How to STOP Seeking External Validation and Start Feeling Seen, Heard and Validated

External validation— wanting other people to validate us is a direct shadow of when we were kids, us having a need and desire for approval. And many times what happens is when we were kids, maybe we did receive it or didn't receive it, and what happens is later on in life we continue to crave the approval and the validation of other people, hoping that like our parents, they will actually give it to us. And what we'll find is unless we do the shadow work and we stop searching for external validation, we will find ourselves constantly seeking from other people. And for me, this was a game changer when I learned about this. I was aware, I became aware of my own shadow for wanting external validation from other people. And I didn't realize how much it actually ran my life. I was making YouTube videos, every single day on YouTube. I was adding value to people, but I didn't realize that one of the reasons I was trying to add value to people is because I attributed that the more value I could add to other people, the more they would like and accept me, the more they would think about me in a certain way. And it also became aware of it because for a long time, one of my biggest goals was on YouTube, trying to get a million followers on YouTube. I remember when I was working at Barney's New York in women's shoes and I started to make daily videos on YouTube and it was very exciting because my channel started to grow and the more validation I would get, the more people that I would get that would like my content and the more subscribers I would get, the more fulfilled I would feel, feel. But it was a like part of fulfillment that wasn't actually long, like didn't really stay around. And it was built on this like false premise. It would just give me like little jolts and I would check Social Blade and I would look for this external validation. And what happened is anytime I'd hit a certain goal, it would feel really cool for a minute and then it would go back down and I would then be looking for more. I'd be looking for more validation, more of that, uh, approval from other people. And I remember the day that I hit 100,000 on YouTube, I was, uh, getting ready to go to the gym. Actually the night before I had 97,000. I had a video that popped out and went viral overnight and all of a sudden it was over 100,000. And I remember thinking, oh, I'm gonna do a Q&A, I'm gonna do all this cool stuff for the audience. And all of a sudden it was here and I was so excited and I had all these expectations like, oh, I'm gonna go to the gym and people are gonna recognize me. I'm gonna finally be seen in the way that I wanna be seen. And I went to the gym and it was pretty much the same from the day before. And every other day I went to the gym, there was zero difference. And even then after I hit 100,000, I'm like, what about 200,000? What about 300,000? What about a million? And for a long time I wanted that gold subscriber plaque on the wall and, uh, finally got it like a year ago. And I remember feeling just very much like, wow, so much of my life was spent thinking about wanting this piece, this thing. And I just realized that it, it really didn't mean what I thought it meant. And, um, I guess it felt kind of empty. And the more I went into it, the more I realized that I was attributing my sense of value, my sense of worthiness and validation with what I could provide and the value I could add to other people, not knowing that in a way I was also trying to prove myself. I was trying to prove myself from, uh, either childhood friends or family that maybe didn't believe in me when I first started getting on YouTube. So I was like trying to prove people wrong. And there was also a part of me, I realized that from my own childhood, and many of you know my story, but from 7 to 15 years old, I had no freedom at all. I wasn't allowed to have friends, wasn't allowed to go to school, I had to earn going to school activities. Normally I was locked outside of the house having to do yard work with my brother, wasn't allowed to watch TV, only got TV dinner at night and a bowl of cereal in the morning, so very malnourished. All of a sudden, have all this freedom, But from that period, there was a sense of myself where I didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel whole and complete. And because I had to please my ex-stepmom who was very mentally and emotionally abusive, it then trickled into the rest of my life where I was trying to please other people. If I could please other people, then I would survive. In a way, it was a survival mechanism. But the main core wound that I've realized that came from craving external validation is that I have abandoned myself in childhood, and like, while I look at my childhood, there was a time when I abandoned myself. You could say that it's the abandonment wound. The abandonment wound is what was causing me to not validate myself because I was afraid that if somebody else would abandon me, then I would feel that same sense of emptiness or I wouldn't survive. Even having emotionally unavailable parents as a kid, that will cause us, that can cause us to then