You walk out of the bedroom wearing something you love.
You caught yourself in the mirror before you came out and thought, Damn. I look good.
Then somebody looks at you and says, “You’re wearing that?”
And there it is.
You go back to the mirror. And suddenly everything you thought feels upside down!
Nothing changed. Same woman. Same clothes. Same body. Fifteen seconds ago you liked what you saw.
So what happened?
Somebody else had an opinion.
And without even realizing it, you allowed their opinion to become new information about you.
Most of us wouldn’t call that validation. We probably wouldn’t call it anything. We’d change the blouse, put on another pair of pants and go about our day.
But something happened in that tiny moment that is worth paying attention to.
You knew what you thought until you knew what somebody else thought.
That interests the hell out of me.
Because I don’t think we only do it in front of the mirror.
We do it when we have an idea we’re excited about and immediately call someone to see what they think. We do it when we’re considering spending money on ourselves and need somebody to assure us that we’re not being ridiculous. We do it when we want to quit something we’ve been doing for years, even though everybody tells us we’re so good at it.
We do it when we want to move, travel, stay home, date, not date, cut our hair, grow our hair, start a business, close one, paint the living room orange or spend an entire Tuesday doing absolutely nothing productive.
We look around the room.
Does everybody think this is okay?
For women my age, I don’t think this happened by accident.
We spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at reading the room. Sometimes our lives required it. We learned what pleased the boss, what the children needed, what made the marriage run more smoothly and what our families expected.
We learned the rules of being a good woman so thoroughly that eventually nobody had to remind us of them.
We reminded ourselves.
And after decades of looking outward for information about how well we’re doing life, retirement can present us with a very strange problem.
The room gets quieter.
The children have their own lives. The career may be finished. Nobody is giving us a performance review. A Tuesday afternoon can belong entirely to us.
And now somebody asks a seemingly simple question.
What do you want?
That question can stop a woman cold.
Not because she doesn’t want anything.
Because she has had so much practice considering everybody else’s answer that she may have trouble hearing her own.
And this is where validation gets interesting.
I am not against validation. Tell me my hair looks fabulous and I’ll happily accept the compliment. Hell, tell me twice.
I don’t believe becoming self-trusting requires becoming some emotionally self-contained island who never cares what anybody thinks. We love people. Their opinions matter to us. Sometimes someone else can see something we’re missing.
But there is a difference between considering another person’s opinion and giving that person authority over your own.
I recently discovered just how thin that line can be because of something completely ridiculous.
My hair.
I have long gray hair. I like my long gray hair. I wasn’t contemplating changing it, questioning it or standing in front of the mirror wondering whether it was appropriate for a woman my age.
Then a woman saw a photograph of me and suggested I get it cut.
I hadn’t asked.
I wrote about the encounter online because what fascinated me wasn’t whether she liked my hair. I couldn’t figure out what possesses one woman to look at another woman who appears perfectly happy with herself and decide she needs correcting.
The response was astonishing.
Nearly 1,000 people joined the conversation.
And that’s when the conversation stopped being about my hair.
Women started telling their own stories. They told me about going gray and refusing to go gray. Growing their hair and cutting it. What their mothers had said. What husbands preferred. What friends thought was more flattering. What strangers had apparently decided women of a certain age should look like.
Everybody had a hair story.
And sitting there reading them, I realized hair was simply the place where something much larger had become visible.
Women have been receiving opinions about themselves for so long that sometimes we forget an opinion isn’t a verdict.
That distinction matters.
If I like my hair and you don’t, do I still like my hair?
Easy enough.
Now change the noun.
I love this idea, but you think it’s foolish. Do I still love the idea?
I want to take the trip, but my children think I shouldn’t go alone. Do I still want to go?
I don’t want to volunteer just because I’m retired, but everybody keeps telling me I need a purpose. Do I believe them, or do I believe the little voice inside me saying, For God’s sake, I’ve been useful for 60 years. I’d like to see what happens when I stop making usefulness my job.
I want to start something at 70.
I want to stop something at 70.
I want companionship but not marriage. I want marriage. I want neither one.
I want to spend the money.
I want to leave it to my children.
I want to wear the damn red lipstick.
None of those choices requires unanimous approval.
But knowing that intellectually and trusting yourself enough to live it are very different things.
And that’s the part I think we don’t talk about enough.
We tell women to trust themselves as though it’s a switch they can flip.
Trust your gut.
Follow your intuition.
Listen to yourself.
Fine.
But what if you’ve spent 50 years practicing the opposite?
What if every important decision in your life included some version of: What will my husband think? What will my mother think? What will the children think? What will the neighbors think? What will people at church think? What will people at work think?
You became extremely practiced at gathering external evidence.
Of course your own voice can sound quieter.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE DAILY RE-WIRE NEWSLETTER
Here’s something I’ve started doing that sounds almost laughably simple.
Before I ask anyone else what they think, I ask myself first.
What do I want?
Not what makes sense. Not what is responsible. Not what will make everybody comfortable. Not what a woman my age is supposed to want.
What do I want?
And then I ask the question that has become much more interesting to me:
If nobody agreed with me, would my answer change?
That’s where things get revealing.
Because sometimes the answer is no.
No, I would still want this.
No, I would still choose this.
No, I would still know this isn’t right for me.
And sometimes you discover that what you’ve been calling indecision isn’t indecision at all.
You already decided. You’re waiting for validation.
Those are not the same thing.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE DAILY RE-WIRE NEWSLETTER
Building trust in yourself doesn’t require you to stop listening to other people.
It requires you to stop assuming that everybody else’s voice deserves a louder microphone than yours.
And you can practice it with ridiculously small things.
Don’t begin with whether you should sell your house and move to Portugal.
Begin with lunch.
What do I actually want to eat?
Begin with Saturday.
What do I actually want to do?
Begin with your hair.
Do I like it?
Make a choice without polling anybody. Then pay attention to what happens. Notice the discomfort if somebody disagrees. Notice the urge to explain yourself. Notice how quickly you start building a legal case for a decision that didn’t require a jury in the first place.
And then do it again.
Because every time you listen to yourself and discover that the world doesn’t come crashing down, you’ve collected a little more evidence.
I can trust myself.
That’s what believable trust is made from.
Not affirmations pasted to a bathroom mirror.
Evidence.
You make a choice. You listen to yourself. You act. You see what happens. And slowly the woman inside you becomes a more credible source than the room around you.
Perhaps that’s why nearly 1,000 people had something to say about my hair.
Hair was never important enough to explain that response.
But validation was.
Because underneath every conversation about whether a woman should wear her hair long, short, gray, blond, curly, straight or standing straight up on top of her head is a much more interesting question:
Who gets the deciding vote?
At 71, I’m increasingly interested in making damn sure mine belongs to me.
And I suspect I’m not the only one.
Get Your Free Copy of Building Believable Trust
I created Building Believable Trust because “trust yourself” isn’t particularly useful advice if nobody ever taught you how.
It’s a practical guide for beginning to recognize your own voice, notice where you’ve been looking outside yourself for answers and start gathering evidence that you can believe what you know.
And after that ridiculous hair conversation, I added an entire section about validation.
I’m giving Building Believable Trust free to new subscribers to The Daily RE-Wire Newsletter for Women ovr 60.
SUBSCRIBE AND GET BUILDING BELIEVABLE TRUST
Because you don’t need another person telling you what your answer should be.
You need to become more believable to yourself.