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00:05:11 Step 1: Be Aware of What You Feel

00:09:47 Step 2: Normalize

00:11:52 Step 3: Tell the Truth

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• When we engage in people-pleasing, we are trying to extract validation, approval, and liking from other people. However, self-validation is the ability to provide all these things for ourselves.

• We create self-validation when we acknowledge and accept how we feel without judgment, normalize that feeling, then speak the truth about it.

#Boundary #Normalize #Peoplepleasing #Selfvalidation #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #PatrickKing #PatrickKingConsulting #SocialSkillsCoaching #StandUpForYourself #SetBoundaries #StopPleasingOthers

Welcome to Social skills coaching. I'm Russell, founder of Newton Media Group, and today we're going to help you learn to be more likable, more charismatic, and more productive. Stick around. Today is June 27. It I love starting the day off with today's list of holidays and celebrations because some of them, I just have no clue what they mean. I find them entertaining. For example, today is a day of. Turkmen, workers of culture and art. Maybe it'll clear it up if you understand that. That's celebrated in Turkmenistan.

It's also big holidays in Djibouti, Independence Day in Tajikistan, a day of national unity. Never been to any of those places. Closer to home. We're celebrating today as Helen Keller Day. And unrelated, I assume, national Women's Fly Fishing Day. And if you're unsure about making the big commitment, today is Decide to be Married Day. Now, I'm not giving any advice there. I'm just reading the reports on the lunch menu today. It's interesting. Have an onion and accompany that with an orange blossom.

And most importantly, ice cream cake. Ended on a high note. Today's a shorter episode than usual. We're pulling this episode from Patrick King's book. Stand up for yourself, set boundaries and stop pleasing others. As always, available on Amazon or as an audiobook, my personal favorite on Audible, itunes and Amazon as well. Today we take a close look at. The concepts of people pleasing and why we do it, and self validation, how it counteracts the propensity to be a people pleaser, and how it helps us accept ourselves. Thanks for joining us today. Here's today's episode. When we engage in people-pleasing, we are trying to extract validation, approval, and liking from other people.

However, self-validation is the ability to provide all these things for ourselves. Self-validation means we accept our own experiences, thoughts, and feelings, and acknowledge them as valid. When we do that, we no longer need people on the outside to affirm us, grant us permission, or tell us who we are. Without the anchor of self-validation, we are constantly and desperately looking to others, in effect asking them, “Who am I?” or “Do you think I’m worthy?" Being the unique person you are entails experiencing a range of complex emotions and thoughts, all of which you are fully entitled to have. As the individual you are, you are no more or less eligible to take up space in the world or to live as you need to live than others are. Plus, you are the only real expert on what living this way ultimately means! Taking onboard other people’s wisdom and knowledge is a great idea. However, being a people-pleaser means we dismiss all our own unique individuality and assume that other people’s opinions, values, thoughts, and ideas are always more valuable than our own. You’ll know that you lack self-validation if you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite know what your opinion is ... until you ask everyone else their opinion first!

If you can learn to self-validate (i.e., to see that your experience is just as valid as anyone else’s), then you will have much less need to get that validation from others. You will be unplugging from the shallow and inconsistent supply of external validation and instead hooking up to a deeper, more sustainable and genuine source of wellbeing that is inside you. You’ll be able to: •See both your strengths and limitations and calmly claim them both without judgment or shame •Understand your needs and prioritize them •Live by your own values and standards rather than follow along with other peoples’ •Set healthy boundaries and limits •Be able to resist peer pressure •Be kind to yourself •Be honest about how you feel and accept it •Have a stronger and more stable sense of identity •Have faith in your own judgment of things even if nobody else agrees with you You will naturally develop your own ability to self-validate as you practice some of the exercises in this book. But here are a few more ways to develop self-belief that doesn’t depend on the fleeting approval of other people. Step 1: Be Aware of What You Feel As a people-pleaser, you’re so used to focusing on other people’s emotions that you can be a bit disconnected from your own. A good first step, then, is to become mindful of what is going on with you right now in the present moment. How do you feel? Can you give a label to this emotion? What thoughts are you having? Have any core beliefs been activated?

