PLEASE LIKE THIS VIDEO... (The Shadow of Validation and being Liked)

Whatever you do, please, just please like this video. Just like it. It takes 2 seconds. And what the like does is a couple different things. One, when I was growing up, I felt validated only when I received validation from the outside. I had to constantly tune myself to somebody else, and based on that person's temperament and how that person felt by me, that meant survival. So I'm already used to doing something where I do something to gain the validation of other people, and the validation of other people is very, very important to me. There are times that I feel like I need people's validation, and I'm looking to the outside of other people to gauge whether I can feel good about myself or not. So one of the biggest benefits of you liking this video is you help me feel good about myself because I haven't been validating myself. That's the thing that happens a lot of times when we really want validation from other people. The key is that we aren't giving ourselves internal validation, and therefore we feel needy based on other people's ability to give us that validation. Now, of course, this video I'm going to be sharing with you the shadow of being liked, or the shadow of validation, of understanding how this leaks into almost every area of our life, and I'm gonna be sharing with you the cure, the cure to this process, because for most of my life, I looked to other people for validation, even on YouTube. For a long time on YouTube, the thing that I really wanted to create in my life is I wanted that YouTuber subscriber plaque button. If I could just get that, then I would finally feel whole, complete enough. It was a symbol to me of the ultimate being liked. That where then what happened is after like the first like year of making videos, it was purely based on passion. And the challenge is that after I started gaining pressure for making these videos, people always assume the video's always got to be better. They got to be fresh, they got to be new, they got to be different. The challenge is how many damn times can I say the damn same thing? I'm sure many of you have seen some of my videos. You're like, yeah, that seems like something he's talked about before. Well, I've made 1,500 YouTube videos and a lot of them are like in a way saying some of the same things in different ways. And there was a time when I felt very self-conscious of that. Anytime I'd read a comment, it's funny when you're reading YouTube comments from my end because some of them, they don't affect me at all. But the ones that affect me are the ones that I have my own little insecurity about where it could be true, where it's like, oh, Aaron's older videos are better than the newer ones. So I'd feel like, oh, maybe I'm not as good as I used to be. Maybe I'm not as pure as I used to be. And it was this like pressure. And anytime I'd create this pressure around anything, it would create this resistance. And here's the interesting thing. Anytime I'm doing something for certain end result, it normally creates pressure and it doesn't do as well. For example, when I used to sell women's shoes, if I went into work every day thinking I wanna sell $5,000 a day, that'd be a great goal because we got paid like 10% commission. That means I made $500, that's good. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna sell this much a day. And when I went in with that goal, I wouldn't necessarily get the greatest results because I was looking for something. I was doing things and helping customers to get an end result. When I then started making YouTube videos, I would be making videos just to add value to other people because I enjoyed it. Like when I was working a 9 to 5 job, when I would just go and help people and I wanted to like connect with people and have fun, I would do way better than when I had a certain goal. Well, same thing worked on YouTube. If I needed people's validation and I needed views to feel good about myself, you'd feel the resistance in the video and it wouldn't do as well. It's very interesting the way the energy dynamic works, but the key is how much am I needing something from you in order to feel a certain way about myself? Now, the real shadow of validation is understanding when you were a kid, Did your parents validate you? Did they encourage you? Did you feel safe in your own sense of self? Your own sense of self is you being in your body and you feeling the boundary between you and other people, knowing that it's okay. And what I found is that because growing up, I had to tune myself to my ex-stepmom that was emotionally, mentally, physically abusive, 7 to 15 years old, I had no freedom in my life whatsoever. My brother and I would come home from school and we just constantly like gauge ourselves to our ex-stepmom's like emotion to know whether we are safe or not. And many times we get in trouble for the dumbest things. You know, we weren't allowed to watch TV, we weren't allowed to have friends, we weren't allowed, we had to earn going to school activities. Most of the time we were locked outside doing yard work and we'd have to sneak inside to get enough food to eat because we were given a bowl of cereal in the morning and TV dinner at night. So it was like there's zero control and we tune ourselves in order to survive. So what happened is after my ex-stepmom left my life and I was 15 years old, and all this freedom. It was amazing, it was a whole new world. But at the same time, I was used to tuning to other people to see if I'm safe, to see if I'm validated because I didn't feel validated growing up. So one thing that I had to eventually learn to do is to switch the script. This is the cure to the validation of the drug of needing people's approval. It's understanding your own values. Values. That's really what this is about. When you're a people pleaser or a nice guy or somebody that is wanting validation from somebody else, you value their validation, what they think, more than what you think or how you feel about yourself. And most likely, you will also value what they think about you over authenticity. So what I did is when I became aware of this shadow, first off, awareness was key because I'm like, wait, This is so unauthentic. This is inauthentic for me to be caring so much what other people think. And what would happen is I would then keep myself in a little box and I would be afraid of sharing different aspects of my life. And what if someone thinks this or when someone thinks that? But eventually I said, you know what? I value— a