photo:
JenavieveMarie
Here’s the next installment of Inspiration Sauce – my new interview series where I delve into fun conversation with some of the most interesting and inspirational midlife women I know.
Women who have touched my life and healed my spirit in some way, women that might do the same for you.
Although I’ll be interviewing herbalists and health coaches for this series, I thought, why stop there?
After all Holistic Hot Sauce is about much more than wellness for our external bodies. Here, I explore my own journey (and YOURS) to healing and wellness from the inside out, and how to turn up our inner pilot lights so we can shine that beacon out to the world.
Inspiration Sauce will highlight women that are blasting their own light out into our (sometimes) bleak world. They are making a real difference – not just in the lives of countless women but to our planet as a whole.
Today I offer you another video interview – and I apologize in advance for the poor quality sound. This is still a learning curve for me!
Busting Out Of The Approval Trap With Amy Pearson
If you had the misfortune to be like me – and found yourself among those picked very last when the kids were picking teams in gym class – well you’ll understand that burning need to be liked, to be approved of, to be picked.
I’m betting that even if you spent your childhood excelling at athletics – you may still find yourself making adjustments to your style so that you can be accepted. And of course this is totally normal. After all as human beings we’re hardwired for belonging.
But for some of us this need to belong gets twisted up along the way. We begin to compromise our true selves in order to achieve a false sense of belonging, one that ultimately will never fulfill that need.
Amy Pearson, a Master Life Coach, has made a study of this phenomenon and she’s even given it a name: The Approval Trap.
As we travel into the midlife years, the Approval Trap can get a lot more constrictive. It starts to feel less like a cocoon of belonging and more like – well – a trap!
I know it has for me, and that’s why I called Amy up for an interview
Although she’s not quite at that stage of life we’d call ‘mid’, she’s closer than she looks. (Really, despite that youthful beauty, she’s not 25! I think that glow has more to do with self-knowledge and understanding than age.)
Although Amy lives right here in Portland I didn’t meet her here. I serendipitously came across her work last fall, when she was spreading the word about her free Approval Trap teleclass.
I had a sneaking feeling that I’d lived my life thus far in an ‘approval trap.’ I had to find out more.
Well, Amy delivered more in that hour and a half teleclass than I could have imagined.
A self-described ‘recovering approval addict,’ Amy shows a pathway out of that constant need to be liked and approved of – and she leads the way by telling her own story of approval addiction.
Check out Amy and I talking about all this in the video below. (Or if you’d rather listen on the go, download the Mp3 here, and put it on your phone or mp3 player.)
You’ll find out:
- What exactly IS The Approval Trap’.
- How can you know if you’re stuck in it.
- Some of the 8 approval-seeking personalities.
- How moving through her own approval issues changed Amy’s life.
- Beating the Bitchy Inner Critic (who Amy calls “The Voice”).
- What does it mean to be ‘radically authentic?’
- Why perfectionism is not the same as striving for excellence and what is its sneaky agenda.
- Most importantly…. what are some steps for climbing out of this trap.
(Once again, apologies for the sound quality on this interview. This is my own experiment in overcoming perfectionism! And yeah, we won’t even talk about what that crappy lighting does to my face!)
If this interview and the concept of the Approval Trap intrigues you as much as it did me, you’ll want to take this a step further and listen to the full recording of The Approval Trap teleclass. As I say, it’s pretty awesome.
Click here for access to that free training.
And note: although in the teleclass Amy talks about the approval trap specifically as it manifests for women involved in solo businesses (particularly coaches and healers), this information benefits everyone. “Magnetizing your ideal client” easily translates into magnetizing the people, creativity and success you crave in life.
Amy’s work is geared to women on a mission’– and aren’t we all on a mission in some way or another?
Her free training is an introduction to her 5-week class (called Be Brazen) which goes way deeper into how to drop the approval addiction and become radically authentic.
If this interview has got you charged up to get brazen NOW, skip on over to get the scoop on her class.
And full disclosure – these are affiliate links, meaning that if you choose to sign up for Amy’s full class through these links you’ll be supporting Holistic Hot Sauce and helping to keep the blog posts coming!
Over to you! What’s your take on ‘The Approval Trap?’ Does it sound familiar? Have you ever been in it? Found ways to climb out?
Let’s get a conversation going in the comments so we can all help each other get true to our own selves!
