The Beth Goodrham Podcast - Lifestyle & Health for Women

Internal Validation: How To Build Self Worth When Praise Starts To Fade

• Beth Goodrham

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In this episode, I’m exploring internal validation — the quiet confidence that comes from trusting yourself instead of relying on praise, approval, or other people’s opinions. It's a skill that many of us were never taught! If you’ve ever felt unsettled by a comment, comparison, or expectation (especially in midlife), this one is for you.

This feels especially important at this time of year. Christmas has a way of thinning the skin, even if you’re generally confident. A comment lands harder than it should, a comparison sneaks in, or suddenly you’re questioning yourself. This episode is about learning how to steady yourself from the inside — without relying on anyone else to turn the heating back on.

In this episode, I cover:

  • What self-worth really is (and why you don’t have to earn it)
  • The difference between external and internal validation
  • Why so many women are conditioned to seek approval
  • How to strengthen internal validation in practical, everyday ways
  • Why midlife can be a powerful time for strength, clarity, creativity, and reinvention

If you’ve ever felt knocked off balance by someone’s opinion, a family dynamic, or your own inner critic, I hope this episode helps you come back to yourself.

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New episodes drop every Monday at 4am (UK time).


I've been thinking a lot lately about confidence. Not the loud, performative kind, but the quiet kind. The kind where you don't need to explain yourself so much. You don't need constant reassurance and you don't need to check in with everyone else before trusting your own decisions. That calm, grounded sense of. I'm okay with who I am. Not perfect, not finished, but pretty solid. Today's episode is about self-worth and self validation. How we build them, why they matter far more than we realize, and how learning to rely on yourself becomes one of the most powerful things you can do as a woman. And this feels especially important to talk about at this time of year because for many women, Christmas has a funny way of thinning the skin, even if you are generally confident. Even if you've done a lot of inner work, suddenly a throwaway comment lands harder than it should. A remark from an in-law, a question you didn't ask for someone commenting on what you are wearing, a comparison you weren't expecting. Someone commenting on your body, your choices, your work, your parenting, or the fact that you are not parenting in the same way anymore and you find yourself thinking. Why did that get to me? It's not because you are weak, it's because this season is loud with opinions, expectations, traditions, and unspoken rules, and when our self-worth is outsourced even slightly, it shows up here first, which is why internal validation, that quiet, steady sense of I know who I am becomes such a powerful anchor. By the end of today, we'll have covered what self-worth is and how it differs from validation, how low self-worth can sneak into everyday life. Why women are often wired to lean on external validation, how to cultivate internal validation so it becomes your anchor. And the surprising ways midlife women can thrive physically, emotionally, and creatively. And of course, I will circle back at the end, join the dots, and make sure that none of these points get lost in the holiday Christmas chaos. So welcome back. I'm so glad that you are here. Before I get further into the podcast episode, just a couple of quick things. First of all, when I go through and edit this. I might add a few little bits and bobs. I might not, but I'm just putting that caveat in there now, because often what happens is I record the podcast episode and then I go away and think about it a bit like you do after an exam and go, oh, I should have said that, or I should have answered that differently, or I should have made that point. I don't see many people doing it, but I'm sure others must. Perhaps they've just got better editors than I have, but I'm not going to hide the fact that sometimes I'll go in and add an afterthought. The second thing is I do have a little stripe and STA discount. I know I've mentioned this before, but if you love. Soft, comfortable. Don't go up. Your bum type knickers. Lovely loungewear, lovely PJ's. I do have a code, which is Beth 20, that's at stripe and stair. I will just link in the show notes and the third thing is I'm going to open up a very few sponsored slots so if you're listening to this and you run a business or a brand and you think that you might like to. Sponsor a podcast episode, just get in touch. My email address will also be linked in the show notes and we can have a little chat from there. But I just thought I'd mention that now in case it's something that might be of interest to you. Okay, so let's get on with the episode. If like me, you're in midlife, you might sometimes feel a little untethered. Maybe your body is changing. I think we're all familiar with things going south. Maybe if you've got them, your kids are growing up and leaving home, perhaps you have parents that need a little bit more support. You