Approval

Who's Do We Need?

Dear Friend,

I have a friend by the name of Jack, a rebel. He’s a couple of decades ahead in years. Someone who has forged his own path in life. Over dinner with Patrick, who will be reading this so I’m trying to get the details as much in order as memory will allow, Jack laid out the corner stone of his philosophy.

“When I take my last breath, I want to be alright with me. That I lived according to my values, that I did it my way. That’s what matters.”

I’m paraphrasing.

It was a summer evening in east London. The restaurant windows were open and the street was buzzing with energy and people.

You can read something or hear it said over and over again, and if you are trying to rewire your brain, repetition is a key tool.

You work at acquiring new beliefs until they become invisible. It can be done. In my experience it’s the hardest work any of us can take on. If you’re doing it, then I salute you. Keep going.

Suddenly when you least expect it, the penny will drop, you feel it sinking in. I can be something like an internal landslide where your mental map gets rearranged.

I’ve learnt to become still when it happens. Bless the moment. Something new and fresh and inspired enters the mind, finds a place to curl up and makes itself at home.

Often it’s the most obvious thing.

In a world that tends towards ever greater complexity, it’s simplicity that cuts through as the hard won fruit of experience.

Our need for approval has been hijacked, commodified, bought, sold and manipulated. We’re tormented and controlled via it.

To be an outcast, for our ancestors was life threatening. Survival required belonging. Our ancient survival instincts are still with us. Evolution doesn’t move so fast. Communications technology is moving at the speed of light comparatively.

Who’s approval do we need to be okay with ourselves?

If we’re trying to match up to vague or generalised notions of what we should be doing with our lives, what we should own, think or be, we’re in trouble.

I was listening to Professor Steve Peters being interviewed by Steven Bartlett. It’s worth the time, an excellent long form conversation and Dr Peterson put something in a way that struck me as supremely useful.

Many of us, if we’re asked who we want to be, would list qualities such as calm, focused, compassionate, generous, connected, creative and so on. Prof Peter’s point is that’s who we already are free from the distortion of the false self and our conditioned beliefs.

We already are who we want to become.

The distortion is not who we are. We are not our mistaken perceptions and maladaptive beliefs.

Maybe we’re looking for approval from those who cannot and therefore will not give it. You can’t give what you don’t have.

Are you imperfect? Yes. Then good.

Are you making mistakes? Perfect.

In the end, when we take our last breath, if we are okay with ourselves, how we lived, that’s what matters.

I’ll bet you’re trying to do what’s right, as best you can in a crazy upside down world.

That’s who you are.

The one who’s approval we most need.

Is the one reading.

In this moment.

You already are that.

It can be no other way.

Till tomorrow

Love

Mikey

PS

Here’s the interview if you have the time for it: