You Don’t Actually Want Confidence- You Want approval

Transcript

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People say they want confidence. You hear it all the time in therapy, in self-help books, in conversations at 1 a.m. when somebody finally admits what's actually going on with them. I just want to be more confident. Confident to speak up in the room, confident to lead without second guessing every decision, confident to be themselves, without constantly checking how they're landing with other people. That's what people say they want. But if you actually watch what people do, not what they say, what they do. Most of them aren't building confidence at all. They're chasing approval. They want to be liked. They want to be accepted. They want one someone to say, yeah, that makes sense. And then suddenly they feel solid. They feel sure of themselves. They feel confident. But the second that approval disappears, the second someone pushes back, goes cold, or just doesn't react the way they hoped, that confidence goes with it. Because it was never confidence. It was approval wearing confidence clothing. This is without permission. Unfiltered conversations about power, identity, masculinity, culture, sexuality, and the things we were told not to say out loud. I'm Chris Willingham, and today we're going to talk about the difference between confidence and approval. Why most people are chasing the wrong one and what it actually takes to build the real thing. All right, I want to start here because I think the confusion between confidence and approval runs so deep that people don't even realize they've mixed them up. They use the word interchangeably, and that's not the same thing at all. Confidence is internal. It comes from inside you, from your relationship with yourself, your track record, your ability to trust your own judgment. It doesn't require anyone else to be in the room. Approval is external. It comes from other people. It requires an audience. It requires someone to respond. Confidence says I know who I am. Approval says I hope they like who I am. And here's the key difference. Confidence is staple. It doesn't fluctuate based on the room you walk into or who's watching. Approval is conditional. It's completely at the mercy of other people's moods, opinions, and reactions. Confidence holds up when people disagree with you. Approval disappears when they do. So when I say most people are chasing approval, I'm not being harsh. I'm being honest. Because I've done it. Most people I've known done it. It's actually one of the most human things there is. The problem is when you build your entire identity on it. Here's the thing about approval that makes this so tricky. It feels exactly like confidence when it's happening. Someone agrees with you, someone validates your idea, someone laughs at your jokes or tells you that you handled that situation well. And you feel good. You feel grounded. You feel sure of yourself. That's not just a mental thing, it's physiological. Your nervous system acts calm, actually calms down when you receive social approval. Cortisol drops, dopamine spikes. You literally feel safer. So of course, it gets confused with confidence. The feeling is similar. The physical sensation is the same. But here's what's different. That feeling is borrowed. It's not yours. It depends entirely on the conditions being right. And the moment the conditions change, the moment the validation stops, or someone disagrees, or the room goes quiet, you're back right back where you started. Confidence doesn't do that. Confidence stays. I want to go back to where this starts because it's important to understand why approval seeking isn't a character flaw. It's not weakness. It's actually a really intelligent adaptation to being a small human in the world that had all the power. When you're a kid, approval isn't just nice to have, it's survival. If the adults around you are happy with you, you're safe. If they're not, there are consequences. That's not dramatic. That's just the reality of childhood. Good job. That's the right answer. That's how you're supposed to behave. And on the flip side, the silence, the disappointment, the withdrawal of warmth when you did something that didn't land right. Over time, your brain learns a very efficient lesson. Approval equals safety. Disapproval equals discomfort, or worse. So you start shaping yourself around what gets approval. You learn which version of you gets the good reaction and lean into that. You learn which parts of you create friction and you stop suppressing those. None of that is conscious. None of that is a decision you made at seven years old. It just becomes the operating system. The problem is most people never update the operating system. They're still running childhood survival code in their adult lives. Here's where it gets serious. When approval becomes the foundation your identity is built on, identity itself becomes unstable. Flexible in the worst way. Not flexible like I'm adaptable and open-minded. Flexible like I'll be whoever this room needs me to be, so they'll keep liking me. You adjust how you speak, you modulate your energy, you shift your opinions. Not because you've actually changed your mind, but because you're reading the room and adjusting to keep the approval coming. You've probably seen this in other people. The person who has completely different personalities depending on who they're around. The person who agrees with everyone in the room, even when the room is contradicting itself. You've probably done it yourself. I know I have. And the insidious part is that it works. At least in the short term. People like you. They feel comfortable around you. You don't create conflict. You're easy. But what you've actually done is made yourself invisible. You've traded authenticity for acceptance. And over time, that starts to cost you in ways