• Research: The Harvard Study of Adult Development
• Book: I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships (Amazon, Audible)

Forgive the occasional errors—this was done using the magic of AI.

[00:00:00] This is the 'I Hear You' Podcast with Michael Sorensen, Episode 1.

[00:00:24] Hello, everybody, and welcome to the I Hear You podcast. I am excited you're here; I'm excited to be here because this podcast is the result of a lot of work, a lot of preparation. And I'm thrilled because the core focus of this podcast is to arm you with practical, oftentimes simple, but very actionable skills to improve every relationship of your life. We're gonna talk today about a fascinating study conducted by Harvard researchers that was aiming to focus in or hone in on what leads to happy, healthy lives. In fact, they followed people for over 80 years now seeking information, trying to understand what the, "secret" is. And we're gonna get into what that in just a moment here. I'm very excited because this podcast focuses on relationships and I'm talking every relationship, not just romantic. We're talking about business relationships with your boss, with your colleagues, with your direct reports. If you're a manager, we're talking about your friendships. Use your social relationships, your family, parents, siblings, children. Really, every relationship of your life is going to benefit from the principles we're going to talk about today.

[00:01:37] So before we get into it, I want to provide a little bit of background on who I am and why I'm here and where I'm getting all this information that I'm going to be sharing with you.

[00:01:47] I'm a pretty ordinary guy. If I'm being totally honest with you, I'm not a therapist. I'm not a doctor. I'm not even a formal you could say researcher. My my background and where I gained a lot of my insights here was actually through four years of therapy, about 10 years ago, maybe eleven years ago, I started seeing a therapist to get help working through a number of different things in my life. And I found pretty quickly that while or rather in an effort to heal those issues, I was learning how to handle every other relationship, every other issue that was coming up in my life, issues with roommates, issues with family members, issues with my romantic partners, issues at work, so on and so forth. Because essentially what my therapist was teaching me were just skills about life, how to handle difficult, difficult situations, how to handle great, great opportunities and great situations. And I found pretty quickly that this was transforming my life. One skill in particular, one principal skill, whatever you want to call it, known as validation was so transformative that I sought to share it with others. Long story short, I couldn't find a book. I couldn't find many articles on the topic. And so I felt impressed to write my own. And that book, titled I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships, is consistently an Amazon #1 bestseller.

[00:03:09] In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, it was at the top of Audible' s bestseller list. It has just exploded. And now I am asked to participate in other podcast interviews, radio interviews; I travel and I speak at corporations across the globe; I coach people now one-on-one to help pay forward everything that I've...