Boys & Boardrooms
Most high achievers have two stories. The one that built the career, the business, the relationship, the room. And the one underneath it — about what they needed from all of that to feel like enough.
This podcast is about the second one.
Many high achievers have inadvertently built their lives around being chosen. They will tell you they wanted the relationship or the promotion. That is not what they wanted. They wanted what getting it would prove about them.
That is validation dependency — the quiet engine underneath high achievement that keeps capable people performing for approval they have already earned the right to stop needing.
Boys & Boardrooms is the show about that engine, told through the stories of people who lived inside it. The unflattering version. The honest one. Because pattern is hard to see in the abstract. It is much easier to see in someone else's life, told well.
If you have built a life that looks like confidence but may rely on approval, you are in the right place.
Hosted by Andi Johnson — Fortune 200 executive, doctoral researcher in self-compassion and leadership, and coach to the high achievers ready to stop the pattern.
You can connect with Andi on Instagram or Facebook at @advance_with_andi
Boys & Boardrooms
Latest Episodes
4. The Validation Pattern: Inside The Ambition Penalty
Stefanie O'Connell is an award-winning journalist, researcher and author of The Ambition Penalty. She spent years documenting what happens when women do everything right — follow the advice, ask for more, negotiate, perform — and still...
3. The Validation Pattern: Why the Good Wife Never Asks the Question
Melissa Pavone watched her mother hold a family together — and then watched it come apart with no one in her corner.Stay-at-home mother, then part-time work, present for everything. The glue. When the divorce came, it came a...
1. The Validation Pattern: When Being Chosen Stops Being Enough
Welcome to Boys & Boardrooms. This is where it begins.For most of my life I was running on a pattern I couldn't see. Being chosen — by the right partner, for the right role, in the right room — was the metric I kept reaching...
2. The Validation Pattern: Why Being the Strong One Is Quietly Burning You Out
If Episode 1 was about being chosen, this one is about being needed. Same engine. Different costume.For years I was the person people came to — the colleague who could carry, the friend who could hold space, the partner who absorbed ever...