The Approval Trap

Probably 80% of my career, I was looking outward for answers.

I said this on Michael Gervais's Finding Mastery podcast and saying it out loud felt like confessing something I'd been hiding for two decades. As an Olympic medalist -- was that a good lap? Was that a good repetition? Was my technique okay? Did I belong here? Was that joke funny? Every question directed at someone else's face, scanning for micro-expressions, looking for permission to feel okay about myself.

It started young & it started simple. Single parent household, my father Yuki working 12-hr shifts at his salon in Seattle, raising me alone. All I wanted -- the underlying desire powering every obsession, every sacrifice, every 4am alarm -- was his approval. That simple, that powerful, that invisible.

I told myself noble stories about it. Love of the sport, pursuit of excellence, representing my country.

All true on some level. But underneath those narratives? A kid trying to prove he was good enough for the one person whose opinion mattered more than anyone else's.

What happens when you finally get the thing you've been chasing?

Then something happened I wasn't prepared for.

I got his approval. Full, complete, unconditional. After two decades of chasing it relentlessly -- everything I'd been working toward since I was a kid, I finally had it.

And it wasn't enough.

I don't know how to explain that feeling to someone who hasn't experienced it. You build your entire operating system around achieving one thing, you achieve it, and the achievement doesn't fill the hole it was supposed to fill. It's like climbing a mountain & reaching the summit & realizing the thing you were looking for was never at the top. It was never anywhere external.

That cracked something open in me that took yrs to understand.

I've since realized this isn't unique to my story. It runs underneath high performers everywhere & it's almost always invisible to the person running it.

I've written about how FOPO -- Fear of Other People's Opinions, Michael Gervais's term -- operates like an invisible OS steering choices you think are yours. But the approval trap is something different, something more specific. FOPO is about the crowd, about "them." The approval trap is about one person. Maybe a parent, a mentor, a partner, a boss -- someone whose single opinion carries more weight than the rest of the world combined.

That distinction matters bc the fix is different. You can create distance from "what will they think?" by recognizing it's a phantom audience. But when it's one real person whose approval organized your entire life, getting distance is harder, bc the relationship is real & the love underneath it is real & you can't just logic your way out of something that lives in your chest.

I've sat across tables from founders who built massive companies & still feel like frauds -- not bc of imposter syndrome in the generic sense, but bc they're still performing for a specific person who may not even be alive anymore. The board, the investors, the team -- none of that is the real audience. The real audience is a father who never said "I'm proud of you," or a mother who always moved the goalposts, or a mentor who expected perfection & made them feel like anything less was failure.

There's a distinction that took me a long time to get clear on, & it matters.

Calibration is using external feedback to adjust your course. Someone tells you your keynote opening is weak, you rework it. A mentor points out a blind spot, you address it. That's healthy, that's necessary, that's how we get better. Ignoring feedback isn't strength -- it's arrogance in a different costume.

Validation is needing external feedback to feel okay about yourself. The difference between "this input will help me improve" and "I need this input to feel like I matter." One sharpens you, the other controls you, & from the outside they can look identical.

I spent yrs confusing the two. I'd ask for feedback on a race or a business decision & tell myself I was calibrating, when really I was checking -- does this person still think I'm good enough? Do I still have permission to feel confident?

The shift happened slowly. Not a lightning bolt, more like a fog thinning over months. I started catching myself in the act -- recognizing when I was seeking input vs. when I was fishing for reassurance. Awareness alone didn't fix it, but it made the pattern visible. And once you can see it, you can't unsee it.

When my internal compass finally aligned w/ external feedback -- when I already knew the answer before I asked the question -- that was the closest thing to mastery I could achieve. Not bc I stopped caring what others thought, but bc the work had gotten honest. I wasn't performing for anyone. I was doing the thing.

The question that helped me most, the one I still come back to:

Am I still chasing approval I already have?

More on this later... I'm still untangling parts of it, if I'm being honest.

I go deeper on this in Hard Pivot -- where the father-son piece of this story gets the space it deserves.

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--AAO