may have a partner, husband, wife who has retired and are suddenly around all the time. Or maybe the holiday season is amplifying all your little nooks and crannies, your little insecurities, your little worries that you may have, or any expectations that you've put on yourself. If you identify with any of these examples, this episode is for you, and by the end, you'll walk away with a clear understanding of self-worth versus validation. Something that I didn't know much about until recently, but always wondered about insights into how low self-worth manifests in daily life. Practical ways to nurture internal validation. Tools to navigate midlife transitions and holiday pressures with more calm humor and grounded confidence, and a reminder of all the ways that midlife women can shine, grow, and thrive, even if we don't think that that is possible anymore. So let's start at the very beginning. What exactly is self-worth at its core? Self-worth is the deep, steady belief that you are inherently valuable and enough just as you are. And this point was illustrated to me by a therapist I was working with a few years ago who said, when you look at a newborn baby, do you think that they have to earn anything to be considered worthy. Do they have to earn the right to be considered worthy? And I was like, no, of course not. And she said, well, that's what self-worth is. We are just born with it. We are enough just as we are, even from the day that we are born. So it's not about accomplishments, it's not about looks. Jobs or anybody else noticing anything that you're up to self-worth exists even when nobody praises or acknowledges you. But it's important to distinguish self-worth from validation because that's where the confusion can often creep in. So let me explain this a little bit further. Validation is the acknowledgement of your actions, choices, or existence. It can be external, like a compliment, some praise or recognition, or it can be internal. So that's noticing and appreciating our own effort or decisions. And if at that last point, the internal validation, you're kind of squirmed slightly, A, I hear you, and B, this episode is definitely for you. So just to recap, self-worth is the baseline. Is the unshakeable belief that you are valuable and worthy regardless of whether anyone notices. And I've got a metaphor that I'm going to share with you that I absolutely love, and I want this to become our little signature. So self-worth is your internal thermostat. Think about your self-worth as being the setting. It's the level your nervous system believes is normal for you. It's how safe you feel, how worthy you feel, and how enough you feel at a baseline. Now validation, especially external validation, is what temporarily heats the room. It's like you've blasted, hot air into the room and you feel all warm and fuzzy. And that can come from compliments, from recognition, from being noticed. But. It's only fleeting. Now, internal validation, which is the important one is of course the skill, particularly as women that we were rarely taught, is the ability to adjust the thermostat from the inside to bring yourself back to steady. When no one else is reassuring you when no one else is cheering you on, and even when life is difficult, and this is why midlife can feel unsettling. The external heaters start switching off. There can be fewer compliments, there can be less attention, there can be different roles or fewer roles that we play. But nobody ever gave us the instruction manual for the thermostat. So we think there's something's wrong with us, when really we were just never taught how to regulate our own sense of worth. Now there's a quote by Dam Emma Thompson, you may have seen this, that I absolutely love. She says, never let yourself be defined by how you look. Never do that because it will be over soon and you won't develop. So it's just over. So if people go on and on about how you look, you have to challenge it. You can't just take it in. You have to challenge it. You have to put up a barrier against it, and you have to exist as a person and a character, and a brain. And that counts for boys as well. But it's particularly bad for girls at the moment. I think what she's really saying in her brilliant, no-nonsense way is that looks, were never meant to be the thermostat, and we can extrapolate that. It doesn't just have to be looks. It can be our roles in life, our profession, whatever else is relevant to you. But these were never meant to be the thermos. They were just a temporary heater. Wisdom, experience, humor, discernment, emotional intelligence. Those are things that we can generate from the inside. They don't flicker, they don't fade. They don't depend on who's watching. So they are the things that are the thermostat. Another quote I read recently was this. