Treating others' approval as a need rather than a preference is claimed to be the source of much avoidable distress.
Dyer's advice is to reclassify approval from a need to a preference. The reframing is useful and the underlying model is wrong in one respect: sensitivity to others' regard is not a defect but a functioning social monitor, and people with too little of it are not thriving. The distress comes from the weighting rather than from the sensitivity.
In practice
- An employee who requires every stakeholder's endorsement before acting will not act.
- A manager entirely indifferent to how she is regarded is not liberated and is usually about to be surprised.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is contingent self-esteem, in which self-worth is staked on external regard and therefore moves with it. Another is that approval was genuinely necessary in childhood and the habit outlives the necessity.
- In its favour
- Research on contingent self-esteem and on sociometer accounts supports the core observation that staking self-worth on others' regard raises distress.
- Against it
- Sensitivity to others' regard is not a fault to be eliminated but a functioning social sense, so advice to stop caring misdescribes the target, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.
- Standing
- Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Adjacent to research on contingent self-esteem and on sociometer accounts of self-worth, both of which treat sensitivity to approval as functional rather than as an error to be eliminated.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition