Welcome to Visionary Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your big, bold ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Welcome back. This is episode 31 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Thank you for joining me. Every day, I have the privilege of talking with incredible human beings. My clients have multiple traits in common. They're driven, ambitious, they're risk takers. They're in pursuit of something bigger than themselves, and I would dare say that many of them, if not all of them, appreciate being recognized.
They like to be seen as the best in their industry as successful. Many of them chose top ranking universities for undergrad or their graduate programs because they value being associated with institutions that represent excellence. That represent success. And I would say that for many of them, the success they have today has been driven by a desire to be recognized.
Many are where they are today because they have also been driven by a desire to be recognized, to feel that they matter and they're important. And that's what I wanna talk about today. Tony Robbins talks about six human needs. For him. Those needs are the motivators, what drive our actions as human beings.
One of those needs is significance. He defines significance as our need to feel important, special and needed. Our need to feel valued for our own contributions. So as you see, the desire to be recognized or be significant is neither good nor bad. It's simply one of the drivers in our life. But what I wanna talk about today is when this desire to feel recognized or significant starts hindering our progress towards the real goals we wanna achieve.
When recognition is at the top of our list. We can't operate at our best when recognition is at the top of our priorities. We can't expand our full potential. Because what we're trying to do is to make people think we are the best instead of simply being our best version at the beginning of our careers or our work life.
Most of us start as interns, as assistants, as individual, as individual contributors. And at that moment, wanting the approval from our boss is very important. We wanna do the things they ask us to do. We wanna perform well for them. We wanna make sure that we're following the instructions they're giving us at the beginning of our career.
Wanting the approval from others works really well because we wanna be recognized by doing our jobs well, by following instruction, by pleasing our boss, by pleasing other people we work with. But as we grow in our career and we are no longer individual contributors, we now start getting paid or hired for our own ideas, for our own vision, for our capacity to bring others with us towards a common goal.
And then it's in that moment, in that moment in our career where we go from an individual contributor to a leader, where if we continue to have significance at the top of our list, we start holding ourselves back. And I'm gonna explain with this metaphor, imagine a pilot of an airplane who cares so much about what everyone in the airplane is thinking about her.
She's so concerned by everyone's thoughts that in the middle of the flight she stops and says to everyone, Hey, I have two options. We can take this route, but it's gonna take a little bit longer. We can take this other route, but it's gonna be bumpy. Can you imagine trying to get consensus from an entire plane?
Can you imagine as a passenger, I would feel scared to see a pilot who is incapable of making decisions, of taking a safe to where we wanna go. And the same thing happens when we're leaders of our projects in our companies. When we're seen as the person who's always trying to make everyone happy. When we're seen as a person who's trying to make everyone happy, who can't make decisions because they're trying to please everyone instead of being approved.
What starts happening is people start losing trust in us. Because one of the main jobs of a leader is to bring certainty to a situation. It's to bring certainty to the people that are following him, and that certainty never comes from getting the approval of others. It only comes from your ability to self validate, to stay on your own side, to believe in yourself.
I believe that the journey to self validate, which is our ability to not depend on the feedback of others, is truly a journey, and it's a big part of the work we do in coaching. I believe they're above the average human being in terms of the approval they need. They still need some, and that need for approval still holds them back.
So what we do in coaching is work. To strengthen their ability to self validate, to lessen the importance they give to other people's opinions. As I was preparing for this episode, I spent some time reflecting on what are the real consequences that we all face when we start, depending on other people's approval.
Too much. Number one is when our teams start losing trust in us. Because instead of seeing us as a leader who's certain and who knows where they're guiding them, they see us as insecure. Us without a backbone, they can't trust that we can actually take them where we're saying we wanna go. The second consequence I've seen is that we become very slow at making decisions when we're wanting the approval of everyone we're doing mental gymnastics.
Trying to calculate and imagine how would this person react? How would this person feel? What this other, what would this other person say? And we're trying to please everyone. So it takes us a long time to make decisions. In fact, sometimes we avoid making those decisions because we don't wanna face the consequences of being disapproved or being or, or from being disapproved being, um, disapproved.
No, no, not receiving approval or people disapproving of us. Yeah. Sometimes we even avoid making a decision because we don't wanna face the possibility of others disapproving us. The third is that we play small. We hold back. We don't live up to our full potential because we're afraid to take risks because we're afraid that we're going to displease others when we become our fullest version.
