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Self-validation is admitting your personal interior knowledge, your beliefs, and your opinions. It doesn’t indicate that you accept your opinions or think your beliefs are supported. Self-worth, in fact, fuels you up and improves your thought process. Here are a few ways of self-validation and its benefits.
We will try to answer the questions like, “What is the self-validation theory?”, “Why and how do people self-validate?” in this article.
17 Best Ways of Self-Validation and its Benefits:
1. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others:
I’ve made this point prior because it’s possibly the essential feature of self-validation. It also results in the most complex phase and requires collective work every day.
Comparing yourself with others is just like comparing apples with oranges, as you must have heard that everybody has different skills and different capabilities. When different animals are told to climb the tree the fastest, the monkey will win. It doesn’t make the monkey the best animal.
It makes it the fastest animal to climb a tree. When you compare yourself with someone, there is a 50/50 chance. 50% chances are there that you might win, but on the 50% where you don’t, there’s a chance that it might break your confidence and ruin your drive.
Some people are good at taking it, but not all. So if you don’t want to doubt your skills and capabilities, stop comparing yourself with others.
2. Be the Younger Version of You:
It’s understandable that this one you might have trouble grasping this one, but here’s the thing: Most people don’t hold the kind of warmth, aid, and mercy that they did when they were little. We unknowingly give up on those feelings as we grow, which usually molds us into treating ourselves brutally and critically.
When you’re attempting to attain that mild, foggy sensation that arises when someone you believe says to you, “Everything will be fine,” assume yourself relating it to your younger self. The photo of that small child who worked so laboriously intended no hurt and only wanted to be admired and adored.
Self-validation can help decrease your self-criticism and stuff you with a true insight of empathy for yourself. It gives you a safe ground to accept kindness from others as well, without asking for it.
3. Make a Habit of Talking to Yourself In a Positive Way:
Everyone in this world must have talked to themselves once in their lifetime. When you talk to yourself, two of your thoughts are talking to each other – one positive, and one negative. Sometimes they’re arguing with each other.
You are the controller of those thoughts, and you can take your pick. When you are positively talking to yourself, you are in a way validating yourself; you recognize your capabilities.
Try to look deeper into a memory where you were satisfied with yourself. It’s usually between your abilities, an academic achievement, a time when you helped somebody, and so on. Give yourself appreciation for it rather than glossing over everything you’ve done right.
Everyone needs a pleasant life and profitable work, but it’s simpler said than accomplished. Perhaps the first place to start is inside yourself. That’s how self-validation helps you out.
4. Be Entirely Honest With Yourself:
Accepting imperfection is a great difficulty for most people. You have to be honest with yourself. Human beings lie to themselves instead of accepting their flaws.
When you feel that you have done something wrong, it’s because something is against your values and ethics. But you lie to yourself or bend the truth inside your head to make yourself feel better; so you don’t have to feel that guilt inside you.
One of the biggest reasons why people tend to lie to themselves is because growing up, their parents and their communicative conditions were bad. In an attempt to please them, you ended up being stuck in toxic perfectionism. That state of being stuck in that kind of loop has adverse effects on your psychological state.
If your sense of self-worth equals being flawless, you would possibly have a troublesome time even noticing (let alone accepting) your blemishes.
Nonetheless, if you really want to embrace the art of self-validation, you need to be brutally honest with yourself.
5. Don’t Look Outside of Yourself for Happiness:
Leaning on someone or something else for your happiness makes you dependent on that person. We keep searching for happiness outside when the truth is that true happiness, the absolute true joy, comes from the person’s inside.
Outside happiness does make you feel better for a while, but after some hard times, the feeling disappears. Being dependent on someone else for happiness is the most vulnerable trait a person can have.
We’re in the wrong for being stuck in the belief that true delight would only come from living in a bigger house, finding a soulmate, or receiving a better-paying job.
What happened to be happy because your cup of tea tasted extra good today? And what about when you achieve the said bigger, better things that you thought would make you happy, but they somehow don’t? This is why you need to understand that true happiness is something that you need to cultivate from within.
Self-validation has the ability to make things right.
6. Give Yourself Some Self-Love and Nurture Your Inner Self:
If you need to ask for validation from a parent who has never been willing to do that for you, take into consideration what it was that you preferred hearing from them. What was it that your younger self wanted to hear from them? What would your present self like to hear from them?
Put it down on paper and talk to yourself about it. Replicating this activity when none of your friends or relatives can help you figure out a variety of emotions about yourself.
If no one validates you, do it for yourself. Self-validation will always support you.
Self-validation also involves actions like journaling your senses, marking your attainments and penning them down, holding yourself back when you’re exhausted, eating when you’re starving, and giving yourself a surprise – not just because you deserved it, but also because you must take care of yourself.
7. Try Asking Yourself What Your Inner Self Needs Right Now:
Often, when we’re restrained on ourselves, we sense a (sometimes subliminal) desire to fix ourselves.
