

Even when I bump into a wall,

Even when I drop a glass of milk,

Even when I'm not at my best self,

Even when I'm two and having a very natural temper tantrum,

Even when I'm three and I'm saying no and mine to everything,

I'm still going to be loved.

Even when I am obnoxious as a little girl and I don't know how to control myself,

I'm not going to feel rejected.

I'm still going to feel loved.

If you came from that type of environment,

You are someone who may be struggling with still seeking approval from the outside.

Why?

Because you never received it,

Right?

Well,

Biologically,

We are built to hit particular milestones and in a particular order.

And if we hit all those milestones,

Then we become very well adjusted adults who can handle disappointment.

We can handle rejection.

We can handle even abandonment because we have found the self or we have found the road back to me.

We are people who understand that the word no is a natural part of the adult experience and that people have a right to have their opinions.

They don't have a right to break the law.

They don't have the right to emotionally abuse us.

And I really do hope that eventually we'll move to a place where emotional abuse really is considered a form of domestic violence,

Deliberately trying to emotionally inflict harm on another human being is an assault.

Wanting to destroy how someone sees themselves is violent.

Wanting to destroy someone's reputation is violent.

Trying to separate you from your children,

A form of violence.

Using the children against you is a form of violence.

Threatening to take the children away from you is a form of violence.

Threatening to never return them to you is a form of violence.

So if you came from a home where you were emotionally abused,

You have to recognize that there have been scars laid upon your heart.

And you may still feel like you never received the affection,

The attention,

And the sense of belonging that every child deserves to experience when they come to planet Earth.

And if you are someone who felt rejected as a child,

Don't be surprised if you have low self-esteem,

If you can be clingy,

You can be needy,

Codependent,

You can even be highly critical of others,

You could be passive aggressive of others.

I mean,

There's a whole plethora of dysfunctional defense mechanisms that come along or occur inside of us when we have experienced early abandonment.

And that is not our fault.

What we have to do on the road to recovery or the road back to me,

As I like to say,

What we have to do is figure out what happened to us so that we can reverse engineer and we can give the self what we always needed.

And obviously,

If you felt rejected as a child,

Then you struggle with shame.

And shame means that you have learned or have been conditioned to think that you as a being are unworthy,

Unlovable,

And disgusting.

You're just not enough.

You're not worthy of anyone's validation or affirmation or praise.

Just get out of here,

Kid.

You really feel like you as a being are defective.

Now,

Guilt,

On the other hand,

Means that I have acknowledged that my behavior went against my moral code,

Or I said or I did something that I,

Not under stress or my best self would have never done.

And so feeling guilt,

Healthy guilt,

Means I recognize that I need to change my behavior.

Someone who is healthier will absolutely follow through.

They won't shrug the guilt off and use backwards justification and rationalization to blame shift,

Which is more on the line of narcissism.

It's like someone who has a narcissistic injury may even feel a little bit of the guilt,

Maybe even feel a little bit of the shame,

But they quickly flip it on you,

And their mind goes right into rationalizing the guilt away,

Which makes you wrong and them right.

And that's why it's very difficult,

If not impossible,

To be able to break through to someone who has that mindset and has that issue.

They're highly reactive.

You are playing a game with them.

They are not listening to you.

Holy Hannah,

What a revelation that was when it clicked in my head that the person that I was trying to get through,

The person that I loved,

The person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with,

Was literally designed to not hear me,

To reject me.

Everything was a game.

I was being placated.

Every argument I was placated.

It was pretend.

It was shut up.

Lisa just shut up and fall back in line.

I'm not changing.

And I will pretend that I am for a little bit of a time,

But as soon as you calm down and I convince you that I've heard you,

I'm going to go back to being me.

Holy Hannah,

When you realize that,

You can let go.

I am a huge believer in pulling off the band-aid.

In other words,

I can't change what I don't see.

And if I'm going to transmute and evolve my soul,

Then pretending what is is not is ridiculous.

It goes against evolution.

If you think about mental alchemy or literal alchemy,

It's this idea of accepting the lead.

So if I'm an alchemist,

I have to accept the lead first before I can transmute it into gold.

And what we do emotionally is we don't want to look at the lead.

We don't want to look at our boo-boos.

We don't want to change.

We want something outside of us to change.

And if we're struggling with needing approval from the outside,

We are definitely guilty of this.

