How to self-validate

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There is a secret to feeling confident. To prioritizing your own needs. To feeling in control of your time and turning off your work brain at the time that you want. There is a secret to getting out of procrastination and learning how to make more decisive decisions. You ready for it? The secret is learning how to self-validate. In other words, to stop needing someone else to tell you that you’re good, that you’re doing enough and that you’re doing things right. You can simply choose to believe those things without ever needing someone else to tell you so. In today’s episode, I will show you how.

Topics in this episode:

  • The need for recognition and validation

  • The connection between confidence and validation

  • The sneaky ways the need for validation surfaces

  • How procrastination and perfectionism are really all about validation

  • What it takes to increase your belief in self

  • A free event to help you learn the skill of self-validation

Show Notes & References:

  • Increase your confidence and feel like a badass working mom! Join Belief Week, a free week-long event: www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/beliefweek

  • Don’t forget to leave a rating and review to help spread this resource to other working moms!

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Transcript

Intro

There is a secret to feeling confident. Prioritizing your own needs and your health. To feeling in control of your time and turning off your work brain at the time that you want. There is a secret to getting out of procrastination and learning how to make more decisive decisions. There’s a secret that you might not know that I am going to cover in this podcast. What is that secret? Learning how to stop needing someone else to tell you that you’re good, that you’re doing enough, that you’re doing things right…it’s learning the skill of self-validating. Yes, you can believe in yourself, believe in what you do, believe that the decisions you make are always right…you can simply believe. I will show you how, right here, right now. You ready? Let’s get to it.


Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it!

Working moms, I hope you are having an amazing start to your week! Welcome to belief week! All this week in Rebecca Olson Coaching, I am focusing on helping you increase your belief in yourself and what is possible for you. I want you to feel more confident, I want you to increase your positive thoughts about yourself, I want you to calm down your brain and start making more decisive decisions! We are doing all of this in Belief Week, I’m going to share more about the details if you don’t know at the end of this podcast so definitely stay tuned. 


This is what is at the heart of your imbalance.

Today I wanna talk about a tool that I teach a lot of my clients because so often what I see is the most extraordinary women, women at all levels in leadership, women with all sorts of backgrounds and education, all of them needing something that most of the time they think is just sort of normal….and it is, it’s the human experience to want this, but what they don’t realize is that the need for this is at the heart of all of their imbalance, and I guarantee is holding them back from creating and having some of the big things they want in their life. What is this thing? Validation. The need to hear ‘you’re doing a good job, you’re doing enough and you’re good enough’.


I call that the ‘enough triad’ and all of us as human beings need to believe this in order to be deeply satisfied in life, to be able to truly rest, and I think, to really experience happiness.


We have to believe at a deep down, core level that we are enough, that we’re good enough and then we’re doing enough. All of us need to feel that sense of validation that those things are true.


The problem happens when we seek that validation from other people. When you need to hear from your boss, or your team, or your husband, or even your kids that you are doing enough, that you are good enough, that you are right and so fourth.


Let me give you some examples of how this shows up, because that need for validation can be sort of disguised in other ways. Until you start to see the pattern you might not realize how often you are seeking that validation.


The first one is people-pleasing. That need for people to like you and not be disappointed. 


That shows up a lot in the inability to say no.


How people pleasing shows up.

When someone needs something from you, even if it means you’re gonna have to work late or if it puts more stress or pressure on you, you just feel like you can’t say no. I had a client that worked in the tech industry and she had a really hard time saying no to these late-night work parties that her team would do…The team was mostly men, mostly without kids, and my client felt so guilty because she really wanted to be done working at 5 o’clock so she could spend time with her son, and oftentimes when these work parties happened she would work much later than she wanted to or she would shorten the time she spent with her family so she could jump back on later in the evening and keep working with the team. When I asked her what would happen if she just said she couldn’t make it, a whole lot of stress and anxiety surfaced because she worried that people would think that she wasn’t a team player and she wasn’t committed and she thought people might question her work ethic. 


So if you think about it, what she was doing was saying yes to working late into the work parties even though she had to sacrifice time with her family in order to attend, in order to validate that she was ultimately a good employee, committed, and a team player.


I had another client that had a hard time denying meeting requests when they would come in. She had an open calendar, and people could just grab time with her whenever there was an open spot, and it was causing her as a manager to be so far behind because she was never really able to get to her own work and she never really felt like she was able to lead in the way that she wanted to because she never had enough time to really think about it. I asked her, what did she think would happen if she closed her calendar and started saying no to meeting requests. And so much fear and anxiety surfaced as she considered that, because she worried that her team would think that she was not available to them, that she was not supportive, that she wasn’t there for them, she worried that she wouldn’t be a good manager or leader because of it. So having an open calendar and saying yes to every meeting was her way of validating that she was in fact a good leader. Are you starting to see the connection here?


What is hyper doing?

Another way I see this need for validation surface is in what I like to call hyper doing, that’s this need to just check one more thing off of the list. 


There’s this perpetual list going on in your head: you're constantly thinking about the things that you haven’t accomplished yet and the things that still need to get done. And when you have five minutes your brain obsesses about what you could accomplish in these five minutes. Hyper doers tend to have a pretty hyper brain as well that is constantly going.


Validating you’re good enough by the amount you achieve.

I was talking to a client recently about her need to constantly check things off of her to-do list and what was happening was, she wasn’t able to really calm down her brain at night and she would find herself doing household chores until she would basically just fall in bed at night. And there wasn’t a time to rest and really enjoy her life. And I asked her what would happen if she just didn’t allow herself to do any work-work or household work at night, she just allowed herself space to have a hobby or connect with friends or just binge watch Netflix if she wanted to. I asked her what would happen if she did that and her first response was, I’d fear being lazy. Kinda like I’m not measuring up or I am inadequate in some way. So that need to constantly be checking things off the list and working towards goals, that was her way of validating she was good enough.


