 According to American Singer Chair, women are the real architects of the society. It's all women today on The Advocate. I will be talking about validation today. Who do we entrust with validating us? Friends or family members? Making a debut is Titi Ibilola and she's here to educate us on financial literacy. Titi Lopue Aue speaks on post-noctural agreements. And finally, Ennitor wants to clear the air on the differences between entrepreneurship and employment. Sit back. Your panelists are here to discuss the issues in an atmosphere of laughter and seriousness. Stay with us. Validation. Who should validate us? Let's discuss validation. This strange question came to my mind. Who should we entrust with validating us? Should it be ourselves, our spouses, our friends or our family or maybe even random strangers? Validation in this concept is the act of receiving commendation or approval or even praises for who we are or what we have done. Validation is critical to us all as human as it reaffirms our confidence and strengthens us to keep on going. Validation can come in form of people making a call to encourage you or to tell you, bravo, you are good enough. Or when someone says words that put you in a better place and makes you want to strive for better. Everyone wants to be validated. Everybody needs to be validated. Validation can make you see yourself in a different light. It makes you believe you can do anything. Gives you superpowers or at least a sense of one. Validation gives us the courage to tap into a part of ourselves that we do not know existed. When validated, we feel accepted, respected, wanted and loved. In the pursuit for validation, we must be very wary of whom we give this sensitive responsibility to. This is because the person that has the power to validate you also has the power to tear your self-esteem into shreds at the slightest provocation. Just a short while ago, I put out a poll asking the question, who is responsible for validating us? The response was quite diverse, with some noting that our family is responsible for validating us because they know us very well. Some said friends because they are always with us. They must be able to encourage us and push us further and continue to chair us on. Others selected the spouse option, noting that after all, we are going to be together forever. So they must encourage one another to succeed. It is their responsibility to validate you at every turn. A few responses selected the self option, i.e. self-validation. They noted that one must be able to look into the mirror and validate oneself. They argued that this would make you less dependent on others and what they think about you. So what is my opinion on this matter? After all, it's an opinion piece. Personally, I believe that all of these people should validate us, at least to an extent. However, I strongly align with self-validation. It is our responsibility to validate ourselves. Indeed, you must be able to look in the mirror and chair yourself up. Something very similar to what is a ray of the TV series insecure does. My position is premised on the fact that every other person is human and does imperfect. On some days, when they are feeling bad or gray, they can hurt you. They can hurt your self-esteem. This is because they understand and they know your insecurities. So while our family, friends, spouses, and random strangers can validate us, we must strive for self-validation. Any time. I know, I know. I'm wondering why I took the deep breath too. But I honestly, I guess the whole opinion piece kind of threw me back a bit in the sense that I didn't see it coming. Yes, I know. But at the same time, I strongly would say I agree with you about self-validation. I align with the principle of self-validation. But one thing I have started seeing with principles around self-validation, your own perception, and everything is that. We're tending to become slightly self-centered. So it's almost like if I've already told myself I'm good enough, if I've told myself that I'm great enough, if I've validated my sense of being and importance, then what you or you actually come to the table to say to me can be put to the backbone. But personally, naturally, my first option would be self-validation because like you rightly said, if somebody else validates you, and that's your strongest source of validation, they have the same power to tear you down. I mean, I can say that from personal experience because for a long time, I had a best friend who was like my... The person hasn't torn me down per se, but I realized that the dependence on other people's validation was a tad bit too much. I don't know what your experience has been like. I strongly agree with self-validation. I recently just had to tell someone something like, I see her, she has a drive to succeed, but she's always listening to what people have to say. Like my sister would call it, exactly. And I had to tell her and I said, you have to think what do I want? Where should I be right now? Then work towards it. Don't concern yourself too much with what others think because that will slow your own progress down because they're living their lives and this is a true life situation. She's a makeup artist. Someone advised her that leave this makeup and go into influencing. And then she decided that, okay, I'll do that. And then she abandoned makeup and went into influencing. Six months down the line, that person is still in makeup. Oh my goodness. She's struggling with influencing. Now she wants to go back to her makeup. And I said, you see? You see why listening to other people is not going to get you far in life. You need to validate yourself and know where you want to be. I don't know. Titi, do you watch your thoughts on this whole self-validation or non-self-validation? I agree with your self-validation first. However, have your ears out for loved ones to see whether they can also keep you in check where you feel like you're going out of line. But the most important is how you feel about yourself, your self-esteem. You analyze yourself and process yourself first before carrying other people out. So that way, whatever information you are being passed is just coming as an add-on as opposed to changing the whole way you feel about yourself. So self-validation, definitely. Let me chip it. Let's look at it from this angle. So I have two daughters. I have this vocational 12-year-old self-independent, a leader type, a personality all the way, cleric all the way. Then I have another daughter. It's quite melancholy. And you have to push her. And when I close my eyes to say a prayer, I keep saying, God, help Tishe believe in herself. Help Tishe know that Tishe, because what I now did was I printed so many self-validation words. I'm a type of a personality, so I validate myself. I don't need nobody to imagine stuff like this. Obviously. My seven-year-old. She'll say, I can't do it. And I'm like, so I just printed like 10 different self-validation quotes. Tishe can, so she does. Tishe believes, Tishe achieves. How do you get children to actually understand that they need to imbibe self-validation, particularly when it doesn't come to them naturally? See, I think that, I mean, as a mom, and because I have kind of related with you before now and again, I almost think that with our two personalities, I think we kind of, as parents, as mothers especially, we are kind of meant to guide them, lead them and let them be the best version of themselves. True. Sometimes as mothers, we want them to be. Because it's really when we are full, first people like us. We want them to be all up there, all everything, all the energy. Let them bring the energy to the room. Let them have that. My first interest in it, in my case is the opposite. My younger daughter is the one that is, oh my goodness, her type A is worse than mine and maybe yours. And sometimes I'm thinking like really, she's my first century child. No, no, no, we have to learn that. At some point, like my baby girl, you're becoming a bully. Like she's so all out. And her older sister is so, she's, yes, there too, but she's so timid about it and she doesn't want to fail at anything. True, yeah? So she steps back from even going forward and says, I can't do that. And we're like, no, you can't. You can't. So what I have learned to be able to maybe answer this query that you kind of brought up about, you know, people, children who maybe don't exhibit the self-validation that we four force people do exhibit, might be to actually just allow them to bloom in their own time while putting their hand behind. Because sometimes waving a bit too much for them. True, right? Well, sometimes too strong for them. I also think we, if you affirm them more. True. She does something small and you celebrate it. You encourage her and you make it a big deal. She then builds confidence in herself. Yes. And then it comes up. No wonder we're learning now to swim. Pamela, of course, she's an award-winning swimmer, you know. And Tisha for me went to, we all went to the same swimming school and we said, Tisha, you're six. I believe that by six everybody's ready to go. Now start your swimming classes. She did learn to swim in five lessons. But Tisha will never go the full length. She said, mommy, see, I can swim and she'll go this way. And I'm like, my money is not vertical and my body is not horizontal. You know, so I just keep saying to Tisha, Tisha can do it, so she does. Tisha can do it, so she does. So truly, not everybody is, well, self-independent and self-validate as we are. But at the end of the day, it's important, it's pertinent that you must remember that if you put that responsibility in the hand of somebody else, you have also given them the authority to shred yourself and steam at every given time.