So what's the purpose of a session like this?

The purpose of a session like this is to blow your mind,

Is to allow you to see the cracks in your own self,

In your own personality's self.

Now it's important that we all realize,

We take a moment,

Take a nice deep breath,

Do you want?

This might blow your mind.

You are not your personality.

You are not your thoughts.

And you are not your feelings.

You are so much more than that.

But when we are living below the veil of consciousness,

Which all human beings do,

We are born into a dream state,

Which is why newborns sleep so much.

And then we shift into a theta brainwave state,

Which is a hypnotic brainwave state.

And we are in a hypnotic brainwave state until about the age of seven.

We are in a hypnotic brainwave state because nature and infinite wisdom knows that children need to rapidly download information within the first seven years of life.

Here's the problem with that.

The problem is that when we are in a theta brainwave state,

And we come from dysfunctional homes,

We are being padded and programmed for dysfunction.

Source is supposed to flow through us.

We're supposed to be evolving up.

Unfortunately,

When you are born to dysfunctional people and toxic parents,

Energy is not flowing through you the way it should.

You're stuck.

You're arrested at particular milestones in life.

And that's not your fault.

And one of the places that we get stuck is seeking approval.

We really feel like we need our environment to be accepting of us.

What does that mean?

That means I'm not changing.

I'm expecting the environment to change for me.

And that's just not within our control.

Think about it from the spiritual aspect.

If you are spirit,

Then you cannot change someone else.

You need to change self.

The whole idea of transmutation is about finding what is within the self that is keeping us stuck and transmuting it.

You cannot do spiritual work without organizing your mind.

Can't,

Because spiritual evolution takes place on the mental plane.

In the mental plane,

I am seeing and feeling and digesting what I'm doing wrong.

And I'm figuring out ways how to problem solve.

You can't fix a hole in the wall that you cannot see.

If you do not know that you're seeking approval outside of you,

You can't change that behavior.

As a life coach who encourages people to be their best self,

And I help people figure out where is your hole in the wall,

Where is your pattern,

I teach people how to empower themselves through the mental field.

This is amazing when we believe that we can do this,

When we apply this knowledge.

Now,

If you're listening to this,

You must know there's a huge difference between being someone who is a hearer of the word and a doer of the word.

There is a huge difference between someone who takes knowledge and applies it to their life and actually takes action in a physical world,

Then someone who sits back passively and takes in information and then really doesn't think that they are part of the alchemist's journey,

That they are part of the alchemy process,

Which is transmuting that which within you that needs to be transmuted for the sake of your spiritual evolution,

For the sake of your peace of mind.

When we are attached to anything outside of us,

We suffer.

If I need your approval for me to feel balanced,

You are in control over me.

If I fall apart when you say,

Ah,

Lisa,

You suck,

I don't want to listen to you anymore,

I think you're crazy,

I'm unsubscribing,

I'm not going to listen to your podcast,

I'm leaving your Facebook group,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

If I fall apart because that is your perception of me,

You now have power over me.

And that's not what we want.

I don't want to suffer because of what someone else thinks of me.

You will suffer if you're attached to anything outside of you that has you falsely believing that your sense of self or a sense of happiness exists outside of you.

But I think it's important to realize we all do it to a certain degree.

It becomes maladaptive when we are not aware that we're doing it and we sabotage relationships and we end up feeling powerless when we end up feeling hopeless and desperate and anxious and depressed and we don't recognize what we're doing wrong.

And if we don't know what we're doing wrong,

We can't fix it.

One of the things that absolutely motivates me every day is that idea that we are all born asleep.

We all live below the veil of consciousness.

We interface with other people who are below the veil of consciousness and none of us know that we're all projecting our wounds onto one another.

When I meet you,

If I'm still struggling with seeking approval,

There's a wound in me.

I don't feel good enough.

And I will project that onto you and do what I can to try to get you to make me feel like I'm good enough because I don't know that the power to feel good about myself is within me.

I don't know that I'm living in a world of illusions,

That I am drinking the Kool-Aid of consumerism.

I am believing that I need to look a certain way,

Be a certain way,

Have a certain amount of money,

Have a certain amount of material objects in order to feel good enough.

Whether we're men or women,

We can suffer greatly when we are wrapped up in that matrix gobbledygook,

When we believe in this illusion,

When we are drinking the Kool-Aid and we think that our sense of enoughness comes from the outside.