By asking these questions, you are giving yourself the chance to reflect on your real, current experience and acknowledging that without blame or shame. Sometimes, it makes a world of difference just to literally tell yourself, “I’m allowed to feel what I feel." Being aware of feelings can sometimes be difficult for people-pleasers because we may believe that some feelings are bad or make us bad people. For example, we may feel angry but deliberately stuff down this feeling because we have a core belief that strong emotions are unacceptable. We may assume that our anger, sadness, confusion, or disappointment are an affront or a burden to other people, and so we conceal them ... and lose touch with our own emotional reality in the process. But there is nothing inherently wrong with emotions. For some people-pleasers, accepting emotions is difficult because they wrongly assume that acknowledging how you feel is the same as agreeing with it. But as we’ve already seen, it’s our response to emotions that matters. Feeling angry is perfectly acceptable even if yelling at others or being rude isn’t. The entire range of human emotion is normal and natural, and we can acknowledge and validate that fact.

That doesn’t mean that we necessarily enjoy those emotions, that we approve of them, or that we want them to stick around. It doesn’t mean we blindly allow our feelings to force us to act in ways we don’t want to. And it doesn’t mean that we make those feelings the basis of our personality. This, then, is the challenge for people-pleasers: to find that healthy, stable spot right in the middle where we comfortably acknowledge how we feel while taking responsibility for how we act. From a graceful acceptance of how you actually feel, you can act in a way that reflects your values. If you only fight against your emotions or judge them, you lose out on this chance to build self-knowledge as well as self-control. Plus, it’s pretty stressful to always push back against your genuine experience! •Be present no matter what the emotion is. •Don’t cling to an emotion or push it away. •Don’t try to look for a justification, ignore an emotion, or try to hurry it along.

•Just be there, with the emotion as it is. That’s all. No Inner Critic, no interpretation, no judgment, no shame. With practice, you may start to notice that your emotion is usually coming from a memory in the past, an old habit, or an ingrained assumption. You may notice that your tendency to apologize, invalidate, or second-guess is actually just a learned response and not a genuine and spontaneous reaction to the present. If you can do this, you achieve half the work of self-validation, which is simply to give yourself space to be as you actually are! Example: Ellie’s boyfriend has announced that his ex is coming to town and he’s going to have a drink with her after work. Ellie instantly feels crushed with doubt and jealousy, wondering what this all means. After telling her boyfriend, “I’m fine with it, really!” a million times, she realizes she really isn’t fine. She pauses and looks within, trying to name what she feels.

There’s a strange tight lump at the back of her throat, and she feels panicked and tearful. But she also notices that she wants to flee this feeling and to deny having it, especially to her boyfriend. She just notices and holds these feelings, however unpleasant they are. Step 2: Normalize Be aware of how you feel and then normalize that feeling. It can seem difficult to do lofty things like accept, acknowledge, and embrace your emotional experience. But really, you don’t need to do anything more complicated than understand that how you feel is normal and not a big deal. You don’t have to beat yourself up, but you also don’t have to suddenly declare that you love yourself unconditionally and are completely enlightened and stress-free (mostly, this would be a lie!). All you need to self-validate is the understanding that you’re okay just as you are. You’re a human being with good and bad qualities. Everyone has emotions of all kinds, and everyone struggles from time to time.

