At work
The promotion came through on a Tuesday. Your first thought was who you would tell. Your second was what that person would say, and whether it would be enough this time. Colleagues congratulated you all week. It was pleasant, and it did not quite count. People I barely know tell me how well I've done. I take the same news to someone in my family and hear what I ought to have done with it instead.
At work the Approval rule often looks like working for one person's good opinion, a boss, a mentor, or someone who is not there at all. Wanting a good boss to think well of you is ordinary, and that may be all this is.
What you do at work
The Tuesday may be typical of how results get weighed.
There is one reaction you picture before the others. It may belong to a manager, or to someone who has never set foot in your office. You write the report with that reader in mind. You choose the harder role partly for how it will sound when they hear of it.
A new boss who has that person's tone can end up with more say over your mood than the job gives them. Praise from everyone else is nice and does not stay with you.
With this one person, nothing I do is done right. I feel not good enough all the time.
It has produced a great deal. The achievements are real, and so is the skill behind them.
What it costs
A result may stop feeling like yours. A good year gets held up against what one person would make of it, and may count for less than it earned.
A whole career can also be built to a standard that was somebody else's. It took me a long time to see how much of what I wanted was really what other people wanted for me.
And the wait may not end. The approval may never come. It may also come and turn out not to count.
As a parent
Your child has a tantrum at a family dinner, and the first thing you do is look across the table at one person. You parent a little differently when they visit. When you are alone with a decision, you may hear what they would say about it. When my family gets together I go back to being who I've always been for them. It feels like my job.
In parenting the Approval rule often looks like raising your child in front of one person whose opinion of you still counts, present or not. This page is about the parent and that one person. Raising a child is not its subject.
What you do as a parent
The look across the table may be the smallest part.
Decisions about school, food, and bedtimes may get checked against what that person would think. You may do things their way. You may do the exact opposite on purpose, which can still be measuring by them.
You report your child's good news to them and wait for the response. When they comment on your parenting, even mildly, it can stay with you for a week.
In their company you may feel much younger than you are, while being the parent in the room.
What it costs
This part covers only your side of it.
You may be parenting by a measure that sits outside your own house. A choice you were sure of can come apart after one raised eyebrow.
A co-parent may come to feel that a person outside the household has a say in it.
And the response you are waiting for may not arrive. It may arrive and settle nothing.
In the body
You manage people and make decisions all week. Then you walk into their kitchen, and within a few minutes you feel much younger than you are. You explain yourself. You wait to hear whether you did well. On the drive home you feel your own age again and can't quite say what happened. I can hold my own with anyone. With one person my mind goes blank and I can't put a sentence together.
Under the Approval rule the sign tends to be feeling much younger than you are, most of all around one particular person. This page describes what tends to go with the rule. It does not explain it. What a body is doing, and why, is a question for a clinical source, and a physical complaint that persists belongs with a doctor.
When it shows up
It tends to come with the person.
A visit, a phone call, a message from them. A milestone they would have noticed. An anniversary. And sometimes with someone who only resembles them, such as a boss with the same way of pausing before answering.
Away from those moments you may feel entirely your own age, which can make it hard to believe afterward.
What sets it apart
This one may have no particular place in the body.
It can be closer to a change in how old you feel. The competence you have everywhere else may not come with you into that room. You may hear yourself asking permission for things you decide alone every other day.
It is also specific. Most people, and most rooms, don't bring it on.
Look-alikes
- Chosen (selection in general, not one person's verdict)
- Output (producing for its own sake, not for an audience)
Approval often runs alongside Chosen or Output. Most people are running more than one rule. Subtraction does not force a single root when the evidence shows two.
Questions to observe
- What was the exact moment it fired? Not the topic, the second.
- What did your body do first?
- What did the moment seem to mean about you?
- What did you immediately want to do, and what were you protecting against?
- Would this rule explain your last three moments like this, across different parts of life? If not, which ones does it fail on?
How subtraction tests it
In subtraction, Approval is one of several hypotheses tested against your evidence: moments from work, relationships, conflict, success, failure. If it accounts for what keeps repeating without forcing the evidence to fit, it survives. If it only explains some of the moments, it goes, or it gets paired with whatever explains the rest. How subtraction works.