When I am starving myself,

When I am injecting myself,

When I am doing the things that I do to seek approval and I'm doing it unconsciously,

I'm not living my life,

Not authentically,

Not the way I could be living my life.

That is not to say that looking to achieve in life and to gain things in the material world is not spiritual.

Of course it is because we have come to live abundantly.

I'm talking about the intention.

If I don't feel good enough,

Unless I have that corner office that's overlooking Riverside Drive,

There's an issue with that.

I have an attachment.

I am actually looking to this experience,

This external experience to make me happy.

That's an issue.

Let's talk about the first sign that you're still seeking approval outside of yourself.

You're hypervigilant.

When you're afraid of not being seen as perfect,

You become hypervigilant.

What that basically means is that you have a focus on other people.

You are other focused.

You are the person whose eyes are darting around the room rapidly.

You're like that little bird that lands on the ground and pecks a couple of pieces of birdseed and looks up and pecks and looks up,

Pecks and looks up.

You're living in fear.

You're living in fear of other people's persecution.

You're living in fear of people's criticism.

You're living in fear of being hurt and emotionally attacked in some way.

You don't feel safe.

This hypervigilance comes from living in a home that's oppressive,

Living in a home where there was,

Daddy was the bully and Mommy acquiesced to Daddy or vice versa.

Mommy was the bully and Daddy acquiesced.

This goes whether or not you were raised by heterosexual parents or homosexual parents,

Transgender parents,

It doesn't matter.

If you came from a home where the people who were in control were people who made you feel oppressed,

You weren't allowed to express your feelings.

There was always something wrong with you.

Your parents demanded perfection of you or even of themselves.

So there's this fear of not appearing perfect and the goal really is to at all costs avoid criticism.

How is it that we're seeking approval?

Well,

The hypervigilance is a sign that you are seeking approval from outside of you because when you're hypervigilant,

That's what you're looking for.

A,

You're looking to avoid pain and B,

You're looking to secure a sense of pleasure,

Which is approval.

So if you feel safe around others,

This is your attachment to the outside because you don't feel safe on the inside.

If you feel safe,

If people make you feel safe,

If they make you feel loved,

If they make you feel like you're good enough,

Which is a bit of a sliding scale because a narcissist,

When you first meet them,

Is going to make you feel good enough.

That's why so many of us who have low self-worth and a low perception of self and who are starving for love end up in these relationships with a lack of objectivity and more of an intense need to feel seen and we have an intense need for approval.

So when we first meet someone who is narcissistic and charismatic,

We can get drunk on the attention that they give us.

Or if we are hypervigilant and we don't feel safe around other people,

We could fall for a more shy or vulnerable narcissist who seems at first like they would never hurt us.

So we fall for the sob story and in the sob story,

We think this person could never hurt us and so our hypervigilance has really betrayed us.

So we're on the lookout for a grandiose narcissist and we end up falling for a more shy,

Vulnerable narcissist who has a drinking problem or who has some type of an addiction,

Maybe a gambling addiction or who came from a really dysfunctional family and has had traumatic experiences but keeps messing up their life.

We fall for this person who seems so wounded and we end up feeling safe in a truly unsafe situation.

So what are we doing?

When we are hypervigilant,

We're seeking approval.

We're seeking a sense of stability outside of the self and hypervigilance can,

Like I said,

It can betray us.

And so it's really important that if you recognize that you're hypervigilant,

That you are constantly looking outside of yourself.

You are afraid to be hurt or you're looking for ways to get people to approve of you or you're looking for ways to rescue people.

So you can be hypervigilant and really be aware of the wounded puppies in your area.

And you could want to take care of all of these wounded puppies.

So you're hypervigilant as you're on guard for ways that you can actually rescue and take care of other people,

Which when we are highly codependent,

This is a way that we feel safe.

We feel safe around those who we think we can fix and who will never leave us because they need us.

So be aware of the hypervigilance in you.

Number two,

You're needy and you're emotionally intense.

When you first meet someone,

The idea that you have finally found a relationship takes over.

You don't know that you are trying to gain a sense of approval from this new partner.

You don't recognize that this intensity is actually could have the potential and oftentimes does blinds you to what's really happening inside of you and with this other person.