that are hard to name but easy to feel. I have to talk about it because fundamentally, I have to talk about this because it fundamentally changed the landscape. Before social media, approval seeking happened in real time. You got it or you didn't. There was a natural ceiling on how much you could chase it. Then social media came along and made approval quantifiable, visible, constant, and addictive. Likes, comments, shares, follower count, engagement rates. Now you can measure in real time exactly how much approval you're receiving. You can watch the numbers go up or go down. And your brain responds to every notification the same way it responds to parental approval when you were six. They liked it. I'm okay. I'm accepted. I belong. No one responded. What did I do wrong? Was it too much? Not enough? Should I have said it differently? The platform is literally built on the dopamine loop of approval. And the people who built it knew exactly what they were doing. I'm not here to tell you to delete your accounts. That's your call. But I want you to be honest with yourself about what you're measuring when you check those numbers. Because if that number's going up makes you feel confident, and that number going down makes you feel worthless, you're not tracking engagement. You're tracking your self-worth. And that's a problem. Okay, man. Let's go here because this is where it gets particularly interesting and particularly unexamined. Men are often taught to appear confident, not to actually develop it. There's a huge difference between those two things. From the time most boys are small, they get messages about how a man is supposed to carry himself, the tone of voice, the posture, the decisiveness, stoicism. Don't be too emotional. Don't be too soft. Don't show uncertainty. That's weakness. So men learn to perform confidence and they get really good at it. The voice, the eye contact, the energy that walks into a room and says, I've got this. But underneath that performance, a lot of times it's approval seeking. Just dressed up differently. For men, approval often shows up as the need for respect, the need to be perceived as capable, the need to be seen as a man in whatever way your culture defines that. You're not asking, do you like me? But you're absolutely asking, do you respect me? Do you see me as strong? Do I register? And when the answer is no, when a man feels dismissed, disrespected, or overlooked, the reaction is often completely disproportionate. Because it's not just about that moment. It's about the whole identity structure that was built on that external foundation. Fragile confidence is loud. Real confidence is quiet. For women, approval tends to show up differently. And it usually goes deeper emotionally because it's tied to connection and belonging in a more direct way. Not because women are more emotional. That's a tired and lazy take. But because women are often socialized to build their identity through relationships, through being valued, being chosen, being someone people want in their lives. So approval for women often looks like being liked, being included, being wanted, being seen as warm, supportive, agreeable, easy to be around. And the threat of disapproval, being too much, too opinionated, too direct, too intense, carries a particular weight because it doesn't just feel like social friction. It can feel like the loss of connection itself. Which is why so many women default to editing themselves in relationships. Not because they're weak, because the states feel higher. And I want to be clear. I'm not diagnosing a gender. I'm describing patterns. Patterns that come from how we're raised, what we're rewarded for, and what we've always learned is safe versus risky in our specific context. The mechanism is the same for everybody. The costume just looks different. I want to pause and ask you something. And I want you to actually think about it, not just let it go by. When do you feel most confident? Is it when you're alone sitting with yourself? Clear on what you think, grounded in your own perspective, you haven't talked to anyone yet, before anyone has responded. Or is it after? After someone agreed with you, after someone validated your decision, after the room responded the way you hoped. Because if your confidence lives primarily in that second space, in the reaction, then what you have isn't confidence. It's a condition response to social reinforcement. And that's worth knowing. Not to beat yourself up, but because you can't fix something you haven't accurately diagnosed. I want to talk about what this actually costs you because I think people underestimate it. When you build your sense of self-hone approval, you hand control of your emotional stability to other people. Full stop. Your boss has a bad day and gives you short feedback. You spiral. Your partner seems distant. You assume something's wrong with you. A friend group doesn't invite you to something, and it doesn't feel like a scheduling convict. It feels like a verdict. Every shift in your environment becomes a referendum on your worth. Every reaction becomes data about whether you're enough. And living like that is exhausting. I mean genuinely exhausting. