When Validation Stops Serving You
I have been thinking a lot about validation lately, partly because it keeps surfacing in conversations I am having with other leaders. We usually do not call it validation right away. We talk about comparison, insecurity, imposter syndrome, or the pressure to keep proving ourselves. We notice how easy it is to compare our businesses, careers, accomplishments, visibility, or influence to someone else’s and wonder why we still care so much about what other people think.
The more I have examined it in myself, though, the less convinced I am that this is simply about insecurity. For a lot of successful people, I think the desire for validation grows out of behaviors that were helpful for a very long time.
We learned how to be useful.
Early in our careers, we are rewarded for learning how to read the room, anticipate what people need, deliver beyond expectations, solve hard problems, and become someone others can count on. We learn what good performance looks like partly through the responses we receive from other people. Someone gives us more responsibility. A leader notices our work. A client trusts us with something bigger. We get promoted, invited into a new room, or asked to take on the problem nobody else quite knows how to solve.
That feedback matters because it tells us we are growing. The challenge is that, over time, it can start telling us something much deeper about ourselves. Somewhere along the way, the connection between contribution and identity can become difficult to separate. When people come to me for the answer, I matter. When I solve something difficult, I am valuable. When people need me, I know where I belong.
Most of us would never say those things out loud, but that does not mean we are not living by them.
For ambitious people, this pattern can work incredibly well. It can fuel years of growth because responsiveness, achievement, problem-solving, and being willing to carry more responsibility are often exactly the behaviors that move us forward. Eventually, though, leadership starts asking something different from us.
When Success Changes the Feedback Loop
As responsibility grows, the work usually becomes less clear. Earlier in a career, there are often more obvious ways to tell whether you are doing a good job. You complete the project, hit the goal, solve the problem, satisfy the client, or receive feedback from someone above you. The connection between effort and outcome is relatively easy to see.
Senior leadership rarely works that way.
The decisions become more complicated because there may not be one obviously correct answer. You can make a thoughtful decision and still disappoint people. You can choose what you believe is best for the business and not know for months whether it was the right call. Sometimes there is no clean win, only a choice between imperfect options.
That is where our relationship with validation can become more complicated. The feedback that once guided our growth can become something we depend on to reassure ourselves that we are still capable, relevant, and valuable. We start looking for evidence that we still belong in the room, especially when the room itself is changing.
I have been thinking about this personally because my own life is changing in ways that make the question hard to ignore. My business has grown, and the leaders around me do not need me in the same way they once did. They know what to do. They are making good decisions. They can solve problems and move things forward without requiring me to be involved in every step.
That is exactly what I should want. A healthy business cannot depend on one person having every answer or inserting themselves into every important decision. If the people around me are becoming more capable, that is a sign that something is working.
It can still feel strange.
The same thing is happening in my personal life. My kids are older and building lives that are increasingly their own. They do not need me in the ways they did when they were younger, and even though that is exactly what growing up is supposed to look like, there is an adjustment that comes with realizing your role is changing.
When I put those things together, I have had to ask myself a question I had not spent much time asking before: Am I stepping in because someone genuinely needs me, or am I stepping in because I need to feel needed?
From the outside, those behaviors can look almost identical. Internally, they come from very different places.
Why Validation Can Become Addictive
The problem with external validation is not that it feels good. Of course it does. We are human beings, and we want to know our work matters. We want to feel connected to other people, respected by the communities we are part of, and recognized for something we have worked hard to accomplish.
The difficulty is that the feeling does not last very long.
The problem you solved yesterday does not automatically make you feel valuable today. The compliment wears off. The award becomes something that happened in the past. The project you poured yourself into ends, and eventually there is another opportunity to prove something all over again.
For driven people, that can create an almost endless loop. We accomplish something, receive validation from it, feel good for a while, and then begin looking for the next visible sign that we are still doing well. What started as useful feedback slowly becomes part of the way we regulate how we feel about ourselves.
Social media has made this even more complicated because nearly everything we do can now become visible. We are constantly exposed to other people’s accomplishments while also being given the opportunity to package and display our own. I catch myself thinking about it too. Is this worth posting? Would people find this interesting? Does this show something meaningful about the work I am doing?
There is nothing inherently wrong with sharing your work or celebrating success. The question becomes more important when visibility starts influencing which work we choose in the first place.