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position fails, your ego goes with it. And I love that because it acts as a really good visual representation of how we need to separate. Ourselves from things that we think define us because they make us feel good, but actually they're not who we are at our very soul. I remember I used to listen to a really good business podcast by a chap named Rick Mulready, and he used to talk about seeing your business as being separate from you and having it on the chair next to you. And sometimes it would grow and it would flourish and it do really well. And then there would be other seasons when it didn't do the things that you would hope it to do, but that it was always separate from you and that your self-worth shouldn't be tied. To how well your business was or wasn't doing, and I found that really helpful over the years in lots of different contexts. And I thought it was something I would share with you in case you found it helpful too. So now let's look at external versus internal validation. And I know I've already explained them and it's probably sunk in really well already, but if you're anything like me, I like to hear things a few times before it goes in, and then I'm like, okay, yes, I get where you're coming from with that. So external validation is the acknowledgement or praise we receive from others, the compliments, the recognition, the likes, if it comes to social media and being noticed. What I find really interesting is that from a young age, many women are conditioned to rely on external validation almost to the, exclusion of everything else, and certainly to their detriment. So we are praised for being polite, helpful, or nice. We can get compliments on our appearance. We are recognized for how well we do at school or at university, or in our careers and various achievements. It's very much an external process and the fascinating science behind this. Now, I was thinking about this in the night. I'm sure you've all heard of the reticular activation system, but basically our brains have something called the reticular activation system or the RAS. For short, and it's a filter that helps our brain notice what's relevant in life and it's constantly scanning for things that matter or feel rewarding. Now, a great example of this is when a friend of mine, and you will have come across this yourself lots of times a friend of mine got a particular kind of car in a pistachio green, and I would see those cars everywhere, and that was my reticular activation system at play. It just started to notice them. Now bringing it back to how this impacts women. Because women are often conditioned from a young age to seek approval, be polite, look nice, get things right, so on and so forth. I believe that our RAS gets really good at noticing when we are being validated externally. The compliments, the recognition, the likes on social media, and our brains start to flag those as important because they make us feel good. But the problem is if we rely on that exclusively, and I think this is what happens, we miss nurturing internal validation. We are trained like lab rats to seek warmth from external heaters so that when those fade in midlife or when there's career shifts and aging and family transitions, it can feel like the room suddenly goes cold. And that's why learning to adjust your own thermostat becomes so essential. It's like we are conditioned from a young age just to go and hunt out those things. If we contrast that with internal validation, which what really matters in life and which is what is really important, it's just not something that we are taught about. So I think it's a skill that we need to learn. It's a part of ourselves that we need to develop, and it's almost a case of going back and rewiring ourselves so that our reticular activation system starts to look for those things instead, Which can be quite hard when your internal thermostat is going down in any event, because the things we are used to hearing that make us feel good about ourselves, happen less. It's quite an interesting conundrum if you think about it examples of internal validation are things like us saying to ourselves, I am enough, regardless of whether anyone notices or not. I trust my choices and my instincts. I can celebrate myself even privately. And why it matters particularly now is that this doesn't decline with age. This is a skill that we can improve and strengthen as we get older, and it's something that we really do need to be working on. It anchors us when external praise wanes, which it will inevitably because it tends to be the older generations which compliment the younger generations. And as we move up that chain and we become the older generations, we don't have the generations above like the parents, like the school teachers, assuming there was some positivity coming from them to help us feel good about ourselves in that same way. And I suppose another point that comes in here is that we should be aware of the kind of praise that we are handing down to the younger generations too, so that they develop the skills to validate themselves internally. Now some quick ways of how to build it, because the theory is great. Understanding what self-worth is and understanding what external validation is and what internal validation is, is all great. But if we want to build this skill, then we need to know how to do it. So here are some quick ways that we can strengthen that skill, which we really need to uncover and embrace as we get older. The first thing to do is to notice your winds. Even tiny ones now, my 17-year-old daughter is really, really good at this. So in the morning when she's getting ready for school and she's come down and cooked