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. And here's the other cost. It quietly erodes your relationships. Because when you're constantly performing for approval, the people around you aren't connecting with you. They're connecting with the version of you that you put forward for their consumption. Eventually, one of the two, one of two things happens. Either they figure that out or you do. And both of those reckonings are painful. The most intimate thing you can do in a relationship is show up as yourself and risk the reaction. That's the actual definition of vulnerability. Not crying, not trauma dumping. Showing the real version of you and letting the other person decide. Approval seeking is the opposite of that. It pre-filters the presentation so the reaction is controlled. Let's get specific because I think this is where most people recognize themselves most clearly. In relationships, romantic or otherwise, approval shows up as self-editing. It's subtle and it happens slowly. You soften an opinion because you don't want to create tension. You let something slide that genuinely bothered you because bringing it up feels risky. You laugh at something you didn't find funny because the silence felt worse. You agree with a perspective you actually disagree with because you didn't want the friction. That's the trap. Each individual instance seems like you're just being flexible, being easy, being kind. But you do that enough times and you've created a pattern. A pattern of choosing approval over honesty. And eventually you look up and realize you're in a relationship or a friendship or a job where no one actually knows what you think, where no one has really met you. And the loneliness of that is a very specific kind of loneliness. Because you've surrounded yourself by people who like you. They just don't know you. I want to describe what this looks like over time because I think it happens so gradually that people don't recognize it until they're in too deep. You adjust one thing the way you talk about your opinion at work, you couch it more. Soften the edges so it's easier to hear. That's fine, actually. That's social awareness. Then you adjust another thing. You stop bringing up a topic that you care about because your partner shuts down when it comes up. You tell yourself it's not worth the fight. Then another thing. Then another thing. And another thing. And somewhere in that process, there's no single moment, no line you crossed, you've lost the thread back to yourself. You're not showing up fully anymore. Not because you don't know who you are, because you've gotten so good at adjusting to your environment that the full version of you rarely shows up at all. And when someone finally asks you, what do you actually want? What do you actually think? And you feel that strange blankness, that hesitation, that I don't know. That doesn't feel like genuine uncertainty, but like something you've buried so deep you can't find it anymore. That's what long-term approval seeking does to your identity. Dating is where approval seeking is on full display. And it's fascinating to watch because the thing people do to try to win someone over is usually the exact thing that eventually loses them. Early on, people perform the best possible versions of themselves. More easygoing than they are, more flexible than they are, less opinionated, less direct, less complex. And it works for a while. Because you're giving the other person an uncomplicated version of you, and that creates a certain kind of easy attraction. But here's the problem you can't sustain a performance forever. The real version of you eventually shows up. It has to. And when it does, one of a few things happens. Sometimes the other person is fine with the real you. And you've wasted months being someone you're not for no reason. Sometimes they're not fine with the real you. And you're in a relationship built on a persona, not a person. Or, and this one's the most painful, the other person actually liked the real you all along, but you were so busy performing that you never let them find out. The most attractive thing over time, in a lasting way, isn't the polished performance. It's the person who knows who they are and doesn't need you to confirm it. That's compelling. That's the energy people actually want to be around. You can feel it immediate when you meet someone like that. Approval at work. This one hits differently because there are real consequences. Your income is tied to it, your career is tied to it. So the approval seeking here is wrapped in a layer of justification that makes it hard to see clearly. You have a perspective in the meeting, a different take, an observation that nobody else has offered yet, and you almost say it. And then you don't. Because you're reading the room, because leadership seems committed to this direction, because you don't want to be the person who slows things down. Because your last idea didn't land that well, and you don't want to repeat Tuesday just keep quiet and someone else sometimes the person next to you says the same thing three minutes later and gets a great response sound familiar the organizations that actually do interesting work are the ones whose people are willing to say the uncomfortable thing not to be difficult but to be useful to bring real perspective instead of performing alignment and the people who get trusted with real responsibility over time they're the ones who opinion you can actually trust not because they're always right because they tell you what they think let's zoom in on leadership for a second because I I think this is one of the most under talked about dynamics in how leadership actually functions or fails to if you need approval you will avoid conflict that's just the math if you avoid conflict you start avoiding truth because truth especially in organizations especially in families especially in any group of people with stakes and history truth creates conflict so the leader who needs to be liked will always manage perception before they manage reality they'll tell people what they want to hear they'll avoid the hard conversations they'll put the difficult feedback in soft enough language that it doesn't land. They'll let a problem persist rather than name it directly and deal with a fallout and then they'll be generally confused when things don't improve because from where they're sitting they communicated they said the thing but they said it in the most approval managed way possible which means no one actually received it real leadership requires