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 for. I called it ambition. I called it taste. I called it knowing what I wanted. None of those names were accurate. 

In this opening episode of Boys & Boardrooms, I name the pattern — validation dependency — and walk through how it installed itself in me.

I share:

— What validation dependency actually is, and why it is invisible to the people running on it

 — The first relationship at 16 that taught my nervous system what being chosen felt like 

— The last relationship that showed me the ceiling of the pattern, and the question underneath it: who am I if I'm not being chosen? 

— How the same operating system that ran my romantic life ran my career, and why my nervous system never knew the difference between a relationship and a job title

 — What it costs to build a life that looks like confidence and runs on approval

This episode is the foundation of the show. The frame I'll hold against every story that follows — my own and my guests'.

Follow me on Instagram at @advance_with_andi to catch when new episodes drop.

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Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @advance_with_andi
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Transcript

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to Boys and Boardrooms. I am your host, Andy Johnson, and I am going to start the first episode of this podcast out by saying something that may be a little confrontational, a little bit spicy. And that is that most of the high-achiev people I know built their lives around being chosen. Whether it's chosen by the right partner, chosen for the role, chosen for the table, they're going to tell you that they wanted the relationship, they wanted the promotion, the title really meant something. A lot of times, that is not what they wanted. But in my experience and what I've seen is that they wanted what being chosen would prove about them. And that is something that I call validation dependency. It is a pattern and it's an engine underneath a lot of impressive lives. And the thing here is that it's often invisible to the people who are running on it until something, and usually something pretty drastic, forces them to see it. Now there is research on this, there are frameworks, there is language clean enough to fit on a slide. None of it changes anything until you see it inside an actual life. A relationship someone stayed in, a job they chased, a version of themselves they became to keep being chosen. And that is what this show, Boys in Boardrooms, is built on. So it's not about interviews, it's not about hot takes. We're going to look at stories, stories about relationships, stories about careers, mine first and then other people's, told honestly enough that you start to recognize your own. The stories are the data. Now, a little bit more about who I am, because this context shapes everything I'm going to say on this show. And I'm a lot of things. But for the purposes of this show, I am a Fortune 200 executive. I'm a doctoral student who is studying self-compassion and leadership. I'm also a coach and I help high achievers who are really unwinding that validation dependency, whether it's in their work, in their relationships, or the way that they've built their identities around both. So if you're listening to this, your life probably looks like it's working from the outside. Perhaps you're an executive, maybe you're an entrepreneur, a leader, maybe you're still climbing. And your gender doesn't change the mechanics of this. What matters is whether your sense of who you are has quietly gotten tied to whether the people in front of you approve of you. So this show exists to diagnose that. I'm not trying to motivate you out of it. What I want to do, success for me, is helping you see it clearly enough through episodes that you cannot unsee it. Now, I talked about my doctoral work and it examines self-compassion because I see self-compassion as the antidote to validation dependency in leaders. That research is the academic backbone underneath everything you're going to hear on this show. But what I found, especially in my own life, is that research on its own does not move people. Frameworks on their own are just frameworks. What moves people is hearing the exact shape of their own life inside someone else's story. This is usually where you have that realization moment that you've been telling yourselves a different version of it for years. So that is why this show is built the way it is. Solo episodes will be where I tell my own story in pieces. Guest episodes will be where someone honest tells theirs. And occasionally we'll bring on experts for context as well. But every episode is going to pull on the same thread. Again, this is not a leadership tip show. This isn't a success story platform. I'm not interested in the gloss over story. This is a place where we look at what most high achievers will not look at. And that's what's actually running them underneath the achievement. So I'm going to start with my own story because I lived inside this validation dependency pattern long before I had a name for it. Start at the beginning, I was three when my parents separated. I spent every other week with my mom and every other week with my dad. So obviously, that lifestyle does not allow for a lot of consistency. And friendships are built on consistency, especially friendships with people your own age. And I simply didn't have that. So what happened was I got really comfortable around adults because it was hard to make friends. And I got comfortable being alone. So this set me up to march to the beat of my own drum. And a lot of kids don't like that. So I was a little