What If the Proof You're Waiting For Never Comes? | John R. Miles - EP 822

In this solo episode, John R. Miles explores how our need for external validation can shape our sense of worth, identity, and ability to move forward—and what it takes to trust yourself when the proof you're waiting for may never come.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. There's a finding in psychology that sounds made up until you see the data. Give some people a sincere compliment and their blood pressure goes up.

• 0:46John R. Miles?

  Not from embarrassment, from threat. Somewhere in your life right now, there's a piece of praise, a promotion, or a person who loves you that landed and just didn't stick. It didn't feel true, and so quietly, some part of you went looking for proof that it was wrong. This week, we met a woman who sailed around the world alone, months after the sailing world told her on the record that she was too small to survive it. And we met the psychologist who can explain exactly why a verdict like that is so hard to out-argue, and what it actually takes to do it anyway.

• 1:28John R. Miles?

  Today, we're asking the question sitting underneath both conversations. What do you do when the proof you're waiting for is never going to arrive? Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters.

• 2:13John R. Miles?

  Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Welcome back to episode 822 of Passion Struck. We're in Week 3 of our September series, The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World. Earlier this week, I had two conversations that on paper could not have been more different. On Tuesday, I sat down with Cole Brower, the first American woman to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around the world. 130 days at sea, 27,000 nautical miles, completely alone, to talk about her new book, First Light. On Thursday, I talked with Dr.

• 2:56John R. Miles?

  Marissa Franco, the psychologist behind Platonic, about her new book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Cole's story is about a body of water. Marissa's research is about a body of evidence. Literally, the evidence your own mind keeps on file about whether you deserve good things. Here's what I couldn't stop thinking about once both conversations landed in the same week. Cole's entire career before she ever left the dock was shaped by other people's verdicts. She told me she was too small. A year before the biggest race of her life, she was cut from a major sailing team and

• 3:38John R. Miles?

  told explicitly that she wasn't built for the Southern Ocean. And Marissa's research explains almost too precisely why a verdict like that is so hard to shake, and strangely, why the opposite verdict, someone telling you how wonderful you are, often doesn't work either. By the end of today's episode, you're going to have one diagnostic tool. I'm calling it the verification check, and it's built directly off something Marissa calls self-verification theory. It takes about 10 seconds to run on yourself. We're going to use it on Cole's story, on Marissa's research, and on a piece of my own life I haven't told you on this show before. Here's what's ahead.

• 4:21John R. Miles?

  The exact verdict a sailing team handed Cole Brower a year before her race, and the reframe she used to survive it. The research finding that should unsettle you a little bit. Why a genuine compliment can spike someone's blood pressure. Carl Rogers' idea of contingencies of worth, and the hamster wheel it quietly puts you on. And the moment in my own life story where I finally understood the difference between being validated and being worthy. Let's get into it. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 5:05John R. Miles?

  Cole Brower didn't grow up around sailboats. She grew up on the working-class side of eastern Long Island, the daughter of a construction worker and a shop owner, spending her teenage years on fishing boats, because that was what was accessible. When she finally discovered sailing at 19, it was almost by accident. She googled it after watching little boats drift back and forth off Waikiki, then lied to a college coach about her experience just to get a tryout. By her own account, Cole has restarted her life nine times. Art school in Savannah, then after her mother's cancer diagnosis, a total pivot toward pre-med,

• 5:48John R. Miles?

  then Hawaii on a whim because a photo on a search results page looked beautiful. She was still figuring out who she was when a college sailing coach gave her an ultimatum. "This is NCAA Division 1. You're either on the team or you're not. We're not a charity." That ultimatum, she told me, put her into overdrive. In the years that followed, she lived out of a van and taught herself the systems of a boat from the ground up. The unglamorous shore crew work it takes to earn a place in a small, insular sport. Here's the part of Cole's story that stopped me.

• 6:30John R. Miles?

  A year before she became the first American woman to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around the world, she was cut from a major offshore sailing team. She was told directly that she was too short for the Southern Ocean. She had flown to France and turned down paid work to make room for the opportunity, and it evaporated. In her words, she was completely crushed. The team never called her back. She never got the apology, the reversal, the moment where somebody who doubted her admitted they were wrong. As far as I can tell, she's still waiting on it.

• 7:14John R. Miles?

