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 and it started simple. Single parent household, my father Yuki working 12-hour 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.
If you searched for how to stop seeking approval and landed on this page, I want to try to save you some of the time it took me. This is the honest version - what the approval trap actually is, what chasing external validation costs you, and the specific things that helped me start getting out of it.
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 and reaching the summit and 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 years to understand.
I've since realized this isn't unique to my story. It runs underneath high performers everywhere and it's almost always invisible to the person running it. The person seeking approval usually looks like the hardest worker in the room. The people pleaser at work looks like the ultimate team player. That's what makes this trap so hard to see - it gets rewarded right up until it breaks you.
Some of this is just human wiring. We evolved in small groups where being rejected by the tribe was a survival threat, so our nervous systems treat disapproval like danger. Nobody is exempt from caring what others think. The question is whether that caring runs you.
Gervais has a name for the generalized version: FOPO, fear of other people's opinions. In an interview with Fortune he breaks it into a three-part loop: you anticipate judgment before it happens, you check for approval while you perform, and then you adjust yourself to win acceptance. His phrase for it has stayed with me: you're "outsourcing your sense of being okay to the approval or potential rejection of somebody else." Run that loop long enough and it stresses your body like any other chronic threat.
I've written about how FOPO 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 because 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, because the relationship is real and the love underneath it is real and 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 and still feel like frauds - not because of imposter syndrome in the generic sense, but because 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 and made them feel like anything less was failure.
I'm not going to pretend chasing approval gave me nothing. It gave me an engine. For a while, that engine won races.
But the research on this matches what I lived. Psychologist Jennifer Crocker spent years studying what happens when people stake their self-worth on external outcomes, and her paper The Costs of Seeking Self-Esteem is blunt about the bill. People whose worth hangs on others' approval tend to dismiss feedback about their weaknesses, because feedback stops being information and starts being a verdict. Their attention pulls away from other people's needs and toward managing their own image. In one of her studies, graduate school applicants rode an emotional rollercoaster, self-esteem spiking with every acceptance and crashing with every rejection, and that instability predicted depressive symptoms later. Her summary of where the chase leads: you end up getting exactly what you don't want - isolation, frustration, insecurity, and unhappiness.
Read that list again. Those are the exact things approval seeking promises to protect you from.
At work this shows up in ways you've probably seen or lived. You say yes to projects you should decline because saying no feels like risking the relationship. You soften your real opinion in meetings, then resent the decision you didn't fight. You read your boss's one-line email fourteen times looking for tone. You hit the goal and feel relief instead of satisfaction, because relief is all the approval chase ever pays out.
There's a distinction that took me a long time to get clear on, and 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, and from the outside they can look identical.
I spent years confusing the two. I'd ask for feedback on a race or a business decision and 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 test I use now is simple. Before I ask for input, I ask myself: do I already know the answer? If I do, and I'm asking anyway, I'm not calibrating. I'm fishing. And every time I fish for reassurance, I train myself to need it a little more.
Awareness alone didn't fix me, but it made the pattern visible. And once you can see it, you can't unsee it. Here's what I'd actually run this week if you're serious about breaking the loop:
None of this makes you stop caring what people think. It makes caring optional instead of automatic.
This past February I was at the Winter Games in Italy, covering Milan Cortina for Yahoo Sports. Sixteen years removed from my own Olympic racing, credential around my neck instead of skates on my feet.
The Olympics is external validation in its purest form. A scoreboard, a podium, a planet watching. And standing on the other side of the boards as a correspondent, I could finally see what I couldn't see as a competitor: the athletes who looked most free were not the ones performing for the judges, the cameras, or even their families in the stands. They were the ones racing against their own standard. You can see it in how they carry a loss. The approval chasers are destroyed by the same result that the internally anchored athletes metabolize by morning.
I spent 80% of my career on the wrong side of that line. The last stretch of it, and everything since, has been about living on the other side.
When my internal compass finally aligned with external feedback - when I already knew the answer before I asked the question - that was the closest thing to mastery I could achieve. Not because I stopped caring what others thought, but because the work had gotten honest. I wasn't performing for anyone. I was doing the thing.
That's the question that helped me most, the one I still ask myself. More on this later... I'm still untangling parts of it, if I'm being honest.
This is the core of the mindset work I do with teams now, and it comes up in almost every conversation after I speak to organizations: high performers quietly admitting they don't know who they'd be without the scoreboard. If that's you, start with the list above. This week, not someday.
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
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