Number four is that I see that when we're too dependent on other people's opinions, we tend to quit faster because when we receive feedback or criticism, it's so harsh for us to hear it, that we decide to retreat, go back to our caves, hide. Number five, when we're trying to be everyone's friend and that everyone likes us, we cannot develop our personal brand.
Our personal brand is the way we show up is what we believe is the stance we take in different moments. And when we're trying to make everyone happy, we lose our ability to show others who we truly are. What do we believe in? What is a non-negotiable for us? So again, when we're looking for approval, we lose our personal brand.
And the last, which is not to mean that there are not other consequences, but the last I was thinking about is that we become dependent on positive praise and we feel awful when we don't get it. We doubt ourselves when no one applauds us or when we don't receive extra positive feedback. And that feeds our imposter syndrome because we start thinking maybe one day they're gonna discover that I'm not as great as smart, as capable as they think that I am.
And to respond to that, we start getting additional trainings, working extra hours, trying to prove our value. And that cycle of wanting and that cycle of wanting positive feedback, trying to prove ourselves really keeps us stuck. Bottom line. As a visionary, as a leader, you must learn to self validate and stop depending on other people's thoughts about you.
So now let's talk a little bit about what do I mean when I say self validation? I. First, I'm gonna talk about a misconception we have about self validation. Self-validation does not mean that we think we're always right, that everything we do is amazing, that we're perfect, that is more like self-righteousness.
And I recorded another podcast about that topic. Self-validating is the ability to stay on our own site. Many years ago, I did a training program in Chicago, and I wanna share the definition I learned during that program about self-validation. And it goes like this, to self validate is to accurately see yourself in the here and now with positive regard.
Consistently and unconditionally. So let's break it apart. What does it mean to accurately see yourself? It doesn't mean that you're only seeing yourself like, oh, I'm great, all the wonderful things I've done. Of course, you are recognizing your strengths, your talents, your wins, and your owning them, but you're also seeing the places where you need to grow and improve, or you made a mistake or maybe you fell short.
One of the tools I love to teach my clients is the ability to evaluate different situations. A meeting they had with a client, the performance of their business, a speech they gave. Because when we evaluate ourselves and we see what we did right, and we own it, and we see where we can improve and we own it, that's when we can continue growing So accurately seeing ourselves is being able to recognize the full spectrum of who we are.
The second part is to accurately see ourselves in the here and now and why this matters and why this matters is because when we're self validating, we cannot bring stories from the past or ideas about potential future. We need to look at things as they're happening right now today in this situation.
For example, let's say that in the past you are giving a presentation and you made a huge mistake. When you're self-validating presentation you did today, you cannot bring that information from the past that is gone. You have to accurately see yourself today in this present moment. The third part of the, the third part of the definition is to see ourselves with positive regard.
And what do we mean by this is to see ourselves with compassion, with optimism, with the vision we have for our lives. Even when we make mistakes, the opposite of seeing ourselves with positive regard is when we shame ourselves, when we criticize ourselves, when we're so hard on ourselves. So positive regard is seeing ourselves accurately, but with love and compassion.
And that brings me to the last part of the definition. That is to see ourselves unconditionally, which means to stay on our own side regardless if we win or if we lose, if we were brilliant or we made a really dumb mistake, regardless of people praising us or criticizing us. Self validation happens at all times, not only when you win.
So let me tell you the definition. One more time to self validate is to accurately see ourselves in the here and now with positive regard consistently and unconditionally. Self validation is a practice. The more we do it every day, the better we get at doing it, the better we start seeing the small nuances that exist in this definition.
Now I wanna make a disclaimer. Sometimes we're carrying very old and very negative beliefs that get in the way of us validating ourselves beliefs, such as, well, my value depends only on what I do, on how I perform, on the results I generate. Or I don't matter, or I don't belong, or I'm not worthy. Those deeper negative beliefs about ourselves are worth exploring with a therapist or a coach and change them for more empowering beliefs and beliefs are the thoughts we practice over and over and over, that we start thinking they are true, that they're true about us.
I think some empowering beliefs, we can all adopt our thoughts like I matter. I can figure this out. I can trust myself. I can learn. I have intrinsic value. My value is non-negotiable, and it's not dependent on my achievements. When we start self-validating, I. We are stronger, we're more resilient. We're willing to take bigger risks.
We are allowing others to see who we truly are. We're more willing of sharing our points of view, our creativity, our ideas, and therefore we can fully expand our potential and turn those wildest streams we have into reality. Until next time.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea, we need to talk! In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions, as well as your team and your money, so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality.
Go now to carozuleta. com slash consult, that is C A R O Z U L E T A dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there!