It is highly addictive when we are intense,

When this intensity is coming from a place of neediness,

Which is coming from a place of loneliness.

When we meet someone,

This person,

Even though the relationship should start off slow and easy,

Almost like finding a breadcrumb and following the breadcrumbs too,

Like Hansel and Gretel did.

And then you find the house,

Right?

What we do is we see the breadcrumb as a five course meal.

We turn it into something that it's not.

It's all below the veil of consciousness.

We're imagining being married to this someone,

This someone.

We're imagining going on vacation with this someone.

We're imagining that this person is it and we have no objective data that this person is actually good for us or that we're good for them.

Now codependents do this a lot.

Love addicts do this a lot.

They're addicted to relationships as they are.

We turn them into things that they're not.

So we could have a prickly porcupine as a partner,

But in our eyes,

We don't see that.

All we see is the potential.

We're so hungry for love that it distorts our perception and we become these little children that are seeking a pseudo mommy and daddy,

If you will.

This relationship has to work.

I have to prove that I'm worthy of this person.

We're feeling abandoned in life and feeling rejected.

Because we missed this milestone of being felt like we belong to a tribe early on in childhood,

We wrap ourselves up in this outer experience with this other person.

So it's important that you recognize if you're coming off needy,

If you're coming off intense,

That you are in shark infested waters because it is codependent for you to seek approval in a relationship.

And it could be even love addiction if you find yourself so intense around new relationships that you're not seeing things clearly.

You end up losing yourself in the seeking of approval and the securing of this relationship.

You can be in a relationship like that that started off like that,

End up married,

Have a couple of kids,

And 10 years down the line go,

Who did I marry?

And your partner goes,

Who did I marry?

So it's really important that if you are someone who finds that you tend to lose yourself,

Especially in the beginning of a relationship,

That you hit the pause button and that you ask yourself,

Am I seeking approval in this relationship?

What is my part in it?

Number three is you are in constant seeking mode.

So in other words,

What I mean by that is you're constantly seeking a sense of enoughness outside of you.

It could be you are looking for,

You keep changing your church group.

You could keep changing a yoga class.

You could keep changing Facebook groups.

You can keep changing who you are even.

And so there's a sense of you're never able to sit still.

You're never able to just be.

So there's this seeking of approval outside of you.

So you're switching and you're changing maybe even careers to this constantly seeking of a turnover.

There is a turnover.

So there's very little,

I am enough.

I can sit still.

I can find peace within myself.

There's this idea that there's something outside of you and you still haven't found it yet.

You are constantly in seeking mode.

It could even be in your healing modalities.

It could be in following a guru and then falling out with that guru and then looking for another guru or finding another spiritual teacher and then falling out with that spiritual teacher and find there's this constant seeking.

There's a hole inside of you and you just can't get it fulfilled.

This is a sign that you're seeking outside of you for something that can only be found in you.

And I know it sounds hippie dippie.

And I'm telling you,

If I would have heard someone say this 30 years ago,

I would have been,

What the heck is she talking about?

I'm a 3D human being.

And of course I want things.

Of course I want experiences.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But if in the wanting of the experience,

You are seeking a sense of home,

That is the problem.

Seek from within.

Seek from I am enough.

Seek whatever you want from the place of I am enough.

That's the whole point.

But the goal really is to find your center first and to move forward in life from I am enough.

This way you're not attached to this teaching.

You're not attached to that person.

You're not attached to this group.

People can come and go in and out of your life and situations can come and go with sacred indifference because you know that you're enough.

Sacred detachment.

We accept and we respect and we honor the natural ebb and flow of life,

The rhythm of life.

Things come in,

Things go out.

Think of a wave.

A wave comes in and a wave goes out.

What happens in one space happens in all space.

You are an ocean.

Your waves are supposed to go in and they're supposed to come out.

But the ocean is the grounding force.

Does that make sense?

Number four is that you have a low opinion of yourself.

We touched upon this a little bit earlier.

But really,

Spend some time and ask yourself,

How do I feel about myself?

Imagine a scale of one to five,

Five being the greatest.

Do I feel worthy of love?

Do I feel seen?

Do I feel enough?

Do I believe that I am important?

Do I believe that I have some sense of greatness within me that needs to be expressed in this lifetime?

Do I believe that my soul comes from the infinite?

Do I believe that source wants to work through me?

