What is approval seeking?
Running your decisions past an audience in your head before making them.
It is not vanity. It is a normal appetite pointed at the wrong source. The man who says he does not care what anybody thinks is usually performing that for somebody too.
How do you find your judge?
Watch where the anxiety spikes in small things.
The text you reread four times before sending. The meeting you replay in the car. The particular person whose opinion arrives uninvited while you are deciding something that has nothing to do with them.
That person is who you are accountable to. Not who you would name if asked. Who shows up.
Why doesn't confidence fix it?
Because confidence is often approval seeking that has gotten good at it.
A man who stops caring does not become free. He becomes brittle, performs indifference, and isolates, and isolation is the condition in which men do the most damage to themselves.
What actually changes it?
Not wanting approval less. Changing whose it is.
The one opinion a man is genuinely accountable to was settled before he did anything to earn it, and that is the ground the rest stands on. It is what lets him lead a household without needing permission to feel like a man, take criticism without collapsing, and make money without apologising for wanting it.