  And exactly one year later, she was standing on a different dock about to sail around the planet by herself. What changed wasn't the verdict. Nobody reversed it. What changed was what Cole did with it. Here's how she described her own operating philosophy to me. "When I hit rock bottom, it was exactly what I needed to go back up. While I'm at the bottom, all I can do is go up. I can't really go any lower." That's not toxic positivity. Listen again to what she's actually claiming. She's not saying the rejection didn't hurt, or that the team was secretly right to worry,

• 7:58John R. Miles?

  or that she found a way to prove them wrong on their terms. She's saying something more useful. Rock bottom became data that she was about to move, not evidence that she should stop. Two weeks into her solo circumnavigation, that philosophy got tested for real. She described hitting what she calls "the scaries." Not fear of storms or equipment failure, but a raw identity crisis. She spent months surrounded by a tight-knit shore team, and then, with no transition period, she was simply gone from all of it. She told me it felt like the world had been ripped away, and she genuinely started questioning

• 8:43John R. Miles?

  her own sense of self. She got through it two ways. Her mother told her, in Cole's words, "to suck it up." A blunt reminder that this was the thing she'd wanted for years, so she should be in it. And she started paying close attention to the natural world around her. Because Cole's line, not mine, "Nature is predictable if you actually study it, and predictability calms anxiety better than reassurance does." Now, I want you to notice what's missing from both of those coping strategies. Neither one involves someone finally telling her she belonged.

• 9:25John R. Miles?

  Nobody from that old team called to say they'd been wrong about her size. The proof she was waiting for a year earlier never arrived. She went anyway. That's the first half of today's verification check, and I'll give you the full tool in a few minutes. For now, just sit with this question. What verdict from your past are you still quietly waiting to see reversed? Take a second and actually answer that question before you come back. We're going to take a short break for our sponsors. While you're listening, think about one piece of external proof you've been waiting on. A promotion, an apology, someone finally noticing the work.

• 10:08John R. Miles?

  And ask yourself honestly, would receiving it actually change how you feel about yourself, or would it just feel good for about an hour? When we come back, Marissa Franco is going to tell us exactly why that second option is so much more common than we'd like to admit. We'll be right back.

• 10:35John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Welcome back. Before the break, Cole Brouwer showed us what it looks like to move forward without ever getting the world's permission. Now, let's talk about the research that explains why permission is so much less powerful than we assume, and why its opposite, unearned praise, can misfire just as badly. Marissa Franco spent her first book, Platonic, studying loneliness, the mechanics of how we build and keep relationships. Her new book, Worth, goes somewhere different. She started noticing something in the research that didn't fit the self-help script at all:

• 11:18John R. Miles?

  people who are loved, successful, and surrounded by others, who still feel at their core unworthy of any of it. The theory she landed on is called self-verification theory, and it's one of the more unsettling findings in modern psychology. People with low self-esteem, on average, actually prefer to interact with people who see them more negatively. "If someone sees them too positively," Marissa told me, "it triggers anxiety. You're going to figure out who I really am." There's real psychological data behind this. Some people's blood pressure measurably rises when they receive a genuine compliment. When they try

• 12:00John R. Miles?

  positive affirmations, saying "I'm loved out loud," they report feeling worse, not better. And when good things happen to people who don't believe they deserve them, some studies show they get physically sicker months later. Here's Marissa's own summary of what she means. She told me, "If we struggle with our worth, we can have the greatest love of our lives, we can have the successful career, but all of it slides off of us because it doesn't resonate with our sense of self. And thus, we can't actually internalize it."

• 12:42John R. Miles?

  It means the fix so many of us reach for, "Go get the achievement, collect the compliment, land the relationship," can completely fail to solve the actual problem. Because the problem was never a lack of evidence, it's that the evidence doesn't match a theory the mind has already decided is true. That theory Marissa explained gets built out of memory. Researchers call memory "the database of self-esteem," and the unsettling part is that memories don't just record what happened to you, they predict what will happen to you next. If your early memories are full of rejection, some part of your mind treats

• 13:24John R. Miles?

  that as a forecast, not a history. And staying a little insecure, a little braced for it to happen again, is actually adaptive inside that forecast. It protects you from being blindsided. This is also where Marissa pushed back on something a lot of us get wrong about achievement. She pointed to psychologist Carl Rogers' idea of contingencies of worth, the belief that you have to earn your worth through some specific accomplishment. Get the lead role, get the grade, hit the number, then you'll finally feel worthy. Marissa's research says that's a trap with no exit. Internalizing those contingencies of worth

• 14:08John R. Miles?

  dooms you to forever be in a hamster wheel of worth. You may believe that once you finally achieve the thing, you'll feel worthy, but the finish line keeps moving because the achievement was never the actual mechanism. It's the self-verification loop underneath it that has to change. So, what does change it? Not confidence, Marissa argues, honesty. She defines worth not as feeling good about yourself, but as being able to feel everything you feel, including the ugly parts from a grounded place. The same way a securely attached

• 14:50John R. Miles?

  child learns to regulate emotion because a caregiver responded to it instead of shutting it down. Insecurity in her framing isn't a law, it's a strategy your mind built to protect you from memories it's still bracing to repeat. And the way out isn't pretending the insecurity isn't there. It's acknowledging it honestly enough that it stops running the show from the shadows. This brings us to the second half of what we need for today's tool. Your worth was never something a compliment could install, and it was never something

• 15:29John R. Miles?

  a rejection could delete either. Both are just information your mind either lets in or filters out, depending on a story it already believes. Now, put Cole and Marissa's work side by side, because I think Cole is, without knowing it, a walking demonstration of what happens when you rewrite the theory of self Marissa is describing. Here's what should have happened according to self-verification theory. Cole gets cut from a team, told she's too small, and that rejection confirms whatever story she had already carried about not belonging.