herself for breakfast, and she normally does a really good breakfast, she'll sit down, she'll have her breakfast, and at the end she'll go, well done mouse. Well done. You've eaten a great breakfast there. And I'll kind of look at her and go, you're praising yourself for eating your breakfast. But actually, it's a really good thing to do, and we've all started doing it much more to the point where it's become a bit ridiculous, but there's nothing wrong with a little bit of positive praise, even if it's just for putting your shoes on or having done a nice act for somebody. Or tidying up a little bit. It's like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna say well done, Beth. That was a great, that's a great job. Well done. You, we can reflect on past successes or decisions. We will have them. What our brain also likes to do, of course, is to focus on the negative. So we have to switch that little part off and go, come on, come on. In fact, I was just listening to a coaching call slightly going off track here, but I was listening to a coaching call with some Amazon sellers because I have a business selling sauna hats on Amazon in the us And the coach was talking to some relatively new sellers, and this seller you could see, was really struggling to accept any praise. And he was very much of the mindset of, okay, so yes, I managed to sell that many books. What's next? What's next? I don't think this has gone very well, and the coach is saying, hang on, hang on a minute. Hang on. Just slow down. 90 days ago you didn't even have a business, and now you have sold this many units of your product. You have generated this income. This is unheard of. This is brilliant. And I could still feel the guy grappling with this as if to say, yes, okay, I know, but it's not that good is it? What do I need to be doing next? And the coach was really trying to bring him back and ground him and say, no, no, celebrate this. You need to be celebrating this. So reflecting on past successes or decisions. So the next one is setting boundaries, and I think as women we can find this really hard and it may be a case of sitting down and really identifying perhaps something quite small to start off with just doing baby steps where that you feel you can set a boundary around and it's important to do that and building it out from there. The next one is to separate self-worth from appearance or achievement. And this is the analogy that I was giving about having the business. Sitting on a chair next to you, so all your achievements are just sitting on a chair next to you. They aren't part of you necessarily. They don't define your self-worth. They don't define who you are. They're just a separate part of you that sits just a little bit remotely from you. And the last one is engaging in activities that connect to your strengths and passions. Now, whether that's volunteering and volunteering in a particular role, whether it's your hobbies, whether it's your exercise, whatever it may be, but doing things which connect to your strength and passions to reinforce that internal validation. And sometimes I find it really helpful to have an exercise to do so that I can give the theory some proper context. And something that I would invite all of us to do is to pause for a moment and ask ourselves, where is my internal thermostat right now? What am I waiting for In order to feel warmer? Someone's approval, someone's noticing, and now try this quietly say to yourself, given everything I'm carrying, I'm allowed to feel steady. That's internal validation. That's you reaching for the dial instead of standing in the draft. Hoping someone else fixes the heating. I think it's particularly important this time of year. Imagine yourself standing in the kitchen on Christmas Day or some big event and the turkey's burnt, or you have an in-law or a relative that comes in and they always irk you. It could be a sister-in-law. Or some other member of your family, and they give you that sideways glance as if to say, okay, what are you wearing? And suddenly you feel uncomfortable having thought that you looked okay. You're not questioning yourself and have I got that wrong? Or perhaps you're out with a group of friends and doing the same. Just pause for a second and say to yourself, where is my internal thermostat set right now? And then if it's not where you want it to be, it's how are you going to get it back to where it needs to be so that you're feeling calm and grounded without relying on somebody else to do it for you? Because I think that's what we're all aiming for in life. We're just aiming to feel calm and steady on our own without any external validation from anyone else and I dunno about you in life, but that is where I am heading, is how do I feel good about myself with only myself as a reference point, without any external validation, either from the qualifications I've got, how much money I've earned, or any other measure of success in inverted commas, but just from my own self-worth and my own internal validation of. You know, that's okay. You know, you've got some things wrong, but you've got a lot of things right. You've said some daft things, but you've said some really good things. You might have taken a few wrong turns, but you've taken some really good right