Excerpt from a conversation (YouTube video) where Speaker A describes shifting from seeking external validation to internal validation and connection. Connor Beaton advises exploring the concept of grace (both biblical and personal), separating personhood from behavior (you can do wrong without being a bad person), journaling past choices, extracting lessons from mistakes, and carrying those lessons forward.
Trying to work on more internal validation versus external validation, trying to connect more with people rather than impress, and seeking that kind of validation from them in the wrong words or the wrong terms.
One I would encourage you to explore the concept of grace both from a biblical sense and from a personal sense of what it looks like for you to be an embodiment of grace for yourself. I really want you to start to separate personhood from behavior is by starting to realize that I can do something bad or wrong and not be bad or wrong. And you are a good person who has done some bad things and that's okay. But I also want you to start to journal and go back and look at some of the choices that you've made and just look at them and say, okay, that was bad, that was wrong, and that does not mean I'm a bad person. I'm a good person who did a bad thing, and here's the lesson that I learned. So you have to kind of extract the gifts and the lessons from those behaviors so that you can carry them forward into the present.
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