Ask yourself these questions.

Those of us who struggle with low self-esteem,

We don't believe that we're worthy of love.

We don't believe that we're worthy of abundance.

We don't believe that we can manifest riches in our lives.

We don't believe that we're worthy of it.

So we not only believe we can,

We don't believe that we're worthy of it.

We think that we need some PhD or we need someone to pay attention to us.

We need to be rescued.

Someone has to discover us in order for us to be able to express our divinity.

And yet that's the whole purpose in life.

The whole purpose in life is for you to find yourself,

Is to go back home,

To go back to the beginning,

And the beginning is you.

The beginning is your source.

You are enough.

You come from divinity.

Remember,

You cannot get something from nothing.

You came from something and that something is glorious.

And no matter who you are,

You have the same origin of anyone that has ever lived,

From Gandhi to Buddha to Oprah to Beyonce,

Whoever it is that you admire in your life.

We've all come from the same place,

Including you.

So why is that important to know?

It's important to know because when we are seeking approval from the outside,

We're seeking this sense of enoughness.

We're seeking the right to be the self.

We're seeking permission to feel what we feel,

To think what we think,

And to do what we do.

One of the greatest stumbling blocks in my own life is when I realized,

And I didn't know I was doing it,

So it was a huge moment of awakening.

It was a spiritual awakening.

And again,

It happened on the mental plane.

All spiritual awakenings happen in the mental plane.

And it hit me that I was holding my breath in my entire life.

So I was 36 years old,

And here I was with three little kids.

And I was seeking.

.

.

I was even younger than that.

I was about 33,

34 when this really started to awaken within me.

And I was starting to become the witness.

I was getting to a higher state of consciousness,

And I was witnessing myself,

My unconscious self.

And I was witnessing this sense in me that had me believing,

And it's ancestral for sure,

That I needed my mother and father's approval to feel anything.

And I knew on some level that the only emotions that they would accept from me had to be good emotions.

So that meant that expressing negative emotions was bad.

So below the veil of consciousness,

My unconscious self,

My patterned program self,

My ancestral self,

The 3D human being that was operating through karmic patterns,

Was below the veil of consciousness and holding her breath,

Seeking approval from everyone else outside of me.

And how that manifested in the 3D world was not feeling my feelings and thinking that I needed to have people agree with me and that I needed permission for other people to say that it was okay for me to feel what I feel.

I had a low opinion of myself,

And I didn't even know it.

I did not think that I had a right to express my feelings.

I did not think that it was appropriate to say,

I'm unhappy and I can't do this anymore.

And I love this person,

But this person refuses to change.

They're resentful that I want to grow.

And he's making my life a living hell.

I didn't feel like I had the right to say that to anyone.

And so that all translated into me having a very low opinion of myself and my worth.

And when it began to hit me that,

Wait a minute,

I've come from the same place everyone else has.

Why is someone else more worthy to speak her truth and to live courageously and to become the victor of her life?

Why is it okay for one woman to be confident and to be powerful and to create manifest abundance in her life and to create a business and to create a mission-based business no less?

Why is it okay for one woman,

A woman that I admire,

Why is it okay for her,

But it's not okay for me?

It's because I had low self-worth and because I had been conditioned through ancestral karma that who I was was not enough,

Especially being a woman.

And I needed to be submissive in relationships to men.

That was all part of what I grew up with.

And breaking through that really changed my life.

But acknowledging,

Wow,

I have low self-worth.

And this is why I was still seeking approval from others outside of me.

The fifth sign that you're still seeking approval or a sense of happiness outside of you is no matter what you achieved,

You're one,

You never feel fulfilled.

So you are the person who has a list,

A checklist,

And you've done everything everyone ever told you to do.

You've gone to grad school,

You've got the PhD,

You have this amazing job,

You're a professor at a university or you're a surgeon at that hospital.

You've done all the missions to third world countries and you do surgery for people for free and you've created a Fortune 500 company.

You have 600 employees under your belt that you're in charge of.

You're the manager.

You've made it.

You are that world-class athlete.

You are the best baker on the block.

You have the businesses and you have the house and you got married and you have the children.

You have everything that you ever wanted.

And every time you achieve,

You end up feeling flat.

It's never enough.

So you have achievement syndrome.

You have success syndrome.

You are drunk on the Kool-Aid that has you believing that your worthiness is found in an achievement that happens outside of you.

