Waiting for Validation

And what it costs us while we wait

I was refreshing my email every five minutes waiting for good news. I had two great prospective client meetings earlier this month. I left those meetings with high energy and excitement. I felt a natural connection. I was thrilled that people are starting to find me. I felt like I’m on the precipice of building real momentum. I wanted the business. And I also wanted to be wanted.

The weekend was particularly painstaking. Had they responded? Did they feel the same energy? Do they want to work together? I checked my email, rechecked, and checked again just in case I hadn’t seen their responses. No new messages.

I was stuck at a crossroads, seemingly unable to move forward without external feedback about where to go next. I was waiting for someone to validate my excitement and to validate my business. I was craving a yes and daydreaming about an outcome while I ignored the color of the lights on the way home. I ignored other aspects of my business while I waited for my number to be called. Nothing was going to validate the direction and the growth of my business more than a yes.

My desire and need to be validated have ridden shotgun in many domains of my life.

• When I publish my writing, viewership can dress up as validation. It’s enough of a dopamine hit for me to want to do it all over again.

• When I go see my doctor with symptoms of a nagging injury that I can’t seem to sort out or recover from, leaving the doctor’s office with a prescription plan and a treatment is far more validating than hearing that more tests are required, that the scan looks clean, or that I need to continue to monitor the issue to gather more information.

Validation of my pain feels like a win, even though I haven’t actually felt any relief from that pain just yet. Validation is also more than confirmation that “I’m right.” Validation becomes a signal and a metric for measuring my identity. Do others see me the same way I want to be seen?

We seek validation because it represents confirmation that we are walking on the path we desire (or at least think we desire). It’s a yard marker that we are headed in the right direction and that we are becoming.

If we aren’t careful though, validation can shift from a useful metric to something that can consume our entire identity. We only rely on it more.

What happens if this piece gets half as many readers as my last? What would have happened if those two prospective clients said no? Do I stop? At what point does my desire for reassurance from validation slide down the slippery slope to dependency? What is going to give me more reassurance that I am doing the right thing? I’m not suggesting I need a participation trophy for simply trying. But isn’t trying (with the possibility of failure) better than not trying at all?

I’ve been spending more time in this uncomfortable void between trying to have tangible and tactical goals (can be read “trying to win”) but trying not to get too attached to the scoreboard. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen captured my discomfort quite beautifully. He warns when “you’re letting an external metric or ranking set what’s important for you, you’re outsourcing the process of figuring out your own sense of meaning.” The validation of views, or a yes from a prospective client can quickly become the indicator of my success. But are those metrics pulling me closer to the person I want to become, or am I chasing ghosts masquerading around as success?

What seems to be missing here is effort, meaning, and purpose. Nguyen calls this “The Gap” or the distance between what’s easy to measure and what matters.

It makes me think we have it all backwards. At the end of the year, I don’t believe I should ask myself if I made it to the gym one hundred times, or if I lost ten pounds, or if I called a friend once a week. It becomes too easy to conclude that only when I meet those criteria, will I have achieved, accomplished, or changed for the better. But the unfortunate reality of life is that it’s likely that I will fail at any one of those things. If I reframe my values into effort, could I be proud of how I spent today, or yesterday or this year? What kind of person would I be? If I do the thing, I am becoming that person I desire. I’m just unlikely to find the immediate validation I seek and the scoreboard I’m most accustomed to looking at may not say I’m winning. Yet.

Effort is about recalibrating the baseline of ourselves in a meaningful enough way that fosters change. The outcome we desire and the validation we desperately crave may be the one where we win the business, we go viral overnight, or when we reach our magic net worth number. But if we don’t attain that status, who are we?

I’m learning I’m the same as ever, and arguably better for having tried. But when I grip the desired outcome too tightly, not only do I set myself up for disappointment, I stop striving to do the thing I set out to do until I get the validation I crave. I miss moments to be my best while I wait for others to tell me I am the best.

When I get caught up in the idea of onboarding new prospective clients, I lose track of the ultimate goal of my business, which is to help the right clients navigate their own complex journeys, and to find extraordinary meaning in an ordinary life. When I write, each post becomes part of a larger body of work. Will it become a book? A podcast? The outcome I seek may not even be within view yet, and so the best thing I can do is keep writing, not measure the number of readers.

I am realizing that my only responsibility is to show up. To create, to write, to be myself in meetings with prospective clients. Beyond that, I have no control. Instead of waiting for external validation to create more or to be more…me, I just need to go back to my desk and write again.