turns as well, and that awareness, that balance, that ability to validate from the inside and to set your internal thermostat without it being dependent on a lot of external forces. And that's where I've seen women really come unstuck over the years, particularly on Instagram back in the day, in the sort of 2014, up to 2020 when I was doing a lot more on Instagram than I am now. And I used to meet lots of women. Oh my golly. The wrangling they would have with themselves and how much their self-worth was tied to external validation was truly shocking. And I think it's really easy to get swept up in and I can also see how it happens to younger girls and women as well, which is why I think if it is not dealt with in the right way, it can be absolutely toxic, But it doesn't have to be that way. If we teach ourselves the skills and we teach the generations younger than us, those skills not to rely on external validation to feel good about themselves, but more to work on the internal validation so that irrespective of what is going on in the world around them, irrespective of what is going on in their lives, they still have that deep sense of grounding. Now coming back to what midlife women excel at, because it's always good to finish on a high, midlife is a prime time for thriving. Some of you will absolutely agree with me on that. You may have just sailed through midlife, like some women sail through pregnancy and have never had any kind of hiccups and be, yeah, bring it on. I am all for midlife. I love it. Others of you, probably a bit like me, I've had a few hiccups along the way, but are coming out the other side and thinking, yep, I'm here for this. Bring it on. And then there may be others who are right in the thick of the midlife struggle and thinking, no, I cannot see that coming. But it is all different stages and all different phases of life, but it can be, a prime time for thriving. We shine in ways we rarely did in our younger selves. So just hear me as I talk through these different ways that we can thrive. First of all, our physical strength. Contrary to what we hear. We don't have to get weak and frail as we move through life. Something that I've loved doing this year is weight training, and one of the brilliant things about it, well there's a couple of brilliant things about it, is that first of all. If you are stronger physically, you feel stronger mentally because you've demonstrated to yourself that you can achieve things that you didn't think you would be able to. And secondly, the results actually appear quite quickly. You don't have to wait for six months to be able to notice a difference. And so when you combine those two things together, the feeling stronger emotionally with actually seeing bigger muscles, it's really empowering. So building muscle is definitely something that I think has the ability to help us to thrive. It also makes us feel more capable. It makes us feel more confident, and it makes us feel independent. The next thing is that we have hopefully more emotional intelligence. We can navigate relationships with insight, with patience, and with humor. We're at that stage in life, being part of the sandwich generation where we're probably navigating relationships with elderly parents, which is a whole different podcast in itself, as well as the younger generation. So we have that kind of fine line to tread. We're doing that balancing act between these different stages in life, and that comes with it, a lot of emotional intelligence that we develop. Coming back to boundaries, sometimes saying no. Sometimes protecting our energy, not to the point where we are really selfish because again, life is all about a balance, but not always dancing to someone else's tune. Sometimes just taking a step back and going, no, it's okay for me to say no to this. That's all right. That doesn't make me a bad person. It just means that I need a little bit of space and a little bit of a buffer zone in life so that I can deal with what's on my plate decision making. I think that can become easier with age, and I think we can become quite good at it, largely because we've lived enough years to know that. Most decisions aren't irreversible, and if it's a bad decision, we'll find a way to live with the consequences. But we learn to trust our instincts, to listen to our gut, And we often make choices that are more aligned with our values than perhaps we did when we were younger. There might have been other driving forces when we were younger that led us to come to a conclusion. Not always a bad one, but the motivators could be different. And perhaps now that we have a little bit more life experience, we are making choices which are more aligned with our values and which therefore feel better. Self-knowledge is another great strength. We get to learn what energizes us, what drains us, how to manage our time better, how to plan our life around those things that give us more energy or drain our energy. We definitely have more resilience than when we were younger because we've weathered more storms. We've been through more challenges. We've recovered from things in the past, and as a result, we can often laugh a lot louder about them, And by this stage in life, we can often be more creative. Perhaps. We were creative when we