Existential Psychology

Feeling The Need To Prove Yourself To Others

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Feeling the need to prove yourself to others is directly proportional to how much you have proven to yourself. In other words, if you’re sure of your own talents, abilities, and accomplishments others’ opinions won’t matter to you much but if you’re secretly unsure of your talents, abilities, and accomplishments these opinions will matter to you very much indeed

You put yourself in a precarious position when you feel the constant need to prove yourself because all of a sudden your behavior centers not around furthering your own self-actualization but around living up to the demands and opinions of those around you, demands and opinions that might actually have little to do with your interests and much to do with theirs.

The psychological irony though is that the more dependent you are on these external opinions, the more blind will you be to your own current lack of talents, abilities, and accomplishments. You’ll rationalize your situation to keep that idealized self-image from getting tainted. All of that energy could be used for actual improvement but instead it’s used to ignore the truth.

The strong felt need for the approval of others can therefore serve as a vital clue that you probably have some work to do. Your time and energy would be much better spent focusing on your own development than on proving yourself to others. Once you get to a certain point of development you’ll no longer care about that approval anyway so you might as well stop caring about it now and decide instead to go about proving yourself to yourself.