Stop Seeking Validation Today!: 5 Mindsets for Genuine Self Confidence
SHOW NOTES
Here's my invitation to you: stop seeking external validation today. In this episode I walk through five mindsets for building genuine self-confidence, the kind that doesn't rise and fall with what other people think of you. We start with why a single setback, a breakup, a passed-over promotion, a failed launch, can send your brain into overdrive, pulling up every old memory of criticism and dismissal, because social rejection runs so deep that it can actually change what you perceive and even cause physical pain.
From there, the five mindsets: recognizing that most rejection is about the other person's unhealed baggage and not you, deciding that you are what you love rather than what loves you back, focusing on your strengths while simply managing your weaknesses, staying free enough to admit what you don't know, and setting goals that genuinely excite you, then actually celebrating when you reach them.
With a little help from the Grinch and one beautifully self-assured Nicolas Cage character, these shifts will lighten your load more than you'd expect.
Warmly,
Linda
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Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] Why Confidence Wobbles After a Setback
Hi, I'm Linda, an emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
Here's my invitation to you: stop seeking external validation today. Let's talk about five mindsets that will allow you to build self-confidence, genuine self-confidence, instead of limiting yourself to what others think of you.
So it's not uncommon for us to struggle with our self-confidence and what we believe about ourselves after a difficult situation, after a loss or a change that we didn't anticipate or that we didn't want. Something like having a breakup that maybe came out of nowhere, maybe you saw it coming, but you were really hoping that things would work out and it didn't.
Maybe it's not getting the promotion or the raise that you asked for. You prepared your speech, you went in confidently, thought maybe this is it, and they were like, no, it's not. Maybe you've experienced a failed launch in your own business that just flopped and made you feel like, what am I even doing with this? Why am I even doing this? And maybe just in general, you're losing motivation on a goal that you set for yourself, something like taking better care of your own health, physically, mentally, what have you, and it feels like you're not living up to the standard that you set for yourself, and it's really frustrating.
These kinds of events have a way of pulling on our brain's pattern-seeking style of functioning. When we feel like something's not going according to plan and we're struggling, we fail, we've lost something, we suddenly remember all the other times that we felt a sense of loss or felt like we had failed. And what usually comes along with this is memories of any time that somebody else thought that we weren't going to do well, that someone else had doubts about what we could achieve. Any time that someone criticized us.
For some of us it was our caregivers, our parents. Any time someone criticized us and said that we wouldn't be able to do what we were saying we wanted to do or had a dream about. Or any time we were just plain dismissed. Maybe you shared something that you're really passionate about and really excited about with someone and they were like, okay, just dismissed you, or your dream was just ignored somehow.
When we have these kinds of losses or painful changes, we tend to remember and start reflecting about all those other kinds of times as well. It's very common, there's nothing wrong with you that you do that. It's actually the way that our brains function. This runs so deep that social rejection, or feeling like we're being ignored or dismissed or just discounted altogether, runs so deep that we can feel it physically. I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you where you felt rejected or talked down to, or someone just was like, no, that's not possible for you because you are this way. Those things, we can feel on a biological level.
There's even a study that shows that when people are experiencing even a very small instance of social rejection, they tend to perceive the room that they're in as getting quieter. They actually think the room has gotten quieter. Nothing has changed about the room. Anyone else who's in the room is like, it's fine, I didn't notice anything.
But for that person, it sounds like it's quieter in the room that they're in. They can even experience physical pain in their body because of how deep it runs when we experience a moment of social rejection and we take it in. So I just say all that to say that if we're relying on external validation, it can really harm us emotionally and physically. It can really take a toll on us over time.
[04:40] The Payoff of High Self-Esteem
On the other hand, when you look at the effects of high self-esteem and self-confidence, and you know, high self-esteem, we're not talking about narcissism here, nothing like that, nothing delusional like that, right? We're talking about self-respect and self-acceptance. High self-esteem is a small and steady deposit into our wellness bucket over time that yields profound results when you look at it over the course of a lifetime. So in a single moment, you may see a slight difference between two people, someone who has lower self-confidence and someone who has higher self-confidence.
But especially when you zoom out and look at their life over the course of years, you may see a slight difference between that person who maintains that level of self-confidence versus someone who doesn't. They show that there are consistent and much better results for the person with self-confidence. I know this is like a shocker, right? It's not surprising. But they have consistently better results when it comes to school, when it comes to work, their relationships, their physical health, their mental health, etc.