value is kind of like a set of beliefs. It's like a value you live by. It's normally tied to your identity as well. I started valuing authenticity over everything. I started valuing being vulnerable over everything. And there are many of you that watch my videos that may say, well, even though I talk about some esoteric things and I use my hands a lot, I talk in a certain way, you know, most likely that a lot of my intentions are pure. I really want to help people, or I really want to at least, um, like put good content out there in the world. I have good intentions. However, there is a part of me that wonders, do I have good intentions? And am I trying to put a lot of value out in the world because I want your validation? Or is it because it's a universal principle that when you put out value is what you get back? What you put out is what you get back. It's interesting how that works, but there's— it makes me really think, even just recently on Instagram, I have these like impersonator people that are impersonating me, pretending to be me. And what they're doing is they're like conning people into like a psychic reading. By the way, I've never done that. Given psychic readings. I don't do that. But what's interesting is I was actually here in Austin and I'm staying at this cool Airbnb and the guy that owns the Airbnb, he's a cool guy and he had somebody come in to help bring boxes to the backyard and she's like, oh my God, I recognize you from your videos. And she was like, oh, we were talking on Instagram the other day. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't remember talking, but I didn't wanna be rude necessarily. Maybe wanting their validation, who knows? Didn't wanna be too polarizing, but I was like, oh. And then eventually she says, yeah, we were going back and forth about a psychic reading. I said, nope, that wasn't me. And then I got like really not worked up, but kind of like there's people on Instagram that are getting like conned into paying $60 and $90 and it's not even me. What this person does is they, they like buy followers and I don't know, it's some interesting thing. And now the accounts get taken down quickly. I got a process for that, which is nice. But I was wondering, am I, You know, now that I'm meeting people in public that literally they were triggered because people are pushing them to do readings and they think it's me pushing them, being pushy for them to do a psychic reading. Is it mainly that I don't want people to get like their money taken away and all this stuff? That's definitely a big part of it. But there's another part of it that's like, I don't want people to think that that's me, my identity, that I don't want them to think that I'm pushing them to do something that I'm not even doing. So there's these different motivations that become interesting, but the egos in the self-preservation mechanism but there's sometimes like this loss of self that I found to be something that is very interesting. And the key to this I found is going in and looking at my own values. What do I value? And what I value over people's validation is authenticity and vulnerability. And as I started living by those virtues, my whole entire life transformed. I said, yes, sometimes I say things that may trigger people. I may be more polarizing. I share different aspects of my life that I used to really care about. but at the same time, I feel more centered within myself. When you live by your own word and your own integrity, you feel more in a line, in a line, duh, you feel more in a line basically. So these are things that I've recognized about the shadow of being liked is unless you really like yourself, it'll never be enough. There's something called the locus of control. The locus of control is how you gauge a sense of control within yourself. And most people have their locus of control based on external things. So they have to control the outside to feel a certain way on the inside instead of generating that emotion from within. So knowing that you can generate validation from within by validating yourself and to stop abandoning yourself. A lot of times people that feel emotionally or physically abandoned as kids change their center of gravity to please other people, to make other people like them. And the thing is, is not everyone's going to like you. As many of, you know, you may look down, you might see a whole bunch of positive comments. There'll be people that don't like what I'm doing or don't like me. Or don't like the way I look or whatever. And it's just a part of this, you know, I've had to learn to really accept that and just to like myself, you know, and even my flaws, you know, that's why I like to be vulnerable and share different aspects of my life that maybe some people normally don't share. It's just, I think that that's 'cause I value authenticity over just carrying like this perfect perception of what people think of me. It's also probably, I think it's a way I connect with people too, is I'd like to share the things I've been through because then it helps people like put down their guard so that they could be open to like opening and like transforming and seeing what's possible for themselves as well. So it's a very interesting contrast. However, also just in general, for really loving yourself and really feeling that self-love, there is a meditation on raising your dominant vibration permanently. This helps you to release and shed those old patterns of caring what people think and really being stuck, you know, the key to raising your vibe is letting go. As you let go, you raise your vibe naturally. One of the most popular and powerful meditations on this channel is a raise your vibration permanently meditation. I'll go ahead and link that below. Listen to that for 21 days, watch what happens. Other than that, can you please like this video? It really helps me feel good about myself. But you can like this video if you liked it. The other reason is that it helps the YouTube algorithm so that more people see this video and more people see the channel as well. So it helps get the message out there. Now, is that my motivation, or is my motivation more my own sense of validation? Because when you like the video, more people see it, and the more I get fed. Haha, it's like a drug. You'll never know. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both, to be honest with you. Anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this video, and I hope— I really hope, because I really want your validation. And as always, peace, much love, and namaste.