The Approval You're Working So Hard to Earn Doesn't Exist

Before we begin: tap the heart 🤍 at the bottom. It feeds the algorithm. It feeds my ego. Everybody wins.

You're trying to do the impossible and it's wearing you out. You say yes when you mean no. Or you overextend yourself to avoid conflict.

The thought of someone being disappointed in you is more than you can stand, so you put on a happy face and do the thing you don’t really want to do.

If you attend the family dinner even though you’re exhausted from working overtime this week, your mother's needs come first because of her belief that a good daughter always shows up. When you agree to split the check even though your friend had drinks and dessert and you had a salad, you suck it up because that’s what good friends do. And if you’re like me, you run your dead husband’s business for more years than you wanted to because the lingering disappointment of stopping is more than you can bear.

If you’ve been twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to meet everyone’s expectations, I have a hunch you’re becoming increasingly resentful that your own needs aren’t being met.

And the kicker is no matter how hard you try, someone is always disappointed anyway.

So you’re doing all this emotional labor by sacrificing your own peace, and still not getting the approval you’re working so hard to earn.

I was resentful before I even realized it.

When my first husband was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, I took over running his business. He was self-employed, so I took off my stay-at-home mom hat and put on a business owner hat because we had to pay the bills.

My husband’s business was in chemical sales and he loved working in the metal processing industry, formulating products, and schmoozing with customers. I’m a writer, so my chemical background was exactly nil. I hate sales and I’d rather eat an eraser than try to convince you to buy a product. But I felt obligated to help him and when he told all of his customers I would be taking over, my heart sank. You don’t say no to a dying man’s wishes.

After he died, I continued running the business because I felt obligated to his customers to keep providing the products they had come to rely on. I felt obligated to his parents and our children to preserve what he had built. And I felt obligated to a dead man to keep a promise he never asked me to make.

All of these obligations were self-imposed. Nobody was asking me to sacrifice my life for a business I didn’t want to run.

But I kept doing it anyway.

Because the guilt of stopping was causing severe anxiety.

Marcus Aurelius explains this concept of ruling your own mind in Book 4, passage 7 of his journal Meditations.

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been."

If someone is disappointed in you and you tell yourself they shouldn’t be disappointed in you, you are choosing to be harmed. If you choose to think, I can’t control whether other people approve of my choices the harm disappears.

Your mind holds the final vote on whether an event actually hurts you.

People-pleasing operates under a delusion that if I just do everything right, everyone will be happy with me.

But “doing everything right” is a moving target. What makes your mother happy disappoints your partner. What satisfies your boss annoys your friend. What your in-laws expect contradicts what you need for your own sanity.

You can’t win.

The game is rigged from the start.

Disappointment rears its ugly head when someone’s expectations don’t match reality. But you don’t create someone else’s expectations. They do.

When someone is disappointed in you, that’s information about them, not you.

Let’s say you decide to skip a family gathering because you need to rest. Your mom is devastated. She has her own stories about what your absence means like good daughters show up because skipping is the same as not loving her.

Now you know that those expectations aren’t facts. But they’re still stories she’s telling herself about what you not coming to the family gathering means.

You didn’t “make” her disappointed. Her attachment to how she thought things should be made her disappointed.

The Stoics called this preferred indifferents or things that are nice to have but not necessary for you to be live an honorable or peaceful life. Your reputation is a preferred indifferent. It’s a projection in the minds of other people, not who you are. A mother’s approval would be nice if it happens, but it’s not required for you to live according to your values. Actually, anyone’s approval would be pleasant, but it doesn’t have any impact on your moral character.

I wish I'd understood that sooner. I spent years running a business I hated because I thought upholding my reputation as a business owner and keeping everyone else happy the right thing to do because it kept me in good social standing.

Looking back, I wasn't really managing a business. I was managing the possibility that someone might be disappointed in me if I stopped.

Other people's disappointment has a way of exposing the places where you’re still looking for permission. A lot of your own suffering comes from trying to make your life match a set of rules you never agreed to.

When you abandon your needs to please others, you’re saying that their preferences matter more than your own. It’s a misguided way of not appearing selfish.

The effort to not appear selfish turns into a simmering rage toward the very people you were trying so hard to please.

You tell yourself you’re being generous. But underneath the generosity is an unspoken contract that says, Look how much I’m giving up for you.

The problem is that nobody agreed to the contract except you. So when the appreciation, recognition, or reciprocity never arrives, resentment moves in.

Instead of letting resentment build, trying saying no to whatever you want to say no to. It's much kinder than saying yes and resenting people for it later.

What a self-respecting “no” sounds like:

None of these require you to convince anyone your “no” is valid.

It’s valid just because you said it.

Okay, so you’ve set a boundary and someone is disappointed.

Now what?

Acknowledge their disappointment without taking responsibility for causing or solving their feelings.

“I hear that you’re disappointed. I understand this isn’t what you wanted.”

Stay grounded in your decision because it aligns with your values and you trust that.

“I’ve thought about this carefully, and I’m at peace with my decision” or “I’m doing what’s best for me, not what’s best for you.”

Refuse to debate because you don’t owe anyone a defense of your boundaries.

“I’m not going to try to convince you. We can agree to disagree.” Or “I appreciate the invitation but I need to decline.”

Let go of the outcome because your peace doesn’t depend on their approval.

You’ve said what you needed to say. Now you let it be.

I struggled for several years to come up with a good enough reason to get out from under a business that was crushing my spirit.

I can’t say I found the “good enough” reason but I did realize I was running out of reasons that weren’t based on guilt. One day I decided I wasn’t willing to let guilt and obligation continue fueling me. That’s it. I just decided. And I sold the business three months later.

You will disappoint people. That’s guaranteed.

The only question is will you disappoint them while abandoning yourself or while honoring yourself?

Either way, someone ends up disappointed.

It doesn’t always have to be you.

Come talk to me in the comments. I read them all, and half the time the best part of the post ends up happening there.

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