So there's a reason why you're watching this and you're thinking about how to improve yourself, right? How to improve yourself so that you have greater self-esteem, self-confidence. And it makes sense that you would do that, because it literally will pay dividends over the course of your life, not just in this moment.
[06:17] Mindset 1: People Reject From Their Own Insecurities
So the first thing I want you to think about, the first mindset, is to recognize, the first two are about other people, and then we'll get to you. But because we tend to be caught up with other people when we're seeking external validation, I thought I'd start there. You want to recognize that people are often driven and led by their own insecurities, right? Including their rejection of you. You may be feeling the rejection as a very personal thing to you, something about you that is very flawed, that's attracting this negative attention. The truth is, unless you're actually doing something wrong, let's say, if you're doing something wrong and people are like, we reject you, well, then okay, that's just because you messed up for yourself. But if you're watching this, I'm assuming that's not really what's going on, right? The fact is, people often reject from their own insecurities.
And I was looking at different movie clips and things, and I came across the one for How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Okay. So the Grinch, you know, he's all, I hate Christmas, I'm going to ruin it for everybody else, and I hate you, and Joey is stupid, right? It's like, what's wrong with that guy? And then it's flashing back to one of his early Christmases, and he made this special ornament for his love, right? He designed this special ornament. And then he goes to try and give this ornament to this person that he's in love with, and ends up getting ridiculed by his classmates, right? Just hopes dashed, dreams dashed, just destroyed, right?
At a young, tender age, which is often how it happens for us. At young, tender ages, someone says just the perfect wrong thing, and it just sticks with us, right? And it sparked this lifetime of hate, of just wanting to destroy it for everybody else, because it's so dumb, and it hurt him so deeply. It was seen as the reason for why he was hurt so deeply.
Thankfully, the Grinch was eventually reformed and all that. And yet a lot of people that we interact with on a daily basis, they are not so much reformed. A lot of people are not getting help and trying to improve themselves the way that you are. And so you're coming across them, or you're interacting with them, maybe even dating them, or having other long-term, more steady interactions with a person like this, and you feel hurt by them.
But you need to recognize that their rejection of you often has so little, maybe like 10%, if at all, to do with you, and like 90% their own insecurities and unhealed baggage. So that's just something for you to recognize in the moment, so that you know that you have an option to not take it on. It's their stuff. Let's not take on their stuff, their baggage.
[09:10] Mindset 2: You Are What You Love, Not What Loves You Back
The second mindset, that also relates to other people, is that we don't have to be determined by their reactions to us. We can just make a decision that the way that we view ourselves is more about our own choices, our own freedom of choice, right? Not so much how they react to our choices.
And this is the next and last movie that I'll reference. This one's actually a weirder one, I'll admit. I watched this years ago, and I was really into indie films, you know, don't judge me. It's the film with Nicolas Cage where he's playing two characters. He's playing himself and his twin, the Kaufman brothers, right? It's called Adaptation.
And I always think about this scene in this movie where there's the brother who's really confident and kind of just does what he wants and is very happy. He's very light, you know, he doesn't really get bothered by much. And the other one is just swimming in insecurity. He's just stifled and crushed by it. And you can see the difference in how they just show up every day. They're having this conversation. And the one who is always very insecure and self-focused and afraid was talking to his brother about this interaction that he witnessed between his brother and this girl that he liked, you know, years ago.
And he was talking to him about this thing. He's like, you know, you were flirting with this person and then you walked up to her and all this, and they were making fun of you and stuff. And he's like, why were you so happy? Why, in that interaction, when you liked someone and they were looking at you making fun of you, why did you walk away and seem so happy?
And his brother says, "I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have a right to take it away. I can love whoever I want." And his brother's like, okay, but she thought you were pathetic. And the brother says, "That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago." And it's so profound, because, it's funny, they're both not the most attractive guys, kind of a mess, but this guy's just much more comfortable, and his life just flows in a different way because he decided a long time ago, you are what you love, not what loves you.
So he's not basing his sense of confidence and worth off of whether someone loves him back. He's like, I get to love freely. That's my decision. And I embrace that and I'm good with it. And I embrace other people choosing not to want that or not to respond, and that's fine too. It's not like you went and stalked this person. That would be a different kind of story, right? I'm not endorsing that. But he just was like, oh, I loved her and she didn't love me back. All right, moving on. We're good.
So there's our freedom in knowing that we are what we love, not what loves us back. We don't have to be defined by what doesn't love us back. That's really not what defines us, right? That's just in our heads. That's the second mindset.
