9 Beautiful Things That Happen When You No Longer Seek Other People’s Approval To Justify Your Worth

1. You are not afraid of taking a break. You’ll take breaks from the incessant and demanding go-go-go lifestyle in order to clear your mind from chaotic hustling and reflect on your current path with radical honesty, critical self-examination, and a holistic perspective of yourself in relation to your place in the world.

2. You no longer measure your self-worth based on high arbitrary numbers which include number of followers on social media, your salary, or how many things you can get done in the least amount of time possible. You eliminate distractions and say no to things that only drain your energy and leave you no room to breathe or do anything essential in accordance to your life purpose.

3. You pursue what you genuinely love to do without feeling guilty or selfish. You begin to focus more on what gives your life meaning, and you ensure that you have enough time in a given day to do something entirely for yourself without forcing yourself to give up your own endeavors just to meet external demands for the sake of alleviating guilt.

4. You don’t beat yourself up for not being productive enough. Whenever you meditate, write freely flowing thoughts in your journal, sit alone on a park bench, clean your room while listening to your favorite song album, read a book you enjoy, or just take a nice warm bath, you don’t categorize these activities as a huge waste of time because you understand that self-care is essential for your mental health and productivity. Needlessly draining yourself non-stop won’t help you create good work.

5. You recognize that your worth isn’t defined by how much others have in contrast with how much you lack or failed to measure up. You know that other people’s status, measures of success, and end result of their pursuits are irrelevant to your self-worth.

6. You define your own standards because you know that you can never be like someone else, you don’t want to be like someone else, and you understand the futility of trying to win people over based on how well someone else does it. You know that freedom comes from relieving yourself from other people’s assessment and instead pursuing a lifestyle that feels in-tune with your deepest longings, instead of one that just looks good on the surface.

7. Other people’s condescending remarks of your personal deficiencies and failures matter to you less. They do not scar you as much as they used to because you recognize that their judgments of you do not diminish your value as a human being, and that trying to prove that you aren’t what they say you are is only a crutch that holds you back from the future that you wholeheartedly desire to create for yourself, free from anyone’s conditional measures of acceptance.

8. You pursue a life of simplicity and realize that you want to spend more time to spend falling in love with the simple beauty around you and capturing the moments that you often took for granted in the past. You’re beginning to understand that overworking yourself, consuming too much of whatever your peers are having, and trying to make others happy at the expense of your own happiness and wellbeing are all vain and purposeless forms of enslavement that only lead to emptiness, dread, misery, and self-doubt. You have the courage to put an end to things that only drain you of your energy and vitality, even when it makes you look foolish because you ultimately know that your own life isn’t worth giving up.

9. You have a clearer idea of what you’re meant to live for, what your top three values are, what you excel at, what motivates you the most, and what you want for yourself in the future. Because you have a vision that’s rooted in radical honesty and holistic self-awareness, you experience the fullness of joy that encompasses every aspect of your life and leaves you feeling balanced and more loving towards the authentic self that all external voices conditioned you to hate.