If you’re sensing sickness or feel more down than usual, question yourself: “What does my body require? What does my brain want? What does my soul need?” Or: What will help me investigate better, and make me feel more settled, and healthier?
You may discover that you need to take a stroll to enhance your strength, catch a snooze to feel more relaxed, exercise deep breaths to free your head from unwanted thoughts, or sip on some water to hydrate yourself.
Allowing your body to embrace its basic needs is also a part of self-validation. You allow it to come to terms with the fact that these needs are significant, not ‘choices’ you can pick or discard. Feed your soul because no one else can do it for you.
8. Get to Know When You’re Ruling Your Inner Self and Feelings:
According to science, there are 27 types of emotions:
- Admiration
- Adoration
- Aesthetic appreciation
- Amusement
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Awe
- Awkwardness
- Boredom
- Calmness
- Confusion
- Craving
- Disgust
- Empathic pain
- Entrancement
- Excitement
- Fear
- Horror
- Interest
- Joy
- Nostalgia
- Relief
- Romance
- Sadness
- Satisfaction
- Sexual desire
- Surprise.
Now when you are feeling joy, you say to yourself that you have the right to be happy because you just got promoted, but when you are feeling boredom, you say to yourself that you should not be feeling bored.
Except for understanding and accepting the emotion, you are passing judgment that you should not be feeling that way. Yes, it’s true that most feelings are not in one’s control, but when you are feeling any kind of emotion, you have to accept it, reason it, and digest it.
If you live with the attitude of being unaccepting of certain emotions – like feeling low, unsafe, or other emotional responses to sentiment, you’ll inevitably notice yourself growing incapable of dealing with them.
Just make a habit of telling your inner self that you have the right to feel the way you feel. You have the right to feel good, but it’s also okay to feel bad.
This may assist you in understanding your feelings and running through them because acceptance helps you stay away from being rooted in negativity regarding concern for yourself.
9. Don’t Engage Your Failure Feed into Guilt:
Often when you encounter failure, you get down, losing all your hopes, courage, and trust you had in yourself. You begin criticizing yourself for all the negative results. You find your work going in vain and find it useless.
Shame is a feeling you receive from the moment you’re born, and you’ll grow so well-versed in humiliating yourself and being humiliated that you begin to believe you’re flawed and more scattered than everyone else around you.
There’s a toxic 1shame that follows the embarrassment after a breakup, dropping a friendship, when let down during a date, not being able to make an honest wage, and so on. But you’re just hitting yourself and are probably going to end up in despair, stuck in a loop of false perfectionism, and a reduction of every single one of your achievements.
10. Celebrate Your Victories:
When you do something good or achieve something, be sure to celebrate that, no matter how small it may be! You’re remarkable! Let it feed into your self-worth. Performing this improves your self-esteem and pushes you toward the reminder that you’re doing well.
No achievement is too small. You can get yourself a little present, dance to your favorite song, or go eat with a loved one. Glorify the victory the way you need it!
11. Portray a Balanced Behavior:
Having diverse emotions and feelings is what differentiates us from animals. As a human, it’s okay to hold negative feelings sometimes because it is not mandatory that we feel okay with everything that happens around us all the time.
We feel bothered and defeated sometimes by some opinions and actions, and we should normalize them by balancing our behavior toward them. Practice holding these diverse sets of emotions that are part of our lives, individually and among other people.
It takes practice to find out how to validate ourselves and accept all of our feelings and thoughts. It’s not always easy to remember to self-validate, because there are chances that you’ve got earlier repressed feelings, or you’ve set yourself down in the past for thinking in a particular direction.
12. Acceptance Should Be Practiced the Most:
Life befalls. Things often get concluded in a way we don’t expect to see happen and maybe didn’t even imagine. In that case, you’re eventually able to accept anything that is coming your way, whether or not it’s satisfying. Your inner self has chosen the way to make you strong, practicing acceptance.
Acceptance isn’t about abandoning. All you should do is surrender to things that are out of your control.
13. Be Cautious and Present in the Moment:
Mindfulness and self-validation are both interconnected. You can never confirm what you don’t see. You need to build up a non-judgmental perception of your happenings, as they appear and once they befall, verify them.
Being present comes under the very basic level of validation. This allows you to know and understand your personal experiences without restraint or confusion on your part. Mindfulness lets you regain a grasp over your emotions and helps build the strength you’ll need to deal with them.
Data from a few readings support this discussion. People who lost their loved ones were in a state of grief, and they were trained in the technique of mindfulness for a certain period. Later, they were again tested to know if the training worked or not. The result was significantly positive regarding the management of emotions.
They also held some signs of distress, fear, and despair. It was said that the members studied to obtain cognitive control over their emotions. The emotions no longer destroyed them.