[12:34] Mindset 3: Focus on Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses
Okay, third mindset. Now we're getting into focusing on you. The third mindset is to focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses. When you think about the best athletes or the most successful people in business or in finance or whatever, these are not people who are getting all caught up on focusing on their weaknesses and trying to manage their strengths. And yet sometimes we get that message that we're supposed to focus a lot on our weaknesses and make them much, much better, and our strengths will just kind of be there or whatever. The most successful people actually don't do that. The people who are happiest don't do that.
What they do is they know what their weaknesses are. You know, I'm not super organized. I'm not super punctual. I tend to procrastinate. Those things are probably not going to change, right? I'm just making these things up. But these things are not going to change all that much. But I know that I'll need to manage them. So I'm going to have systems in place that will keep them from hurting me too much, because I've managed them fairly well, or I'm getting help with them, or I have someone else in charge of that, whatever, right?
But really, I'm going to focus on my strengths. I'm going to look at my strengths, figure out what they are, explore that, and make them even better, and use them to enhance my life, enhance other people's lives, do good in the world before my time runs out, right? That's the powerful stance. That's the self-confidence stance that will allow you to stop seeking external validation and really just focus on what you want to focus on. Focus on your strengths, enhance them, make them bigger, better, more powerful. Do all that you can with it while you've still got life in your body, right?
[14:15] Mindset 4: Don't Be Afraid to Say You Don't Know Something
Fourth mindset. Don't be afraid to acknowledge when you don't know something. This is just having a growth mindset, okay? This one is short and sweet. There's always someone else who does know it. Just go find that person and lean on their strengths, right? Again, back to focus on your strengths. Just manage your weaknesses, don't focus on your weaknesses. Go find someone else who has that strength. It's really okay. You don't have to be the master of everything. Actually, that doesn't exist. You would just be the master of nothing and a jack of all trades and kind of mediocre at most of it, right? We don't have to do that.
Don't be afraid to acknowledge when you don't know something. Go find someone who does. It's fine. Everybody doesn't know something. Everyone knows something. We can all work together. We're interdependent, right? Keep that growth mindset. It will do you so much good for your self-confidence.
[15:10] Mindset 5: Enjoy Challenging Yourself and Celebrate the Wins
Fifth mindset, fifth and last mindset for not seeking external validation and building your own genuine self-confidence. This is just enjoy challenging yourself and setting high goals that are meaningful for you, and enjoy it, right? This is the key. You're enjoying it. You're thinking about things that you're good at, that you're excited about, that you would love, and you set a goal on that thing that feels good for you, not what someone else told you to do. That doesn't work. A goal that works for you. And then just pursue it, because the thing is, even just by pursuing it, you are going to expand and grow and become more of the good stuff that you love about yourself, just in the pursuit of it.
You're going to develop and challenge and expand just by doing that, even if you don't reach that goal, right? The whole, shoot for the moon, even I wouldn't shoot for the stars, you know what I'm talking about, right? You're going to end up in outer space somewhere. You'll still get further than where you started, which is just on planet Earth.
So with this, make sure that you're setting goals that actually are exciting to you, that feel fulfilling to you. And then also reward yourself when you reach them. Reward yourself with good things. Acknowledge this. Celebrate when you reach that goal. Don't just take it off the list and be like, okay, well, that's done, okay, next thing. No. Stop and sit in the fact that you've achieved this thing that before you hadn't done yet, or you weren't even sure if you could do. And then you're like, wow, I got there.
Okay. These are five mindsets that will help you to greatly increase your sense of self-confidence. It's going to work wonderfully for you. I'm excited. If you put this into practice, you could literally just put this into practice, and the amount of shifts that you would have just from these five mindsets would lighten your load so much more. So I really challenge you to do so.
[17:10] Where to Go Next
If you need more help with being able to focus in on the things that actually serve you, with enhancing your life day to day, short term and into the long term, be sure to check out my course, the Self-Love Skills course. It has all the foundational tools, mindsets, and practices in there that I have used over and over again with one-to-one clients in my line of work as a psychotherapist, to help them achieve more of what they want out of their lives. It's all distilled down into this nice drip-released course that you can do and really experience a lot more of these benefits that we're talking about today with your self-confidence, and then just the quality of your life and all the things that flow out of it, all the relationships, all the career stuff, and how you think about yourself and community and relationships. So anyway, I hope that you enjoyed that. I definitely have enjoyed speaking with you. I will talk to you soon.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
[Editing Note: The Self Love Skills and Relationship courses are not currently available. If you are interested in this content and guidance, all tools mentioned are now exclusively provided through my concierge psychotherapy practice, Satya Counseling & Yoga.]
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