• 16:10John R. Miles?

  She shrinks. She looks for smaller, safer proof that matches the smaller story. Some people do exactly that, and it's not a personal failure when they do. It's the theory working exactly as the research predicts. But that's not what Cole did. She didn't wait for the team to reverse the verdict, and she didn't need an external compliment to replace the old rejection. She changed what the rejection meant. "All I can do is go up." Isn't proof arriving from the outside, it's Cole overriding her own internal database in real time on

• 16:52John R. Miles?

  her own terms before anyone else agreed with her. I want to be honest with you about why this hits close to home for me. A decade ago, I went through a divorce. I won't pretend that wasn't its own version of rock bottom. It was. On the other side of it, I ended up rebuilding a career, married an incredible woman, and built a life that looks almost nothing like the one before it, including the show and the book I've spent the last two years writing, The Mattering Effect. I didn't get some outside validation telling me the divorce wasn't my fault, or that I was on the right track before I made a single

• 17:36John R. Miles?

  change. The proof came after I moved, not before. If I had waited for outside verification before I was willing to act, I'd probably still be waiting. That's the pattern underneath both of this week's conversations, and it's the whole idea behind the verification check. Two questions. Run them together right now if you want to. Question one: What specific proof? An apology? A promotion? Someone finally saying you belong? Am I currently waiting on before I let myself move forward? Question two, and this is the one that actually matters:

• 18:21John R. Miles?

  if that proof never arrives, is there a version of this where I go anyway? If your honest answer to question two is yes, Cole already showed you the move. You don't need the team to change their minds. You need to leave the dock. And if you're sitting with a story about yourself that keeps filtering out good evidence the way Marissa's research describes, treating love or success like static instead of signal, the fix isn't a bigger compliment, it's the smaller, harder work of being honest with yourself about

• 19:01John R. Miles?

  where the story came from and starting to build a new database, one honest entry at a time. So, here's where this leaves us. Cole Brouwer proved that you can move forward without ever getting the verdict reversed. Marissa Franco's research explains why so many of us are still sitting at the dock, waiting for proof that, according to the data, might not even change anything if it finally showed up. Real adaptability, in the identity and belonging sense of the word, isn't collecting enough outside evidence to finally believe you're allowed to act. It's building a theory of yourself honest

• 19:46John R. Miles?

  enough that neither the rejection nor the compliment gets to be the deciding vote. Here's your assignment, and I want you to do this tonight. Step one, the proof check. Name the specific external verdict you're waiting on right now. Then, ask yourself honestly, using Marissa's research, "If it arrived tomorrow, would you actually believe it, or would some part of you go looking for evidence to argue it down?" Step two, the "go anyway" move. Pick the smallest possible version of the thing you've been waiting for permission

• 20:31John R. Miles?

  to do. Do it tonight, without waiting for anyone to tell you that you're allowed. That's the whole move Cole made on the dock. Not a grand leap, just leaving before the painting felt finished. If either of these week's conversations changed how you think about whose approval you've been waiting on, send me a message on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram, or share this episode with someone who's still standing on their own dock. And make sure you're following Passion Struck so you don't miss what's coming next, because next week, we're taking the adaptive human somewhere different, into markets, money, and the

• 21:15John R. Miles?

  moments when millions of individually rational people make decisions that add up to collective madness. I'm rejoined by Professor Alex Edmonds, author of the new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. Alex studies a question that's really just this week's question scaled up to an entire economy. Why do smart people, Isaac Newton included, who lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble, abandon their own judgment and verify themselves against the crowd instead? Why does the stock market dip when a national soccer team loses or rise on a sunny day? We've spent

• 22:00John R. Miles?

  this series asking how one person adapts to a changing world. Next week, we ask what happens when millions of people's need for verification collide all at once, and what it takes to stay grounded when everyone around you has lost the plot. That's next time on Passion Struck. Take a quick listen.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  So, something which is front page and flashy and more quantitative, it might get a stronger reaction. Something which might lead to underreaction is off the front page. So, if something tends to be more qualitative, it might be more hidden. And it's not just hidden to me, it's hidden to you, it's hidden to other investors, because naturally we like to plump for something which is flashy and visible.

• 22:45John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, the proof of what you're waiting for might never come. That doesn't mean you're not ready. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.