We all want other people to approve of who we are and what we do, but sometimes they don’t.  And when that happens, it can really undermine your confidence and self-esteem.

One of the things that we all like is for other people to approve of what we do and who we are. We work hard at something and we want people to say, "Wow, yeah, that’s fantastic!" Like when our kids bring home the painting they did in the art class and they show mum and dad. They need our approval, it builds up their confidence, it’s a normal part of growing up. But in the big wide world out there it doesn't always work that way.

We can do something that we think is really good and other people just frown or maybe a woman dresses up beautifully for her husband and he just says, "How much did that cost?" Disapproval can be disempowering, it kind of takes the wind out of our sails. People around us often put on the faces of disapproval and that’s something that we have to learn to deal with. So how do we deal with disapproval?

Last week, on A Different Perspective, we looked at what it would involve when dealing with difficult people, we all have difficult people in our lives and this week we're going to go on and, I guess, do a little bit more detail and look at the faces that people sometimes put on. Our face should be a mirror to our heart, you know if we're happy we smile, if we're unhappy we cry, so the whole idea is that when we interact as people, I can look at your face or you can look at my face and we kind of know what’s going on inside of each other.

Sometimes it works and other times it doesn't because dealing with something like disapproval, we focus on the face. You know when you're doing something and you give something to someone and you see their reaction on their face you think, "oh no, they disapprove of that, they don't like what I've done?" But really, in understanding this whole disapproval thing, we need to look at peoples hearts.

Before I began doing what I'm doing right now, I spent seventeen years of my life as a consultant in the Information Technology industry and probably worked with a couple of hundred client organisations, so thousands of people that I've worked with and interacted with and worked for and in consulting, typically, I would do a review of say how this organisation managed its information technology budget or department or strategy or whatever they were doing and that involved not just the technology but people and politics and sometimes, in fact often times, I had to deliver bad news.

I remember one very high profile organisation and I had to go to their CEO and say, "Look I'm sorry but your organisation is one of the very worse in managing information technology that I've ever come across in almost twenty years of consulting." Now, surprise surprise, there'd be lots of furrowed brows, lots of concerned looks. Approval? Often there was anger and aggression and defensiveness.

I used to take it personally, I'd walk out of those meetings and think, "my goodness, I've failed. My goodness I've done something wrong. My goodness I'm just not good enough." I couldn't sleep and there was pressure because all of this disapproval I was taking as a reflection of my performance and what I was doing and not doing. That was early on but I learnt not to, I learnt to say, "What’s actually going on here and why am I feeling hurt?"

So, Berni has worked hard, Berni has delivered a report or delivered something and I've been working flat out and I deliver it to the client and the client gives me one of those disapproving responses, disapproving look and I look in the clients face, at this face of disapproval and what I see is a mirror which says, "Berni, you have failed." And that’s a normal reaction when we encounter disapproval, what we normally understand it to mean is that somehow we are the ones that have failed.

So the other persons reactions become a measure of our performance or our success or who we are but actually, that reaction of disapproval is about two things, sure there is a component which is about my performance or your performance but there's another part, another very, very big part and it's what’s going on with that person in their circumstances, what the politics are, what their perception is. A lot of people’s behaviour, how they react and respond, depends on the situation.

If I go and deliver a consulting report which is threatening to a person, why should I expect approval? If this person feels they might lose their job, they might be demoted, they might not get their bonus or pay rise, why would I think I'd get a happy, smiling, gee that's a good report response? Of course, the response that I get from them that disapproval may have more to do about them than it does about me.

It may have more to say about how they're feeling than it has to say about my performance. And so, what I learnt is, I needed to look into peoples hearts, into peoples circumstances and understand if someone is feeling threatened, if someone is having a bad day, if someone’s not travelling well at home, if someone is just inheritantly insecure, all of those things impact on how they're going to react to something. And when I see that face of disapproval on them it may well be that I'm encountering their behaviour in a particular situation rather than their reaction, especially to me. What’s going on for them? Because that bit of their reaction is not my fault, it's not your fault.

If we are dealing with a loved one who is insecure and they react really badly towards something we've done and what we've done isn't wrong it's just coming out of their own security then we don't own that problem. It's not our fault. They're not commenting on who we are. Maybe they think that we've failed, maybe they're reacting to what we've done but you see, that situational behaviour is something that you and I can't control and for us to feel blamed, for us to feel inadequate, for us to feel that we've failed is the wrong thing. We can become approval junkies and if we're approval junkies, if we're always looking for other peoples approval we will invariably be disappointed. If we are always trying to please imperfect people we're going to have imperfect experiences.

The Apostle Paul had spent 10 to 12 years travelling around, in the first century, telling people about Jesus. Now this guy had huge opposition, riots, assassination plots. He'd been imprisoned, beatings, death row and he said this. He said, "Am I trying to win the approval of people? Am I trying to please people? If I was still trying to please them I wouldn't be a servant of Jesus Christ."

Paul figured it out, he said, "I can either be a people pleaser or a God pleaser and if I try and be a people pleaser, I'm going to be trying to please imperfect people, people who are sometimes wrong. I'm not going to run my life like that, I'm going to do what God wants me to do, I'm going to be a God pleaser."

People are imperfect. God is perfect and as I said last week, if we try and measure our success, who we are, our value by looking at the faces of disappointed people, it's like looking into one of those distorted mirrors you get at the fun parks, you know the theme parks. If we're going to be people pleasers we will always see a distorted image of who we are and how we perform but if we become Christ pleasers, God pleasers, then we see ourselves in a crystal clear perfect image, the image of God.

Does that mean we shouldn't try and please other people? No, of course not. It's wonderful to do good to please other people but that's not where we get our sense of worth. That face of disapproval that we see often has much more to do with that person and what they're going through than it does about us. When we stop this whole 'approval junkie guilt trip' we stop judging our own worth through the mirror of other peoples failure and imperfection. Disapproval does not always mean we've failed; the question is: Are we going to be people pleasers or God pleasers?