If I am drawn toward the project everyone will notice but reluctant to do the quieter work nobody will ever see, that tells me something. If I keep putting myself in certain rooms because I know people there will recognize my value, that tells me something too. If I solve a problem for an employee, colleague, friend, or child because being useful makes me feel good, even when they might be better served by working through it themselves, then my need for validation is no longer only affecting me.
It is shaping the way I lead.
The Rooms We Stay In
One of the most uncomfortable questions I have asked myself recently is where I might still be showing up because I already know how to feel valuable there.
As my work has evolved, I have found myself entering rooms where I do not have the same history or certainty I have had elsewhere. In those spaces, it is easy to wonder whether I belong. Do I know enough? Am I experienced enough? Do the people around me see what I bring to the conversation?
Those questions are uncomfortable, but they are also a normal part of growth. When you enter a new stage, you do not yet have years of evidence proving that you belong there.
What I had spent less time considering was the opposite question: Where am I staying because the validation is familiar?
There are rooms where everyone already knows what you have accomplished. There are problems you know how to solve because you have solved versions of them for years. There are responsibilities you could keep carrying indefinitely simply because you are good at them and people appreciate you for carrying them.
That does not necessarily mean you should.
Sometimes growth means walking into a room where nobody knows what you have done yet. Other times it means having the confidence to leave a room where everybody already does.
That transition requires something different from us because our sense of value can no longer depend entirely on recognition, familiarity, or being the person everyone automatically turns to.
The Leadership Work Nobody Sees
The longer I lead, the more I believe that some of the most consequential leadership work receives very little public recognition. It might mean resisting the urge to step into a problem because another leader needs the experience of solving it. It might mean making a decision that is right for the organization even though someone you respect disagrees with you. It might mean having a difficult conversation that will never become a story you tell publicly because its value belongs entirely to the people involved.
Sometimes it is deciding not to pursue an opportunity that would look impressive from the outside because you know it is not right for you. Sometimes it is allowing someone you care about to struggle because solving the problem for them would satisfy your own desire to be useful more than it would serve their growth.
There is very little applause attached to those choices.
In some cases, becoming less dependent on validation may even make you less popular. You may disappoint people because you stop showing up in exactly the way they expect. You may give fewer answers and ask more questions. You may stop volunteering for problems simply because you know you could solve them. You may say no to opportunities that would have once made you feel important.
That can be deeply uncomfortable when so much of your success has been built around being dependable, capable, and needed. I also think it is part of becoming a more grounded leader.
The goal is not to stop caring what anyone thinks. I do not think that is realistic, and I am not sure it would even be healthy. The work is learning the difference between appreciating validation and depending on it.
For me, that means trying to become more curious about my own motivations. Before stepping into something, I am asking why I want to own it. Before offering the answer, I am considering whether the other person actually needs my answer or whether they need the opportunity to find their own. Before chasing an accomplishment, I want to understand what I believe that accomplishment will prove.
One question in particular keeps staying with me: Would I still want to do this if nobody ever knew I did it?
I do not always love what I discover when I ask that question, but maybe that is why it matters.
A big part of going first, at least for me, is being willing to examine the things I am still working through rather than waiting until I have a clean lesson to share. I still compare myself to other people. I still notice the award someone else received, the milestone another business reached, or the opportunity someone else was given. I still walk into certain rooms and wonder whether I belong there.
I also still like being needed.
What is changing is that I am beginning to notice the feeling before automatically responding to it. That awareness gives me the opportunity to make a different decision. Instead of immediately looking outside myself for evidence that I am valuable, I can ask whether I already know the answer.
Maybe that is one of the harder transitions we eventually have to make as leaders. We spend years learning how to prove ourselves through our work, our responsiveness, our accomplishments, and the trust other people place in us. Then leadership asks us to develop enough confidence in who we have become that we no longer need constant evidence from everyone around us.
That is the question I am sitting with now, and I think it is worth asking:
Where are you still seeking validation from the outside for something you need to know from within?
Want to go deeper into this conversation?
I explored this idea in a recent solo episode of Go First, “Stop Seeking External Validation to Feel Worthy: A Solo Episode on the Addiction to Validation.” Listen to the full episode, then ask yourself where the need to be seen, needed, or affirmed might be influencing the way you lead.