WHEN You Stop Waiting for Permission to Be Yourself - The Architecture of Self Approval
WHEN You Stop Waiting for Permission to Be Yourself - The Architecture of Self Approval
Approval seeking is easy to spot in its obvious form. Someone who can't make a decision without asking everyone around them. Someone who changes their mind the moment a new opinion appears.
That version exists, but it's not the most common one.
The more common version looks a lot like being sensible. You talk things through with your family before making a big decision. You ask trusted friends what they think about a business idea. You get advice before changing careers. None of that is a problem on its own.
When Consultation Becomes Dependence
The problem starts when getting input quietly turns into needing permission.
At that point, you're not gathering advice to help you decide. You're gathering it to delay deciding. You already know what you want to do. You've thought it through. But something keeps you waiting for one more conversation, one more opinion, one more round of reassurance, as though the right level of certainty is out there somewhere, just waiting for enough people to confirm it.
A lot of people get stuck here. Often it has nothing to do with lacking intelligence or courage. They've simply got used to treating other people's approval as a sign that they're on the right track. It feels safer. If things go wrong, at least other people agreed with the decision. The responsibility feels shared.
Why Approval Is an Unreliable Guide
The trouble is, the most important decisions in your life rarely come with everyone on board.
A career move that makes complete sense to you might worry the people closest to you. A new direction might look irresponsible to people who only know the old version of your life. Something that feels right on the inside can look completely unrealistic from the outside.
In those moments, approval isn't a reliable guide. People can only evaluate your decisions through the lens of their own experiences, fears and preferences. That doesn't make them wrong. It just means they're not you.
The Question Worth Sitting With
A useful question to sit with is this: would I still make this choice if nobody applauded it? Not if nobody criticised it, if nobody applauded it. No validation, no encouragement, no guarantee that people would understand. Would it still feel right?
That question tends to reveal quite a lot.
Some decisions hold up immediately. Others turn out to be more dependent on external approval than you realised. That's worth knowing, because someone who is clear on why they're doing something can handle disagreement far more easily than someone who needs agreement to stay motivated. One draws confidence from their own conviction. The other draws it from the reaction of whoever they're currently talking to.
What Nobody Else Can Do For You
There comes a point in life where nobody else is really in a position to decide what kind of life you should build, what risks are worth taking, or what version of yourself you want to become. People can offer advice. They can support you or challenge you. What they can't do is live with the consequences of your choices. That part is always yours.
What Changes When You Stop Chasing Approval
When people stop chasing approval, what usually follows is a sense of relief. The energy that was going into managing what everyone else thought becomes available for actually getting on with things. Decisions get easier because you're weighing them on their own merits rather than on how popular they'll be. There's less second guessing, less explaining, less waiting.
The desire to be liked doesn't disappear. Most people enjoy approval and there's nothing wrong with that. The difference is that approval stops being a condition for moving forward. It's welcome when it comes, and you're fine when it doesn't.
That's when movement tends to happen. Projects that have been sitting in notebooks get started. Applications that have been postponed are finally submitted. Conversations that have been avoided take place. Often the circumstances haven't changed very much. What has changed is the willingness to move without needing everyone else's endorsement.
Dropping the Conditions
For many people, becoming who they are has less to do with some big discovery and more to do with dropping the conditions they'd attached to it. The condition that everyone has to understand. That everyone has to support it. That everyone has to approve.
Those conditions are impossible to meet. And life tends to move forward when you stop trying to meet them.
The authority to move forward was never with other people. It was always yours. The question just has to change, “from do they approve” to “do I have enough conviction to go ahead anyway?”
That's where self approval starts. And for a lot of people, that's where things finally start moving.
With intention,
Julia 💕
Part of The WHEN Series, where I reflect on the in-between seasons of growth, leadership, and becoming. Published on Mondays.
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