Perfectionism.

The last way that I see this need for validation show up is in perfectionism, the need to get something right. One of the productivity strategies that I teach my clients is to create containers of time to complete tasks. So give yourself two hours to complete a presentation and work no more than two hours on it. Like the two hour mark is a really hard stop-stopping point. What that does is it forces your brain to problem solve for how to create the best presentation in the time that you’ve allotted, versus giving yourself an endless amount of time to get your presentation to a place that is probably no better or maybe just slightly better than the two hour window you gave yourself. Professionals have the hardest time at first implementing this way of doing things because getting something right and perfecting something until the very last moment, that is what validates them being adequate and good.


And obviously, the need to feel validated just comes out pretty bluntly…”I just want someone to tell me “good job” or “I just want someone to give me credit”. It’s about recognition for some. And no matter who you are, it always feels good to be recognized. To be told by our boss that we’re doing a good job. For our kids to behave well so that we feel validated as moms. That verbal affirmation goes a long way for our brain.


So whether it is people-pleasing, or hyper doing, or perfecting, these are behaviors that stem from us needing to know and needing the validation that we are good enough, that we’re doing enough and we are enough.



Here’s the tool that I teach in coaching, whether you are a one-on-one client or you are a member of the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective - that’s my group coaching program that teaches five steps to work-life balance, the tool that I teach you is self-validation. That is the ability to affirm and tell yourself that you are good enough.


We give away our power when we want validation from outside ourselves.

Because the problem with validation is that you start waiting around for other people to tell you that you’re good enough. And whenever you’re waiting on someone else to do something so you feel good about you, you’re giving them the power. And we want the power to be within you.


You are enough. You are doing enough.

I want you to believe that no matter what anyone else says, no matter if someone is disappointed in you or not, no matter how your child behaves, no matter if you are parenting in a completely different style than the way you were parented or the way your friends are parenting, I want you to believe that you are good enough, that you are enough, and that you’re doing enough. I want you to believe that so much so, to validate that within yourself so much so, that you don’t need it from anyone else.


You don’t need to say yes to every meeting in order to know that you’re a great leader. You don’t need to check one more thing off your list, to know that you’ve done enough for the day. You don’t need hours of time to complete tasks in order to know they are adequate, that you are amazing at your job. You don’t need to be worried about your quarterly reviews, because you already know and believe in all of the contributions you’ve given, you don’t need your boss to tell you that.


The skillset of learning how to self validate. To believe in yourself, regardless of other people or regardless of your own successes. Your résumé doesn’t tell you if you’re good enough. Your ability to be a top performer doesn't tell you if you are good enough, your child’s ability to sleep through the night does not tell you that you’re being a good mom. 


You can believe those things about yourself RIGHT NOW when you learn how to self-validate. 


Isn’t that the most freeing thought! That you don’t need anyone else to tell you that you are good, that you are enough, that you’ve accomplished enough, you can just believe it!


I want you to just take a moment and imagine a life with this as your reality. Where you don’t need your colleagues to think you’re smart, where you don’t need your boss to constantly affirm the things that you’re doing well, where you don’t need 10 different people’s opinions before making a decision on something, where you can spend the money more freely because you don’t need your husband’s validation, or you can leave work at 5 o’clock to be with your family and not worry about what other people may think, where your toddler could have tantrum after tantrum after tantrum, and you don’t worry that you’re a bad mom and you’re doing it wrong.


Take a minute and really breathe in that possibility. And really what I would encourage you to do is write this down, write down what would be different about your life. Go through a typical day or a typical week from morning to night, and really notice what would change within you, within the way you make decisions, with the way you approach your work, with the way you approach motherhood if you weren’t in constant need validation that you are enough, that you’re good enough, that you’re doing enough.


This is the heart of what belief week is all about, learning the skill set of self validation. Where you learn how to believe in yourself, to tell your brain how good you are, and how amazing you are, and how worthy you are, without ever needing anyone else to tell you. Without needing to prove it to anyone.


Belief Week

Now if you haven’t heard the details, let me tell you what’s happening. First you have to sign up for this free event by going to: www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/beliefweek. So that you get all the emails and access into the free pop-up FB group. And all this week we are focusing on increasing your belief in self. Increasing your confidence. But I don’t want you to just have the tools to know how, I want you to actually do it! I want to blow your mind this week by helping you believe in yourself and what’s possible for you in a deeper way.


When you sign up, you will get immediate access to a workbook I put together for the event that starts the process. The questions in this are like GOLD. They prompt you to focus on all your amazingness….all the value you bring to your company…what makes you so good at being a mom. This is where the shift is going to start for you…so you want to be sure to jump in right away. 


Everyday at 1:00pm ET I will be going LIVE in the group teaching the 4 steps to increasing your belief in self and self-validation. There will be 2 LIVE Coaching opportunities and lots of what I like to call “belief bump” questions. 


Everything I’m doing this week is completely free. I want you to join, I want your friends to join, I know the power of believing in yourself, it's like the secret sauce to everything and I want you to have the tools and the experience of actually doing it. So join right now, so you get that workbook and access to the pop-up FB group right away.


You don’t need anyone else to tell you that you are amazing. That you are good. That you have value. That you are doing it right…you can just believe that. I will teach you how. Go to www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/beliefweek.

Rebecca Olson