Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we are going to talk about the perils of living for approval and how to stop.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound

of the bells.

Okay. So the trap of living for approval is a very common one.

Some of us know it as people pleasing, trying to be nice, fawning, or simply just wanting other people to like me.

And while it all might seem benign on the surface, at its core, this is a survival strategy.

And any survival strategy that we employ or make our personality

will further and further distance us from a truer sense of who we are and has a lot of consequences.

So I want to share what some of those consequences are and what we

can start doing to shift this pattern out of living from approval. So one of the first things that

happens is that you lose access to your own inner signal. When approval becomes the primary reference point, your inner compass atrophies,

or we could say your capacity to hear your inner compass atrophies,

you stop asking what feels true right now, and you start asking, what's going to land for this person?

What do I have to say to make them like me?

What do I have to do to get a positive response?

And as you continue to do this, you genuinely don't know what you want because you've trained yourself not to listen.

You've trained yourself to be attuned to the other person, their response, and how to get the right

response, rather than what are your needs and what's most aligned for you.

Related to that, the second thing is you become more adaptable, but you lose your sense of

aliveness.

Approval trains us to be flexible, to be shapeshifters, and we might take pride in that.

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