The Approval You've Been Begging For Was Never Theirs To Give.

We spend so much time performing for an audience that never asked for a show.

It got me thinking...

We've been telling ourselves a very convincing lie. That the ache we feel when someone doesn't text back, when a room goes quiet, when we don't get the job or the compliment or the nod, is about them. That if we could just get enough people to approve of us, to see us, to pick us, we'd finally feel okay. We've built entire personalities around this pursuit. Curated our Instagram, softened our opinions, laughed at jokes we didn't find funny, stayed in relationships three years past their expiry date; all in the name of being liked.

And yet. Here you are. Liked by plenty. Still not convinced.

Because here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud; you were never actually waiting for their verdict. You were waiting for yours.

The craving for acceptance we spend our whole lives chasing externally? It's an inside job. Always has been. The validation you're hunting in someone else's eyes is just a projection of the validation you won't give yourself. Other people's approval feels so urgent because somewhere deep down, you've made them the authority on something only you can sign off on.

It's like outsourcing your own homework to someone who doesn't even know what subject you're studying. You hand it in. They grade it. And you're still somehow failing.

Here's where I hand the mic to your prefrontal cortex for a second; because psychology has a name for this, of course it does. Reflected appraisal theory suggests that we construct our self-concept largely through how we imagine others see us. Not even how they actually see us. How we think they do. Which means you've been auditioning for an audience that exists almost entirely in your own head! You wrote the script, cast the judges, and then blamed them for the score.

Daniele, 38, was the most accomplished person in every room she walked into and somehow also the most convinced she didn't belong there. She'd built a career, a family, a life that looked extraordinary from the outside. But she'd refresh her LinkedIn after posting, count the likes, analyse the comments. "I just want to know it landed," she told me. When we got honest about it, what she was really asking was "do I matter? "And the painful twist? No amount of external data was ever going to answer that question. Because it wasn't a question for LinkedIn. It was a question for h-e-r.

James, 45, had spent decades being the person everyone else needed him to be. The dependable one. The steady one. The one who never made it awkward. He came in exhausted, and not from his workload. He was exhausted from the performance. "I don't even know what I actually think anymore," he said, almost surprised by his own words. He'd been so busy monitoring everyone else's reactions that he'd completely lost his own signal. He wasn't afraid of what people thought of him. He was afraid of what he thought of himself if he ever stopped performing long enough to find out.

Maybe  that's the real fear underneath all of it. Not rejection from others but the moment of silence after everyone leaves the room, when it's just you and whatever you actually believe about yourself. That's the confrontation we spend entire lifetimes avoiding.

And here's the aha that lands differently every time; the self you keep trying to get other people to validate? They can't see her fully. They don't have access. They're working with your highlights reel, your surface, your curated best bits. Only you have the full picture. Which means only you can do this. The acceptance you've been outsourcing, performing for, quietly begging the universe to hand you, it requires your signature. Not theirs.

This doesn't mean other people's opinions don't matter. It means they were never meant to be the foundation. They're weather. Your self-worth is supposed to be the building.

So the work, the real, uncomfortable, nobody-warned-you-it-would-feel-this-weird work, is learning to become someone whose opinion of themselves they actually trust. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But enough to stop handing strangers the pen and asking them to write your story.

Because darling, they were never qualified for the job. That was always yours.

Coco x