Nobody is so well-adjusted and content in themselves that they aren’t hurt by a loss or intimidated by a challenge. That’s simply part of life. Therefore, if you are feeling sad or confused or angry or hopeless or any emotion at all, chances are that other people have felt the same way, too. No, you might not like experiencing these emotions. But to self-validate, you can “hold” them without needing to run away from how you feel or look to others to validate and approve of you. Example: Ellie realizes that some old core beliefs from childhood have reared their head, i.e., “If you’re too difficult or ‘high maintenance,’ then men will leave you." Ellie realizes she’s judged her genuine feelings of fear and jealousy and instead chosen to people-please. But when she takes the time to normalize the emotion she notices in herself, she realizes that jealousy is not out of the ordinary in a situation like this, and that she is not being unusual, demanding, or fussy by feeling this way. Step 3: Tell the Truth One major way to break the spell of people-pleasing is to embrace radical genuineness. When you self-validate, you trust yourself and your truth.

That means that you don’t feel the need to lie even if it would be more convenient to do so. “Lie” here doesn’t just mean being deceitful, but also living inauthentically, hiding who you are, or agreeing to things that you don’t really want to agree with. Simply, when you deny or reject certain parts of your genuine experience, then what you are doing is invalidating yourself. And when you do that, the door is wide open for others to invalidate you, too. Instead, try to behave with a deep, real honesty and express yourself genuinely. People-pleasing is a quick fix to feel better, but we only feel truly good about ourselves when we are at peace with the truth of who we are. This all might sound quite intense, but it’s at the heart of the mindset shift that helps you untangle from the needs and experiences of others and get more clearly in tune with your own. Example: The next time Ellie’s boyfriend asks her why she seems upset, she tells him honestly: she doesn’t feel happy about him meeting his ex and is struggling with the idea. The two have an honest conversation, where Ellie doesn’t apologize for how she feels, and neither does she rush in to try to people-please. From a place of self-validation, Ellie asks that her boyfriend cancels the meeting.

So what happens in Ellie’s life once she identifies her emotions, normalizes them, and speaks that truth to those around her? Does she have a happily ever after? Well, maybe. But maybe not. Holding ourselves in high regard is no guarantee that others will. And gaining mastery and awareness over our experience doesn’t necessarily mean that the experience magically goes away without any action on our part. Whatever happens with Ellie, however, she has been true to herself. What her boyfriend chooses to do next is simply not up to her. It’s up to him. But she has not violated her own boundaries or her values, she has not denied her genuine experience, and she has sincerely asked for a reasonable request.

She also has not attempted to people-please, apologize, or resort to passive-aggressive manipulation (“I’m fine!” followed by weeks of obvious sulking). Ellie can only do any of this because she is tapped into her own energy source of self-validation. She can say, “How I feel matters,” and behave as though she really believes it. She doesn’t need to worry herself about whether her boyfriend thinks her response is reasonable. She feels as she feels, and she trusts that. Ellie may teach herself a valuable lesson: that although making others feel good provides benefits, it is nothing compared to the sense of worth and dignity that comes from behaving with integrity. If you enjoyed this episode of Social Skills Coaching, we'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to drop us an email or a note at podcast@newtonmg.com. Let's take a quick review of the takeaways from today's episode. When we engage in people pleasing, we're trying to extract validation, approval and liking from other people.

However, self validation is the ability to provide all these things for ourselves. We create self validation when we acknowledge. And accept how we feel without judgment. Normalize that feeling, then speak the truth about it. Sounds easy, not quite as simple sometimes to put into practice. As always. We close out today's episode with our. Existential comings and goings and a long. List of birthdays today. Let's just get through them quickly with as few comments as possible.

Andrea Russet, a musician, actor Chandler Riggs and also an actor, Ed Westwick. Gage Bill's birthday is today. H e r's birthday. We mentioned it's Helen Keller day because today is Helen Keller's birthday. And maybe not on the same level as Helen Keller. Khloe Kardashian has birthday today. Lauren someone I'll mispronounce the last name from Fifth Harmony. If you know the group, you know the name birthday today. P I bang and spock both have birthdays today. Spock not from Star Trek, the music producer, DJ, entertainer and comedian, as well as Toby McGuire, actor Paul Lawrence Dunbar from way back when, director J.