A client of mine seeks validation from other people.
Many of us can relate to this.
We are conditioned to look to external sources of authority to see how we’re doing.
This starts as a survival mechanism, like many beloved patterns. We’re born depending on the love and approval of our caretakers, so we learn what it takes to get that. And we do that.
Some of us never stop doing that.
Then we go to school. The teacher tells us if we did something right or wrong. We get a grade, and if the grade is good, that’s often met with more love and approval. We learn that as long as we do what’s expected of us, what we’re told, we can keep love and approval coming. Keep surviving.
The teacher becomes the professor, more grades. And if the education is good, perhaps we are rewarded for writing papers that don’t simply agree with the lecture. Nonetheless, they fulfill a predefined set of criteria for doing so.
I’m picking on schools, as they are institutions of cultural conditioning. There are others, of course.
The classroom becomes the office. The teacher, the boss.
Performance reviews. Promotions. Raises. Feedback.
Healthcare. We go to the doctor to see if we’re healthy.
These days we wear a ring check an app to see if we slept well.
Everything is tell me. Tell me how I’m doing.
Those of you in The Self-Explorers Club or who have worked with me know that this puts a poor taste in my mouth. I invite you to become self-sourced, accessing your own internal wisdom and providing yourself with whatever it is you’re seeking from others. Give yourself what you want from the world. All that.
So this client, she’s very self-aware.
She wants the “gold star,” she laughs. You know, the kind that a kindergarten teacher might put on a poster board with your name next to it.
Back in my day, get enough stars and this meant you got to go clap chalkboard erasers out in the breezeway at the end of the day. This was exciting at the time. A dose of independence. Are chalkboards still a thing?
She’s in a new role, this client. New boss. Same pattern.
And like many self-aware people, this simply means she’s aware of the pattern she continues to be stuck in.
She knows why she does it, but like I tell many people, you can have an entire encyclopedia about why you do what you do, and still do it.
So in this session, we started reversing the pattern.
“Perhaps it’s time to start giving yourself gold stars,” I suggested.
I’ll spare you the dialogue, but 8 minutes later she had her plan.
A “self-celebration journal”.
A place for her to celebrate herself. A log of her proud moments. What she did well. How she’s healed. Changes she’s made. Successes. Wins, big and small. All determined by no one, no one, but herself.
The system was simple. We designed it together.
A clear set of criteria for a gold star. A space to write what each one represents.
The stickers and the notebook were ordered on the session and are probably on her doorstep as of this morning.
This celebration journal will start to rewire her neural pathways, the ones looking around her for approval.
The brain has this thing called the reticular activating system (RAS). It’s why if you start becoming interested in a certain car, you start seeing that car everywhere.
It’s like a filter of sorts, for our attention.
In simplest terms, it’s something I say often: What you’re looking for, you’ll find.
Kind of like how a gratitude journal starts to prime the brain to look for things to be grateful for, and then we start to see them everywhere. That’s an abundance frequency unlock by the way.
Thanks to this self-celebration journal, she will begin seeing all the ways in which she is proud of herself, including the times in which she isn’t looking to someone else to tell her whether or not she should be proud of herself.
On a rough day, she’ll also have an entire journal of gold stars to peruse. Something to remind her she’s awesome, because she is. She can celebrate herself whenever she wants.
Self-celebration.
So yeah, give yourself gold stars.
No one’s love, acceptance, and approval is worth more than your own.
Stop looking to the world to tell you what to think of yourself or your creations.
You don’t need to get a notebook and gold star stickers to do this, although you certainly can.
There are many ways you can give yourself gold stars and celebrate how awesome you are, how great life is, and how legendary you’re becoming.
By the way, this system can work for any direction in which you want to recondition your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
So pick yours, and have at it.
I see people change their entire lives. It’s my profession. I witness it every day.
And even though I take my profession seriously, I’ve found that change is a dish best served unseriously.
Density is slow. Resistance keeps us stuck.
The lighter are are, the freer we are.
When we laugh at ourselves
When we shatter patterns so hard our cheeks hurt from smiling.
When we follow our curiosity into pure presence.
When we realize deeply that we are the universe experiencing itself in human form.
When we play.
When we put stickers in a notebook.