I think of achievements like jewelry.

If you have it,

Great.

If you don't,

No big deal.

But what's important is you is the person that you're decorating with this jewelry.

It's not important whether or not you have 10 degrees on your wall unless it's important to you and this is something that you've wanted to do and you're happy because you're getting to do what you want to do.

And these degrees on your wall were just vehicles that allowed you to land in the career that you wanted to land.

That's beautiful.

But if your sense of self is coming by way of that degree,

That's where you need to adjust the way that you're thinking about what you've achieved.

If your sense of enoughness is coming from becoming the best,

This is what we have to pay attention to.

Because what happens if you lose that award?

Or what happens if someone says,

Well,

No,

We don't want you in this career anymore?

Or what happens if someone attacks that degree on the wall?

What if someone comes along and says,

Oh,

Well,

That university isn't as important as this university or isn't as significant as this university?

Or you know what,

That's really not the degree that we wanted.

There goes your sense of self.

What do you mean?

Look at my degrees.

Doesn't that make me important?

You are important because you are.

Now that doesn't mean that if you need to get another degree or you need to get another certification,

You don't go ahead and do it.

The point is,

Are you putting stock in that thing outside of you to make you feel enough?

Do you plaster your walls with certificates?

Because when people walk into your office,

You stand there and think,

Look at me,

Aren't I great?

Do you need people to pat you on the back because you got that certification?

Do you need to have your name plastered all over the newspaper because you won that gold medal?

Do you need it?

Does your sense of self come from that type of approval or that type of affirmation?

That's where we get into trouble.

So you know that you're still seeking approval if no matter what you achieve,

At the end of the day,

You still end up feeling flat.

If you are chasing after people's affection and attention on social media,

If you are changing the way you are to get approval or affirmations or get those likes on Instagram,

If when you close the door,

Remember we all wear masks,

Right?

Everybody wears a mask and the masks that we wear change.

You could wear one mask around grandma,

You become the person you think grandma wants you to be.

Grandma wants to see you healthy and happy,

So you put on a mask to make grandma happy.

Your husband might want to see you a little bit more submissive,

So you wear that mask.

Your children might want you to be super mom,

So you put that mask on.

You go to work and your manager wants to believe that you're a lot more confident than you actually are,

So you put on that mask.

The idea is that we all wear masks,

But at the end of the day,

When we come home and we shut the door to the madness that's outside of us and we take a deep breath and we slide to the bottom of that door and we're on our butts and our knees are up against our chest and we feel deflated,

We have to pay attention to that.

What is happening?

We are seeking a sense of self,

A sense of worthiness,

A sense of happiness outside of us and we have to stop pretending.

We have to become more authentic.

How does that happen?

Well,

First,

What I do is I always look for the problem first and then I look for the solution.

I think lots of times we get caught up thinking,

Just be happy,

Just do affirmations.

Well,

I'm sorry if my foot has gangrene,

Ain't no affirmation that's going to change that.

Just not.

It's unrealistic.

We live in a 3D world.

I need to tend to the problem at hand and if I don't tend to the problem at hand and I have diabetes,

Let's say,

And I'm not managing my blood sugar,

I'm just going to end up with gangrene again.

So even if I buy myself some time with a bunch of beautiful affirmations,

It's not going to change the problem if the problem is within me and I'm ignoring the problem or I can't see the problem.

And so let's begin with understanding what the problem is.

And so if I'm seeking approval outside of me,

Then I have to learn to seek approval within myself.

What does that mean?

I have to seek my own approval.

I have to figure out what ruler I live by.

Am I giving you the power over me or am I saying,

It's okay what you think of me?

You don't have to love me.

You don't have to like me.

You don't have to accept me.

I love myself.

One of my favorite phrases that I just recently came up with is namaste and walk away.

I'm going to turn the cheek and walk away.

I'm going to allow you to feel what you feel.

I won't let you abuse me.

In other words,

If I need to go gray rock or no contact,

I will do that.

If I'm afraid of you,

You will not have any place in my life.

If I feel that you were manipulative or abusive,

I will spend less time with you.

This is me protecting me.

This is me rejecting my need for your approval.

This is me being authentic.

This is me setting a boundary.

This is me saying,

Hey everybody,

My life isn't as perfect as you think it is.

