• Book: I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships (Amazon, Audible)
• Article: Validation: The Most Powerful Relationship Skill You Were Never Taught (Original Article)
• Article: How Do You Validate Someone When They’re Angry With You?

Forgive typos and odd grammatical mistakes—this was transcribed using the magic of AI.

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the I Hear You podcast. I'm your host, Michael Sorensen, and I'm stoked about today's episode. It will be well worth your time. I guarantee it. And that's because this episode focuses in on a skill known as validation. And it is seriously like a superpower. It's the skill I learned through years of therapy that had a profound impact on my life, so much so that I wrote a book about it because I couldn't find any resources that taught it in the way I felt was most valuable when I wrote the book. I wondered if others would find it as valuable as I had. And yet, just a little over two years after publication, the answer is a resounding yes. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have benefited from better understanding this skill. And I'm going to do my best to distill it down into forty five minutes today. So in this episode, we're going to defined validation and explain why it's so powerful. We're going to talk about invalidating statements and why they actually harm our relationship, even though we use them in an attempt to help. We're going to dive into some fascinating research on how validation actually comes us physically and helps us stay positive. And we're going to give you practical tips for applying this and actually seeing results to day. I'm not even exaggerating. It's really that simple and that powerful. All right. Enough of the intro. Let's get to it.

[00:01:44] We're going to start off today's episode with a story. This is actually the same story that I lead out with in the first chapter of my book, because it was the first time in my life that I realized the true power that validation has to connect and to mend and strengthen relationships and to help us feel closer to those around us. This was over 10 years ago.

[00:02:09] I had not yet met my wife and I was still very much in the dating scene. And I met this met this woman. I thought she was beautiful. Know she was sharp. It was she seemed fun. And I got her number and I asked her out for just something simple. I think it was ice cream. You know, the next week and I thought was gonna be a great time. So I picked her up and pretty quickly I realized she was not the same woman that I had met just a week prior. She was very closed off. She you know what we were talking I would ask her questions and she would just give me one word answers. And she just really did not feel like she wanted to be there. And I remember sitting there thinking, what did I misread the situation here? I mean, is she just not she just not into me? You know, I don't know what was going on. I didn't know what was going on there. But clearly, she wasn't interested in the conversation we were having and she didn't seem interested in me. And it was so bad that literally after 10 or 15 minutes on the date, I thought I should probably just take her home, becau...