How Over Reliance on the Approval of Others Limits Your Life - And What to Do About It - Part III - 4 Scenarios

Main Post of the Week ( Week of May 24-30)

Welcome Back!

Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario #1: You are in a room giving a presentation that seems to be going pretty well. As you continue to explain your proposal, most people are paying close attention and nodding their heads. In fact, of the 10 people seated in the room, 8 of them appear highly engaged. Then comes the question and answer session. Several key individuals express immediate enthusiasm and support for your idea. Bravo. Well done. Two in particular, though, stick to a hard line of questioning and strongly oppose some aspects of your proposal.

Rather than understanding that differences of opinion are truly okay, (whether or not these folks antagonism is credible and worthy of consideration or not), this questioning throws you off. Somehow you become more concerned about winning over the naysayers than keeping in concert with the mainstream who are on board with your ideas.

You may not realize it, but this is because internally you are not satisfied with even most people approving of you. For some reason, you need them all. You spend the last portion of your meeting starting to feel like it wasn’t the success you’d hoped even though the team ends up eventually pursuing your idea. You are under the undue influence of approval from others.

___________________

Scenario #2: You are with a group of co-workers all discussing a topic that everybody seems to know as much or more about than you do. They gravitate toward a consensus of an opinion you do not share. Right or wrong in your viewpoint, you feel a little intimidated, but know enough about it to disagree. For some reason you just play along with the crowd. Subconsciously, you don’t want to keep entirely silent because you might look to others as you are not well enough informed on something you ‘should’ know about after all.

Rather than say what you are thinking or keep entirely silent, amazingly, you seem to agree with the group. This is because you are unknowingly seeking their approval. You don’t want to express the viewpoint you really feel because it might make you look bad if it’s not the right one, but you can’t stay silent either. Your friend pride also doesn’t like to look bad so he chimes in to reinforce that feigning approval seems like the right response. These are the actions of a person under the influence of the approval of man.

___________________

Scenario #3: Maybe you just really want some ‘feedback’. Feedback is a good, safe, productive thing to desire for any business person. So you send an email you labored over to a client and copy everyone part of the loop. Of course you want the recipient to take the desired action. That’s why you wrote it after all and won’t everyone be pleased when this great deal comes through? Look what you did! But that’s not all you want. You want to hear from everyone else that reads it too. So you check your email a little later and no responses of any kind. Didn’t someone see it yet? Won’t they appreciate my work? I wonder what they thought? You might not even be aware that this is what you are thinking. In fact if this is happening to you, you probably aren’t.

Though looking for a positive response from others is often a key to the right business outcomes, too much concern about this can actually indicate you are overly reliant on the approval of others.

___________________

Scenario #4:You can’t quite put your finger on it, but when you meet with the boss one-on-one you tend to be a little uneasy. Not every time, but more often than you would like. You don’t really think anything of it but you just don’t seem to be at your best sometimes when he or she is in the room.

When you are ‘under the influence’, the boss’s approval is extraordinarily important to you, unhealthily so, whether you know it or not. The drive for their approval is a major force in your life and that tends to be the case with other authority figures as well. After all, if they don’t like what you’re doing they could make you look really bad (even though you have no reason to think they would), so wouldn’t it be better just to please them? Rather than feeling free to express your thoughts and make adjustments as necessary based on constructive input, your defensive shield and desire for their approval ‘forces’ behavior that can make both of you feel slightly awkward in its tamest form and really cause issues in its more advanced condition.

___________________

Do you identify with any of these situations? Not you - maybe someone you know then ?. Bear in mind that each of these scenarios on their own is merely an indicator of the symptoms of an issue being present, not the underlying cause.