something that approval seekers find genuinely terrifying the willingness to be the most unpopular person in the room and stay there without flinching not mean not dismissive not arrogant just clear and unbothered by the discomfort that clarity creates so here's something I want you to try. Not a thought experiment an actual physical exercise next time you're about to say something true something you actually think something that might land differently than expected pay attention to your body in the seconds before you say it notice what happens chest tightens breathing gets a little shallower there's a slight hesitation in the throat that fraction of a second where you checked internal internally whether this is safe that's not lack of confidence that's your nervous system registering social risk. It's doing its job it learned a long time ago that saying the wrong thing has cost and it's flagging the potential cost before you proceed. The question isn't whether you feel that most people do the question is what do you do with it? Confidence people feel that sensation and speak anyway approval seekers feel that sensation and edit or go quiet or change course entirely both people felt the same thing the difference is what they decided that feeling meant. Let's pause again. Another question This one's a little more uncomfortable Where in your life are you editing yourself? Not dramatically not lying about who you are you're not performing a persona but subtly you're shaving the edges you're leaving parts out you're adjusting the presentation based on the audience at work are there things you think but never say because you've read the room and decided it's not safe in your relationship? Are there parts of you that your partner hasn't fully met because you're not sure how they'd respond with your family. Are there conversations you've sh avoided for so long that avoiding them has just become the default that editing isn't always wrong. Some of it is just social intelligence but some of it you know which parts isn't social intelligence. It's fear. Fear of disapproval fear of disconnection fear of being seen as too much too different too honest with that for a minute I want to address something directly because I know somebody listening right now is thinking it okay so I'm supposed to stop caring of what anyone thinks? Isn't that just arrogance? No and the fact that those two things get confused is one of the most damaging conflations in the whole conversation arrogance is not confidence. Arrogance is actually a form of approval seeking with the polarity reversed instead of shrinking to be like arrogance puffs up to be feared or envied or admired it's still fundamentally about managing how other perceive you it's still external it still needs an audience real confidence doesn't need an audience doesn't need to perform dominance or certainty doesn't need to convince you it just exists genuinely confident people are often some of the most open curious and receptive people you'll ever meet because they don't have anything to defend. They're not threatened by your disagreement your challenge your different perspective they can hold of that all of that without it destabilizing them. The people who are most loudly certain most aggressively dominant most visibly needing you know how sure of themselves they are those are usually the approval seekers they're just working in a different direction so let me describe what real confidence looks like I think people have a distorted image of what confidence looks like it's quiet. That's the first thing it doesn't announce itself doesn't need to it's the person in the room who doesn't need to be the loudest or the most certain who can say I don't know without it feeling like a threat to their identity who can be wrong without spiraling who can take criticism and actually evaluate it. Not just absorb it as an attack or dismiss it to protect their ego it's the person who says what they actually think not to be provocative not to perform authentically just because it's what they think and when the room pushes back they stay grounded they consider the feedback but they don't collapse it's the person who can walk away from a conversation where they weren't liked where they weren't validated where it didn't go the way they hoped and still feel okay. Not because they're detached or unbothered by everything but because their sense of self doesn't live in the reaction confidence is the ability to feel the uncertainty the social risk the discomfort and act in alignment with your values anyway not because it doesn't cost you anything but because it costs you less than the alternative okay this is the part where people are actually here for because knowing the problem doesn't fix it. So how do you actually build internal confidence? Let me be honest with you it's slower and less dramatic than the self-help industry makes it sound there's no five-step framework that changes your nervous system overnight but there are actual things you can do the first one is evidence. Confidence is built on evidence not belief not affirmation not convincing yourself you're great evidence the actual experience of doing hard things and surviving of making calls and standing by them of being honest and living through the discomfort they followed every time you do the thing that you were afraid to do say the honest thing. Make the decision without polling everyone you know hold a position under pressure. You deposit something into your confidence small deposit but they compound the second one is learning to distinguish your feelings from facts. When someone doesn't respond the way you hoped and you feel like you did something wrong pause. Ask yourself is that true or is it just a feeling am I reading data or reading my fear most of the time the answer is fear and fear isn't facts. The third one and this one's uncomfortable is