And I'm okay with that because I'm finally learning to be authentic.

So what you want to do moving forward,

You want to take stock of how often you seek approval.

So your quest,

If you choose to accept it,

Is to spend more time each and every day looking for the ways that you seek approval outside of you.

When you begin to become the witness,

This is when you actually find your personal power.

Because if you don't know what you're doing wrong,

You're never going to be able to fix it.

And if you're continuing to seek approval,

You're giving people power over you.

You're giving people the power to say you are enough or you're not enough.

You don't want that.

What do you want?

You want to believe that you're enough.

So take stock of your mind.

Learn to raise your level of self-awareness.

Be curious about the way that you think.

Metacognition is this divine mechanism.

Remember,

All spiritual awakenings happen on the mental plane.

Metacognition means that you can learn to think about the way that you think.

Be the person that pulls away from society and sits at the edge of the beach and thinks about the way you think.

Be that person who says,

Did I just do this seeking approval?

Am I chasing this person's approval?

Am I giving this person power over me?

Am I giving my Instagram account power over me?

Am I giving what men think about me power over me?

Am I giving women what they think about me power over me?

Am I giving my power over to my idea of success?

And do I feel not good enough unless I achieve a certain level of success?

And is that level of success tied to what people think about me?

That means I'm seeking approval.

From this state of self-awareness,

This is where you're able to curtail behavior that has you putting you in position number two,

That has you subjugating your needs for the sake of others,

That has you hyper-vigilant.

As you begin to heal this and you begin to become more authentic with yourself and you let other people off the hook,

You become more objective in relationships,

You are not critical of others and not trying to control a sense of affirmation and validation out of them,

Your life begins to unfold in a very beautiful way.

Suddenly the energy of source is flowing through you and upwards through you,

And now you're truly evolving because the path is non-resistance and non-attachment.

And that's really difficult if you've never felt loved in your childhood because you,

Under the illusion of karmic generational energies,

Patterns,

And programs,

Under the rules of nature,

You will live out an autopilot experience and you could actually die unaware that you're unaware.

My mom did that and it's no way to go.

And I would rather spend 30 minutes of my life aware than to live it unaware because at least that means that I had a chance to live authentically.

We have to be willing to risk other people walking away.

And once you really find your inner golden Buddha,

Or once you really find the Spirit within and you know that you must be divine because you came from divinity,

You are an extension of source,

You are an individualization of source.

That's incredible.

And once you rely on this knowledge,

These ancient teachings,

And you end up resolving your addictions to other people a lot more quickly.

So I hope this message of authenticity,

This message of be vulnerable,

Be vulnerable with the self,

Tell the truth.

If you seek approval,

That's okay.

You're just like everybody else.

If you've been intense in relationships before and needy and clingy,

That's okay.

So is everybody else.

If you've been codependent,

You're not alone.

Hello.

You know,

That's okay.

You know,

If you have been hypervigilant and distrusting of people and seeking approval by trying to be perfect,

That's okay.

It just means that you were wounded.

It just means that you didn't know you were not.

So try not to judge yourself.

I recently heard the term devil's consciousness and I found it very interesting.

And the devil's consciousness is a way to describe self-judgment and self-criticism and self-condemnation and self-hate.

And so do everything that you can to recognize that you come from source,

You are worthy and you are divine.

And do everything that you can in the mental plane to convince yourself that you are lovable by loving yourself.

Be willing to let other people go.

The power of letting go,

The power of letting people walk away from you will absolutely shift your life because it means that you are no longer seeking your sense of self or sense of approval in others.

You are worthy,

Dear ones,

And you are divine.

Bye for now.

Until next time.

Reviews

The way you speak about this makes it so relatable and easy to understand without feeling threatened or shamed. So helpful! Thank you.

Thank you! That was very interesting and pertinent to me... 🙏🐣😊

Brilliant, confronting but exactly the powerful message I needed to hear. At almost 69, I think I’m finally beginning to love who I am a bit more. Thank you. 😌❤️🙏🏼

One of the deepest analysis in this app. Thx

Thank you so much! 🙏 This resonates
with me on so many levels.

This helped me learn a lot about myself. Thank you!

Awesome talk and very eye opening!! I could see why I have been seeking approval from others. Now I will focus on seeking approval from myself with the help of my therapist and meditation. Thanks so much!!

Thanks again!