different. I was ripe for bullying. I was also very tall. I was academically exceptional. All of this also made me romantically invisible for a long time. You know, when you are tall, when you are very smart, when you march to the beat of your own drum, you don't necessarily attract romantic attention from kids who are just looking to be with someone that other people approve of. So because of that, I was lonely. I buried myself in romance books because nobody was really interested in me. And I didn't even have my first kiss until I was 16. That said, we, ducklings, let's put it that way, often become swans. And eventually I turned into a swan right around 16. And when the attention finally came, it was amazing. I was so excited to have it. And I took it from the first person who offered it, even though something inside of me knew he didn't actually want me. Interestingly enough, he was interested in my best friend first. But more importantly, he was a gay man. I was 16. And on some level, even though this was, you know, the early 2000s and people weren't necessarily out of the closet or comfortable with sharing their sexuality the way that they are now, you know, you know when something is different. And I knew that it wasn't real, but I went for it anyway. At 16, now I can look back and see that the question I was actually asking when I decided to be with this person wasn't, is this person right for me? It was, will someone want me? And I was willing to ignore everything else to get the answer I needed. That kind of conditional attention installs a template. Once your nervous system learns it, you will look for it everywhere, in every relationship after, in every job, in every room. So fast forward about two decades, at this point, different man, same pattern. I'm going to call him Luke. And Luke wasn't the bottom of the pattern for me. He was what I would call the ceiling. So by the time I'd gotten to him, I'd built an entire career on top of the same operating system I'd installed at 16. Will someone choose me? Will I get validated by someone else? And when I was with Luke, the relationship started to come apart in a way I couldn't fix by performing harder or being better or feeling more chosen. You know, that had been my move my whole life. What can I do to change things, to make this work? With him, it stopped working. He was kind. He was into me, but he asked me to allow for things within a relationship that I knew were not what I needed. And in the past, I would have kept saying yes until I eventually broke. Breaking was typically when I left. I would have to break very deeply and then I would go and I would continue this pattern again. I was a serial monogamous for many years in this way. But when I said no to Luke, it was the first time I fully saw my part in the dynamic that I had been playing out for years. It was the first time I asked myself, who am I if I am not being chosen? So I'm not telling you the rest of my freedom story today, right? Luke was the tip of the iceberg. There is a story on the other side of all of this, but I am telling you the part where the pattern finally became visible to me. And that's the part most people skip. But that's the part the show is going to keep returning to, so you can see those patterns in your everyday life. Now I want to draw the line between the boys and the boardrooms because they're always and ultimately the same story. So onto the boardrooms. When I was 22, 23, I moved to New York City for my very first real job, my big girl job. I had been a strong student my whole life. I knew how to perform. And in corporate, performance gets noticed. I got promoted fast. I had direct reports immediately. And I was in rooms and working with CEOs by 24 years old. So those promotions started early, and every promotion gave me the same hit that being chosen by a boy had given me at 16. My nervous system didn't know the difference between a relationship and a job title. It just knew when it had been fed. It became a duality for me. When the boys were down, the boardroom was up. When the boardroom dropped, I needed the boys back. But I always had something on the other side to fulfill that need, to fulfill that dependency. They were essentially two pumps in the same well. And you can build a life that looks like confidence and runs on approval. This pattern, validation dependency, doesn't keep you from being successful. It doesn't keep you from being confident. That's what I want to reiterate. I was successful. I did have a lot of confidence. A lot of great things came from that period of my life. But that engine underneath was that need for approval, was that dependency on others' validation that took away the real joy sometimes in these very big milestones in my life because I was looking for the next one. That is what this show is going to keep showing you. So if you heard yourself in any part of this, the relationship you stayed in too long, the title that you needed more than you should have, the rooms you walked into already asking what you'd have to do to be wanted there, that is a sign of validation dependency. And it is not a character flaw, it is a pattern. And the great thing about patterns is that they can be named, they can be mapped, and they can be interrupted. And as much as we name the pattern and map the pattern on the show, we're also going to talk about how to interrupt it. So a logistics call out that future episodes will include guests, as I mentioned earlier, someone who has lived a version of the story I just told you in their own life and their own way, and those stories will be the data. I'm really excited to continue this conversation with you. And I will see you on the next episode of Boys in Boardrooms.