🥹 The Paradox of People Pleasing...
Is a Money and Creativity Block!
What if our lives are a series of loops?
Do we keep repeating the same patterns, believing they’re new experiences?
What if every overthinking spiral, every failure, every block that keeps us stuck spinning our wheels are unseen paradoxes?
Is every failure just a rerun of the same journey but with an older face?
Most of us are stuck in fear-based loops and paradoxes.
To paraphrase Mark Twain…
There are three kinds of fears: fears, damn fears, and paradoxes.
Paradoxes keep us stuck and block our financial and creative potential.
The Paradox of People Pleasing
Most of us are people pleasers.
The People Pleasing Paradox:
“The more we chase external approval, the less we approve of ourselves.”
And here’s why
We crave fitting in by pursuing external validation.
We’ve been conditioned to seek external validation since childhood.
We hide parts of ourselves, compromise our values and sacrifice our needs to fit in.
This feels shameful and reinforces our feelings of not being good enough.
And triggers feelings of isolation and insecurity.
What do we do when we feel isolated and insecure?
We seek external approval of others to feel better about ourselves—starting the cycle all over again.
The Hidden Trap Of Validation Addiction
We’re addicted to the dopamine of external validation. Our desire for external approval creates voids within us.
It’s like nicotine.
Our bodies do not need nicotine to survive. It is the addiction to nicotine that creates the voids.
It is our addiction to external validation that creates the voids.
We all exist in a vortex of validation.
As ever, the narrative belongs in nuance.
It is nice for our work to be appreciated. It’s nice to be accepted into the tribe.
But it is the context of the acceptance.
Are we — or our work —accepted for who we truly are, or who we pretend to be?
The former is liberation, the latter is limitation.
It’s nice to receive external validation, but if it’s your primary source of self-worth you will forever be a slave to the opinions of others.
This will significantly limit your financial and creative potential, not to mention your human experience.
The good news is that escaping any fear loop is simple but not easy, first, we recognise we’re stuck in a loop.
Then it’s a binary choice to stay stuck in our fear, or follow our curiosity and embrace the uncertainty.
This is the space I’m in right now.
Chances are you’re in a similar space, too.
People-Pleasing Blocks Money and Creativity
People-pleasing blocks our creative and financial potential.
It stops us from sharing big ideas. We all have creative genius within us.
We can stack our skills and passions to create unique value and monetise our multipotentiality.
Our problem?
We can have all the tactics and strategies, but until we escape our hidden paradoxes, we are stuck in the limitations within them. 👇
Want to double your income? Want to fulfil your creative potential?
Then first you must overcome your:
Fear of rejection
Fear of failure
Fear of cringe
Fear crushes innovation.
The people-pleasing paradox keeps us small.
We fear our big ideas are dumb and we’ll look stupid.
so we dilute them, fearing judgment and criticism.
This reinforces shame and the belief that we’re not good enough.
We dilute our creativity and abandon projects unless they succeed instantly.
We play it safe, all in pursuit of others’ approval to validate our creative self-worth.
Ask yourself this: Is it more important to be accepted by others or to accept yourself?
Is it more important to be true to your creativity or to be shackled by conformity, chasing fleeting applause from the invisible audience?
Your creative philosophy determines whether you experience peace of mind or peace from mind.
The Choice Between Mindsets:
Dave Grohl said, “There are two types of people. One sees a challenge and says, ‘Let’s figure it out.’ The other thinks of all the reasons it can’t be done.”
The former embodies learned optimism, while the latter reflects learned helplessness.
For every fear loop, there’s a curiosity loop. This is the yin and yang of life.
We have the power to choose between fear and curiosity.
This choice is ours alone.
To achieve your financial and creative potential, escape the loops of learned helplessness and enter the curiosity loops of learned optimism.
To unlock our financial and creative potential, we must break free from the hidden paradoxes that keep us spinning our wheels.
✅ 1-1 Sessions
If you want to make more money, you need to get unstuck and create a plan.
Feeling like you’re spinning your wheels? You’re likely stuck in a hidden paradox.
But you’re too close to the problem and can’t see the wood for the trees—I’m the same, btw.
In a 90-minute strategy session, we’ll combine your aligned skills to solve a specific problem, uncover your ideal client and get you clarity to take action!
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