14. Try to Maintain an Honest Self:
Ensure to provide yourself with an exact copy of your reactions by accepting your contemporary interior mood and identifying it carefully. This involves allowing your opinions and preferences out without judgment from yourself first.
When you’re triggered by the past, you can’t bring yourself to function normally. Sometimes, you find it hard to even sleep.
This is because we tend to wipe the past out of fear at times, but if we accepted it as real and something that has already passed, we could react to the triggers in an appropriate way no matter what the circumstances.
15. Study Inspirational Writings:
It can be a quote on the web, your favorite author’s book, or a daily magazine. Make sure you jump into it and make the most of it to get inspired. That specific feeling you get when you read a quote that just hits the spot may do you some good.
It’s a method to validate yourself with the assistance of somebody else. Get the essence of the author’s perspective on the topic. Just learn, make changes, and mold yourself with your thoughts.
16. Make Sure You Know About Your Strengths:
Identify and traverse through your individuality, intensities including joviality, interest, courage, social intelligence, and administration every day.
Having knowledge of own strengths is incredibly important, even if one isn’t practicing self-validation. Because if you know your strength, you will know on what grounds you can beat your rival easily.
When you have an awareness of your strengths, you spend less time wondering what to do in a situation because you already know what cooperates with your strengths and what doesn’t.
Once you utilize your strengths, it increases self-esteem and decreases anxiety2. Not only can it assist you in guiding your career in a more fulfilling direction, but it also can assist you in embracing yourself — the you that’s invaluable, the you that nobody can put a tag on.
17. Admit your Defects:
Nothing in the world is perfect. The word ‘perfect’ itself is not perfect because it’s overrated. Every single person has flaws and defects. But the ones that embrace the said flaws and use them to add to their strength are the ones that stay ahead of those who are too afraid to admit their flaws and defects.
There are millions of people who have physical or mental defects and are still doing far better than the people who do not live with the defect in question. Many people are born with defects; many develop one over time because of one reason or the other.
The point is the sooner you acknowledge your defects and start working on them, the better it will be for your own development as a person.
The best version of you is the one that verifies your feelings and beliefs by admitting your imperfections. Everybody has something about them that they probably need to correct because no one is born with perfection running through their veins.
Those flaws of yours are supposed to be checked from time to time so they can be worked on and corrected.
You should never be ashamed of them. Accept them. Work on them. Repair them.
This also enhances the way you perceive yourself. But if you only focus on imperfections, your experiences will be veiled with negativity. You’ll never learn to differentiate faulty ways from beneficial ones.
Benefits of Self-Validation:
- People live with misery, grudges, jealousy, etc., their whole life. This keeps them from being happy. After having self-validation, you stop getting affected by other people and have your happiness in your own hands, eventually leveling up your living. It upgrades the lifestyle of an individual.
- The more activities you do to have self-validation, the more you know about yourself. You find out more about your emotions; you find out about things that were cornered in your mind.
- Self-validation navigates you toward enlightenment. When a person chooses the path of self-validation, it opens up the doors of his mind’s spiritual world.
- When you start acknowledging and accepting your emotions, You start having more control over them. Because the more you know about yourself, your emotions, and your feelings, the better you control them. And as you control them, it works as your strength and not as a weakness. It holds you strong.
- After having enlightenment about self-validation, you try to achieve that state of mind. and when you are practicing self-validation, it keeps improving your mind, your thinking, and yourself. And as you have practiced it perfectly, a strong identity comes out.
- After practicing self-validation, you are no longer affected by other people’s hurtful words and their distorted perceptions of you. You care about yourself on your own and in your way. And that is what makes you ultimately a stronger and more challenging person. Moreover, it makes you ultimately a more robust and challenging individual than ever.
- After practicing, self-validation has many benefits; one of them is improving decision-making. You start making decisions rationally with facts and your emotions. You do not get affected by other people’s emotions and perceptions. This elevates the level of your decision-making.
Frequently asked questions:
- Self-validation theory (SVT) is introduced and presented as a series of six postulates. The core notion of SVT is that thoughts become more consequential for judgment and action as the perceived validity of the thoughts is increased.
- Learning to self-validate your emotions will help you cope with the overwhelming emotional process. The author Sheri Van Dijk (“DBT Made Simple”) breaks the self-validation skill into three steps: acknowledging, allowing, and understanding.
- To acknowledge and validate emotions without judgment allows us to start to soothe ourselves, and it can also make it easier to practice other coping skills if need be. Ultimately self-validation helps us have a healthier relationship with our own emotions and feel more powerful in our influence over them.
Go through this for related news.
Also, read:
Importance of Acknowledgement in Relationships
- Cho, Chul-Woong, et al. “Review of the toxic effects of ionic liquids.” Science of The Total Environment 786 (2021): 147309. ↩︎
- Chellappa, Sarah L., and Daniel Aeschbach. “Sleep and anxiety: From mechanisms to interventions.” Sleep medicine reviews 61 (2022): 101583. ↩︎
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