People have a fundamental need to seek the attention of others and to be respected and admired for who they are and what they do.
All people and in every culture.
The only critical difference between people is the source of this attention.
Some people seek the respect and attention from a tight-knit group of friends, colleagues, or industry peers, while others cast a much wider net and seek connection with relative strangers, such as influencers they don’t know and strangers on social media.
How big the referent group becomes is a strong signal about many issues tied to self-confidence.
Some people anchor their self-worth and self-identity externally rather than internally. For those externally focused, the internet and social media offer fast and abundant signals that satisfy their need for positive feedback about themselves.
The source of favorable views and social validation matters less than the speed and quantity of the attention they crave.
Social media also offers a low-risk opportunity for testing out opinions, adopting new personas, or trying out new ideas.
Because the relevance of the audience is less important to those externally anchored, they prioritize scale, visibility, and reach. Approval from large audiences feels validating, even if the individual opinions are shallow or lack context.
When their social circles are small or offer limited support and validation, or if they feel undervalued, the need for attention from unknown people increases.
Internally anchored people, on the other hand, have a more stable sense of self and rely mostly on feedback from trusted friends and colleagues or from others who have the expertise to calibrate their value.
They consider validation from those who don’t know them as irrelevant, inconsequential, and unseemly. To them, a stranger’s opinions carry little informational value, so they tend to avoid or ignore them.
When the internal anchor is extremely high, people will actively avoid social proof or attention that doesn’t come from those they know or from those they deem worthy of respecting them, so they distance themselves from social media and other forms of large audience acknowledgement and feedback.
Highly creative, entrepreneurial, and status-oriented leaders often fit this profile.
The problem inherent with seeking validation and respect from unknown parties is when it becomes the primary source of self-worth rather than a secondary signal.
Predictably, people with a strong external anchor experience lower well-being, higher anxiety, more mood swings, less intrinsic motivation, and more emotional volatility.
Research also confirms that seeking attention and validation from strangers can produce an overreaction to criticism, more defensive behavior, a rumination over negative feedback, and a higher fear of missing out.
In other words, when a person’s sense of self-worth becomes too contingent on forces they don’t influence or control, their self-esteem and self-confidence can fluctuate wildly.
If you notice a team or family member’s self-confidence swings widely over the course of days or weeks without any apparent reason, it may be that they have increased their need for validation by anchoring it externally, through social media or other forms.
Encouraging them to focus on the opinions of those who know them well and can more accurately assess their work is a good way to pull them back to a more rational view of themselves.
When it comes to seeking attention and respect, less connection to the external world can be a good thing.
External validation from strangers doesn’t create lower self-confidence. It feeds it.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