feel afraid of being abandoned. So how can I change my sense of self to not be abandoned? And we will then bend like pretzels. We'll bend backwards, we'll do whatever we can. We have trouble saying no, we become people pleasers. And the key and the cure to the abandonment wound, you wanna know what it is? It's to stop abandoning the self, to stop abandoning the self. Same with the validation. The reason we want validation is because we don't wanna feel abandoned. But if we would validate ourself, if we would stop abandoning ourself and start doing what we wanna do and filling up our own cup, we wouldn't need the external validation. This was the game changer for me. It was like literally a whole new world. All of a sudden, I had this potential to where when people ask me if I wanna do something, if it's gonna make me lose myself in the process, then I can say no. Before, I couldn't say no because if I were to say no, I would lose the validation of other people and I could be abandoned again and I would feel very empty and hopeless. So what I ended up doing is I ended up changing my value system as well. This is another key thing. We all have values we live by. Values are like kind of like clusters of beliefs or virtues. And if we live by the value of wanting people's validation at the top of our list, then we end up being guided by that force. When you go to a Tony Robbins conference, by the way, like Date with Destiny, most of the power of that for many people is looking at the values, rearranging the values, because certain values won't lead to— if you value significance, is what he always talks about, over that of valuing growth or connection and love, then a lot of times you will maybe, you know, you will maybe, that's not a formula for happiness because you want people to see you because maybe you don't feel seen. If you value certainty over many other things, then you'll probably stay comfortable in a certain zone because that's a virtue, that's a value that's keeping you where you are. So for me, I had to become aware of the strong importance I put on wanting other people's validation wanting other people's approval, and I had to start giving it to myself. And then I started to value authenticity more than anything else. What became more authentic to me was looking for just the authenticity of me being the real me, even if the real me meant I may get rejected. There are times people have said, hey, come, let's go do this. Can you come meet me here? And I'm like, no, I actually, you know, it doesn't mean that I always say it. There's times I do wanna go do something with friends or something, then I do it. But before, like literally I would do something like drive 10 hours to someone's birthday party 'cause there were no flights that went into this place because I didn't wanna say no. And I actually had to cancel photo shoots. I had to cancel all these things. That was something I did because even though it's a great friend of mine, I just, I couldn't say no. And now I look back and I'm like, what was I doing? I woke up from it. But the key to curing needing validation from external sources is validating the self and also stop abandoning the self. Look at your value system. Are you valuing significance and validation over authenticity and realness? And if so, how can you rewire that? It's really just becoming aware of it and starting to realize who are you? What virtues do you decide to live by? As I started to go and stop abandoning my own self, that's when everything began to change. You could heal the abandonment wound by giving yourself validation and by knowing that you can stop abandoning yourself, knowing that also it's a good thing if you are being your true self and some people don't like it. You're actually attracting people that really like the real you versus this contorted thing that changes based on the— adapts to everybody else around. So that's really what makes The biggest change in this process is when we become aware of this wound and then we begin to heal it. And if you guys didn't know as well, there is an inner child meditation, which is one of the most powerful meditations that I've made where we energetically go to Kauai, Hawaii to heal our own inner child. And part of this is healing that abandonment wound and it'll ripple out in every other areas of your life. So it's kind of like an activation as well. It's completely free. If you want that meditation, all you gotta do is download the app called High Viber, H-I-G-H-V-I-B-E-R, completely free app. In that app, it's a community for connecting to your high vibe tribe. We do live challenges in there every month. We do live unity meditations in there, and there are also meditations you can listen to that aren't on YouTube. That meditation's not on YouTube as well. So it's like a way of off of social media from us all connecting together, meeting our high vibe tribe and raising our vibration to a new level together so that we can really create powerful change on the planet. So you can go to highviber.com or download on Apple or Android, High Viber app. Check it out. Let me know what you think. And as always, I'll talk to you guys in the next video. Peace, much love, and namaste.