were younger and we had to put it on the back burner, but now is a great time to develop it again. Only yesterday I ordered and I am the least arty person in the world. An Indian block printing set, just because I've looked at them and thought I really fancy giving that a go. I do my sourdough. You might say that's not creative. It feels quite creative to me, but we can often have more creativity at this stage in life. Perhaps we've got a little bit more space to explore things and we are not scared of exploring things, even if they go totally wrong. We can just shrug it off more easily than we did when we were younger, and we can also be the queens of reinvention by this stage in our lives. We've often pivoted through different careers. We've had different hairstyles. We've maybe had mullets, we've had perms, we've had fringes. We've grown fringes out. We've had it cut over the ears. We've had all sorts of things going on. Same with clothes, most things that come around now. We've been there and we've done them before. And for some women they don't want to do them again. That's fine. And for other women, they're like, Ooh, I remember that. Interesting. Let's go with it. And the last one is deep connections. By this stage, we are really good at identifying and investing in relationships with people who see us and who really value us and love us for who we are, as opposed to when we are younger, it's maybe surrounding ourselves with lots of people and the friendships aren't as deep or forming friendships with people who perhaps weren't quite right for us. Again, we have to go through that. It's all about learning through experience, so before we wrap up for the day, let's just circle back and I'll do a quick recap because what I don't want you to do is to get to the end of the episode and go, oh, I think there was something quite helpful near the start, but I can't quite remember what it was. Self-worth is being enough just as you are, just like a newborn baby without having any accolades, any particular characteristics, just by the virtue of your very existence versus validation, which is the thermostat if you like, and it goes up and it gets hotter With external validation, the compliments, the praise, and then we can regulate it ourselves with our own internal validation. We also looked at why women lean on external validation through conditioning, societal messages. And the reticular activation system. Which makes us seek out the external validation because it helps us to feel good about ourselves. But then the flip side of that is we're spending so much energy doing that, that we are not developing the skills of internal validation, which is what will ultimately see us through life in a much more helpful way. We then had a quick look at building internal validation, noticing wind. Reflecting, setting boundaries, self-compassion, and connecting to our strengths. And then we looked at the midlife strengths, some of which were physical, emotional, creative, and relational. And the key takeaway from this is that you don't have to be perfect, which I find very reassuring. You don't need anyone else's approval. Your internal validation is your anchor. I really hope that you found today's episode helpful, interesting, useful, and that there are some lessons and metaphors that you can take away from it and that you can carry through your everyday life with you, particularly if you find yourself in a tricky situation over the Christmas and New Year period. I'd love you just to come back to this. If somebody says something, compares you to someone, makes an observation about your outfit, your cooking skills, your parenting style, what kind of daughter you are, what kind of sister you are, and you just give a little r smile to yourself and think. Hmm. Thermostat, thermostat, internal validation. I've heard a podcast on that. I am not going to respond. I'm just going to leave that little comment and not give it any of my energy or attention, because frankly, it doesn't deserve it. Just to let you know that a new podcast episode drops at four o'clock every Monday morning, UK time, so it should be ready, and they're waiting for you when you get up, I'd love it if you could share this episode with a friend who you think might benefit from this, particularly over the Christmas period. And if you have time to leave a review, which is a silly thing to ask right now.'cause of course, nobody's gonna have time to leave a review. That would be amazing. It helps the podcast to get discovered by more women who might find this information helpful. And just circling back to the start, there's that stripe and stair code I have, which is Beth 20. It gets you 20% of everything at Stripe and stair sitewide. Probably not on sales, but on anything full priced. And if you think that you would like to sponsor a podcast episode that you have a business that you would like to share with podcast listeners, please get in touch. As I mentioned, my email address is below. For now, all it remains for me to do is to wish you a fabulous week. I hope it goes well for you. And if ever you want to chat, just come and find me on Instagram at Beth Goodham. I will also link below and we can have a little chat over there. So you take care. Lots of love and bye for now.