Why We Need External Validation

I woke up this morning racking my brains on what to write about. The fact that it’s only day 3 of this exercise and I’m already struggling made me feel a little anxious.

While my ‘readers’ (friends and family) are the few people I’ve shared this with, representing myself on paper is daunting; after all, I’m not a writer. I find myself asking if I should be sharing my work with anyone in the first place. On day one, I wrote that making my blog public would hold me accountable to posting daily. But I can picture the individual reactions of everyone reading this. Yes, I’ll admit it — today I seek external validation as permission to write or consider myself a writer.

The definition

Before I start to explore this idea, let’s talk a little about mental models. Mental models are rooted in our beliefs, as Elizabeth Thornton, a psychologist who studies mental models in the workplace, defines it succinctly:

Mental models are deep-rooted ideas and beliefs about the way the world works and how things ought to be. The mind forms patterns, or models, that define our sense of reality, that lead us to expect certain results, that give meaning to…