tolerating the discomfort of disapproval intentionally start small say the thing you've not been saying hold the boundary you've been softening disagree in the room instead of in your head on the drive home and notice that you survived notice that the relationship didn't end notice that the world didn't collapse because your nervous system is running predictions based on old data and the only way to update those predictions is with new experiences. Here's something interesting that happens when you stop needing approval your relationships change. Sometimes in ways that are painful at first the accommodating version the one that didn't push back didn't assert didn't bring the full complexity of who you actually are and when you stop being that person they have to decide if they're into the actual you some of them will be some of them won't and both of those outcomes are valuable information. But the relationships that stay the ones built on the real you instead of the performance those are fundamentally different. There's a quality to those connections that you can't manufacture with approval seeking because they know who you are. They've chosen who you are not who you were performing and within those relationships there's less exhaustion because you're not managing a persona. You're not tracking what you said to who and making sure the versions are consistent. You're just you and that honestly that's a form of freedom most people don't realize they're missing until you experience it. I want to zoom out for a second because this isn't just an individual issue. This is cultural we live in a world where a significant amount of what looks like confidence is actually performance people posting curated versions of their lives and calling it authenticity people speaking with certainty about things they're not actually certain about because certainty reads is confidence. People projecting strength because they're afraid that any visible uncertainty will cost them and here's the thing when everyone's performing everyone else feels like they're the only one struggling because you can't see through the performance you just see the output and you compare your internal experiences to everyone else's external presentation and you feel like something is wrong with you nothing is wrong with you. You're just seeing the performance the backstage looks the same for most people real confidence in a culture of performance is actually kind of radical because it doesn't need to post about it it doesn't need to announce it. It just shows up as consistency between who you are and how you act regardless of who's watching one last question and this is the one that actually tells you where you're at if no one agreed with you if no one validated you if no one in your life approved of the decisions you're making the direction you're headed the person you're becoming would you still stand by it not romantically not stubbornly but genuinely would you still trust yourself would your sense of who you are hold up without the external architecture of other people's approval holding in its place that answer is your actual confidence level not your performance level not how you come across in a room your actual baseline and if the honest answer is no if the honest answer is I don't know or probably not then you know what the work is and you know it's not about speaking louder or being more decisive or doing the confidence poses in the mirror it's about building a relationship with yourself that doesn't require a cosigner. Here's what where I want this to land comes down to a real choice not a dramatic one. Be quiet made in small moments over and over do you want to be liked or do you want to be known? Do you want to feel confident or do you want to be confident? Do you want approval from the room or do you want a long alignment between who you are and how you live because those paths are different. They start in the same place but they diverge quickly and the further you go down the approval path the harder it is to find your way back to yourself. I'm not saying approval doesn't matter connection matters. Being understood matters. Being loved and valued by people you care about matters enormously I'm not here to tell you to stop caring about any of that. I'm saying don't outsource your stability to it don't let other people's reactions determine whether you're okay because they'll always be unpredictable they will always be inconsistent they will always be human meaning they're dealing with their own stuff their own fears their own approval seeking and their reaction to you is often for more far more about them than it is about you. Most people say they want confidence what they actually want is approval because approval feels faster feels more certain it's immediately available if you know how to read a room but approval has a ceiling and it has conditions. And every time you let it define how you feel about yourself you're handing your stability over to forces you can't control real confidence doesn't feel like certainty all the time doesn't feel like you've never like you never doubt yourself doesn't the maroon mean the room goes away it feels like this you know who you are well enough that someone disagreeing with you or someone not choosing you or someone having a different opinion doesn't undo you can take the information you can consider it you can update when the update is warranted and then you can keep moving that's the work. Build enough of a foundation inside yourself that you're not perpetually rebuilding it out of other people's reactions the people who changed things in their own lives in their relationships in the world weren't the most liked. They weren't the most approved of they were often the most pushed back against what they had was something they didn't need your permission to keep I'm Chris Willingham and this is the Bowen Punch.