Probably 80% of my career, I was looking outward for answers.
I admitted this on Michael Gervais's Finding Mastery podcast, and saying it out loud felt like confessing a crime I'd been hiding for two decades. 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. Single parent household. All I wanted in the world—the underlying desire powering every obsession, every sacrifice, every 4am alarm clock—was my father's approval. That's it. That simple, that powerful.
I told myself noble stories. Love of the sport. Pursuit of excellence. Representing my country. All true on some level—but underneath all those noble narratives? A kid trying desperately to prove he was good enough.
Then something happened that cracked everything wide open.
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.
That realization nearly broke me. I'd structured my entire existence around achieving something, and achieving it didn't give me what I thought it would.
This is the paradox I explore with executives in leadership workshops. So many high performers are running the same program I was—chasing external validation while telling themselves a story about purpose and excellence. The trap isn't wanting approval. The trap is needing it to feel okay about yourself at a basic level.
I've sat across the table from CEOs who built billion-dollar companies and still feel like frauds. I've worked with founders who can't make a decision without polling their board, their investors, their advisors—anyone but themselves. The external validation addiction doesn't discriminate based on success level. If anything, more success makes it worse because there's more to lose.
When I work as a leadership speaker with C-suite teams, I often ask: "What would you do differently if nobody was watching? If there was no performance review, no board meeting, and no external metric to hit?" The gap between their current behavior and that answer reveals how much they're leading versus following.
There's a fundamental difference between calibration and validation. Calibration is using external feedback to adjust your course—that's healthy, necessary. Validation is needing external feedback to feel okay about yourself. That's a prison with invisible bars.
In my advisory work with founders and executives, I help them distinguish between the two. It's not about ignoring feedback—that's just arrogance in a different costume. It's about knowing the difference between "this input will help me improve" and "I need this input to feel like I matter."
When my internal compass finally aligned with external feedback, I exhibited the closest thing to mastery I could achieve. Not because I stopped caring what others thought. But because I already knew it was right before anyone confirmed it.
The question that finally freed me: Am I still chasing approval I already have?
If you're building your entire strategy around collecting head nods from others, you're not leading.
You're following.
About Apolo Ohno: Apolo Ohno is a sought-after keynote speaker and leadership advisor known for translating elite performance principles into practical leadership behaviors. His work focuses on authentic leadership, executive presence, and the Gold Medal Mindset—helping executives and teams perform with clarity under pressure, communicate with conviction, and lead with credibility when the stakes are high. In his keynotes and workshops, Apolo helps leaders identify the unseen patterns, narratives, and habits that quietly limit performance, then replace them with a repeatable system for focus, resilience, and decisive action.