I was sitting in my homemade heat lamp sauna a couple days ago when an interesting thought/picture came into my head. It was a visual of what looked like a tachometer gauge on a car dashboard. If you have spent your life in automatic transmission cars, you may not have much experience with a tachometer, which tells you your engine speed in RPM. The key concept is that if your engine speed goes too low your car will stall and if it goes too high you will damage your engine. Along with this visual came the message that this was how approval was designed to work in our life.
What has approval got to do with tachometers? Here is what that conversation with spirit revealed. Many people spend their lives feeling not okay and believing that if they could only get enough approval that then they would be and feel okay. We tend to get trained into this viewpoint by society and our parents. It begins with being trapped in a dependent position as a child and needing the approval of our parents in order to get our social and survival needs met. This sets up a classic conditioning situation. We feel bad because we are in need and approved behaviors get us the positive attention to get our needs met. In time the approval seeking process becomes linked to the needy feel bad experience such that you now feel bad any time you are not getting approval whether you have any actual needs or not. This is called Pavlovian or classic conditioning.
Daily life generates stress. This is normal. Life is about navigating these various stressors in a healthy way. What does that mean? It means learning how to balance the needs and wants of others with our own needs and wants in a way
that maximizes outcomes for everyone. That requires us to constantly be learning new skills and employing them successfully, since life is hugely diverse and always giving us new challenges. But none of us are automatically successful. Life is a trial and error process with a generous supply of error. That means we often feel not okay. How we deal with this is a good measure of our sanity. When we get stuck using coping mechanisms and reactive patterns from our childhood we behave in immature ways. Approval seeking is one of those childhood patterns. For many people it is an automatic response to not feeling good because the belief is that “if only I could get approval then I would be okay.” This is not to say that approval is a bad thing, it simply has nothing to do with the real reason we are stressed and does not actually solve the need for skills to balance the needs of others with our own. It comes from the dependent child state of mind in which the child does not see himself as having anything to give to the relationship with others that has value. There is no equality of participation or useful exchange that is the foundation of the adult experience of life.
The consequence of being stuck in the child approval seeking pattern is a chronic state of feeling bad. Even when you get approval the ease is very temporary, if you are even able to take it in at all. Since the whole process is now removed from your actual real needs you learn to do things like ignore your
real needs, or chase after imaginary goals like unconditional approval. The whole experience is so frustrating you want solutions that don’t exist because you are trying to solve a problem that only exists in your own mind as a result of the conditioning you had as a child.
Approval is the feedback you receive for the service you give to others. This is where the tachometer analogy fits in. If your service is insufficient to warrant the return you are seeking your mutual exchange “engine” stalls. If you give away too much for what you are receiving you end up damaging yourself. You get approval when your service serves the other person, and you are able to receive that approval when the
exchange also serves you. Your internal feeling tachometer lets you know you are operating in the safe zone. Generally, when you are not in the safe zone you get criticism and judgment from others.
So approval and disapproval are good and valuable things in your life. But they are not the goal any more than having your tachometer in the safe zone is the reason for getting into your car. Can you imagine what your life would be like if every time you got into your car you only looked at your tachometer and never out your windows? Even worse, if the only reason you got into your car was to see a good tachometer reading and not because you wanted to go anywhere, what would your life be like? This is what you get when you are driven by approval seeking. Approval is not the point of life. It is simply feedback on how well you are participating with the actual purposes of life.
What are the actual purposes of life? There are two purposes, and they can easily come into conflict. That is why feedback systems like approval exist – to let us know how well be are balancing between our two purposes. Those purposes are to fully manifest our unique creative potential and to harmoniously connect with all of life. I have referred to this as differentiation and integration. Other disciplines refer to these two purposes as Self-realization and God-realization. This dualism is the basis of most every religion. The balance between the two sides of this equation has been called walking the razor’s edge. Successfully balancing these two fundamental drives of life is the spiritual life.
Where does that leave us? Receiving approval is a good thing but it is not why we do anything. Approval tells us we are meeting the needs or wants of the person/tribe that is approving of us. If we are getting our needs met in this same exchange then we receive the approval and feel good about it. It tells us that our skill set matched this situation. Approval does not make us okay. It does not meet any real needs. It feels good because it tells us we are in the flow of positive mutually beneficial exchange, which does meet our needs. Approval is the golf trophy, but it is our skills at golf that actually have the value.
The child’s mind does not believe that its self manifestation has any value to others and generally this is true. What children produce generally does little to meet the needs of others. Consequently they have no motivation to participate and they depend on the goodwill of caretakers for their survival. They seem to get everything for nothing other than the fact that they exist. They are taught to feel entitled to something for nothing. The fact that this is contrary to how life works leaves them in constant fear, which shows up as demand, disrespect, anger, and self loathing. Society has fallen down in truly building emotionally healthy children by spoiling them and trying to make their lives easier. Self worth is built out of being of worthwhile service to others. Self worth is built out of overcoming difficulties and meeting challenges, not out of ease and participation trophies. Approval needs to be for real service and positive useful participation. The lie that is destroying us is that we have value just because we exist. Wrong. If that were true there would be no wars, no violence, no disrespect. Our value comes from our service, not our ability to suck air. People resort to the demand of violence when they don’t believe they have anything of value to exchange with which to get their needs met. They know from experience that just existing buys them nothing, but they have not been taught how to show up in life in a way that does have value.
Reach into your soul and find what you are attracted to doing and being. Find what gives you joy and bliss. Then bring this manifestation of your bliss into some sort of service for others. Not everyone will be interested in what you are offering, but if your skills are sufficient and you really love what you are doing, then it will inspire and attract those that will value your manifestation. They will approve of your manifestation. That value is what you use to get your needs met. This is the cycle of life.