How to Stop Seeking Validation and Start Living From Your Truth
A story of devotion, disruption, and the embodied courage to live from the inside out.
Some lives are built by instruction.
Others are built by listening.
This chapter is for the one who feels the fire in the chest and knows, without evidence, without permission that life is meant to be lived from the inside out.
Saturday morning.
The third day of 2026.
I’m sitting with a latte gone lukewarm, sunlight spilling across the table, and my heart feels like it’s about to split open, not from pain, but from pressure. The kind that comes when a decade of devotion finally begins to speak back.
Every seed I planted in silence is stirring. For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with a question humming beneath my skin:
Why are we even alive?
What is this strange, beautiful, terrifying game called life?
I invested thousands of dollars in personal development, before I knew how I would earn it back, or if I ever would. Each payment carried a whisper from my lineage: We only spend on what’s essential. We save. We survive.
But something else burned hotter. A rebellion so tender it felt holy.
I am the disruptor in my family, not because I’m better, but because I refused to be comfortable. My siblings chose stability, built lives that made sense, and I celebrate them deeply. As the eldest daughter in an Asian family, I know the weight of that role, the unspoken expectations, the silent measuring stick.
Joanne Genoza
My father could not understand my path.
To him, success was simple: employment, marriage, children. Anything outside that equation was nothing.
And so, without realizing it, I grew from a girl desperate to please her father into a woman willing to disappoint the world to remain loyal to her soul.
Who needs outer validation
when your heart is finally at peace
overflowing, steady, unashamed?
My search for a bigger why didn’t begin in a yoga studio or a bookshop. It began in desperation. I started meditating with no background, no philosophy, no idea what I was doing. I followed YouTube-guided meditations every morning as if my life depended on it. Because it did.
Joanne Genoza
And then one day, quietly, unmistakably, I heard it:
Share the whisper.
My entire body softened.
A lightness spread through my chest.
I listened without hesitation.
Until my eyes opened.
Logic rushed in like an interrogator.
What message?
Who do you think you are?
You don’t even know why you’re meditating.
Still, the voice returned.
This time, it reminded me of an old dream to travel. To trust.
That same day, I booked five one-way flights.
Within a month, I sold everything. Everything I thought I needed fell away. What didn’t fit into 30 kilograms was given away, objects, identities, certainty.
On October 2 of 2016, I flew out of Manila with no concrete plan, only a wild trust that life would meet me if I kept meeting myself. My body buzzed with excitement for the unknown. I told myself:
As long as I have my heart, and I keep listening, I’ll be led.
Life, of course, was not a smooth ride. It never is. But wherever I went, whoever I met, whatever I did, I treated everyone as a messenger. I listened deeply, not just with my ears, but with my body.
My body always knew.
My heart always answered, yes or no.
Discernment became my compass.
I listened to countless mentors, coaches, gurus, and questioned them all. Not from cynicism, but from sovereignty. I realized something liberating:
We all teach from experience.
Not to impose truth, but to share what happened when we took our lives seriously enough to experiment with them.
Like telling a friend about scuba diving. I can describe the silence, the weightlessness, the way the ocean holds you, but the truth is, you’ll only understand when you dive.
And when you do, I’ll be over the moon for you.
Because real knowing is embodied.
Here is what I know now:
Your life is not meant to be proven.
It is meant to be lived.
Every challenge is an initiation, an invitation to cultivate inner strength, deepen trust, and expand your capacity to stay open when certainty dissolves.
And when you move through it, when you witness yourself rise, something powerful happens.
Self-belief is born.
Not from applause.
Not from likes.
Not from recognition.
But from the quiet, undeniable moment when you say to yourself:
I did that.
I stayed.
I listened.
Outer validation is fleeting. It feeds the mind, then leaves it hungry again. The inner game, this is where real satisfaction lives.
Completion.
Overflow.
Integrity.
When you embody a truth fully, you no longer chase acknowledgment. You give from fullness, not from need.
That is leadership.
That is freedom.
Let's take our precious life as a living experiment.
Listen to our body.
Trust our inner knowing.
Move even when the path isn’t approved.
And then, share from our experience, not to be seen, but to serve. One embodied truth at a time, we create a domino effect of self-belief.
This is how our world changes.
Not through noise, but through coherence.
If you are reading this and something in your chest feels warm, tight, alive trust that.
You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are not lost.
You are in the middle of remembering who you are. And the inner game?
You are already playing it beautifully.
If you are ready to live from your inner authority,
to make decisions from clarity instead of fear,
to become the woman who trusts herself fully
I invite you into a private 1:1 call with me. Email me at genozajoanne@gmail.com
Let's be wildly alive, as we are design to be... you know it, by heart.
This is for the human you are becoming:
grounded, sovereign, self-led, and deeply at home in her life.
With love,
Joanne Genoza
Joanne Genoza
Joanne Genoza