[00:00:00] Hello, friends! It’s been a while.

[00:00:03] As you know, I wrapped up season one of the podcast earlier this year to give myself some more time to focus on a couple of key projects that I felt impressed to pursue. One of which I’m excited to announce today.

[00:00:16] What you may not know, though, is that at the time of this recording, I still work a 9-5 as the VP of Marketing for a global health and fitness company. And, I manage a couple of rental properties. And, my wife and I launched a new mobile app earlier this year. And…we have a new baby on the way. Which means, I’ve only been able to run this podcast, meet with coaching clients, work on a new book, and do interviews speaking engagements, and business trainings because of the incredible support of my wife, my fantastic assistant Ali, a very generous PTO offering from my company, and most of my evenings and weekends.

[00:00:56] Yet the irony was not lost on me that every hour I poured into teaching people how to build stronger, healthier, happier relationships was one less hour spent strengthening my own. My wife and I agreed on what we felt was a good balance between work time and together time, but I still had weeks where I was working more than I knew was sustainable. So, when the impression came to create an online training program to really help people master what I talk about here on the podcast, I knew two things:

[00:01:25] First, I knew I had to do it, because I knew how valuable these skills and practices are. And I realized the only way to really teach them as thoroughly and practically as I wanted, would be through this new online video format.

[00:01:39] Second, I knew that I couldn’t take on a project of that magnitude without sacrificing something else. So, I tied off season one of the podcast, paused a couple of other side projects, hired some extra help, and doubled down. And I spent the next six months churning away at my most ambitious project yet, the Extraordinary Relationships Master Course.

[00:02:02] This new course contains over 10 hours of sharply focused training, broken into 12 chapters and over 100 videos. It addresses the same topics you hear me speak about on the show, but takes it into the mastery level and talks about many more things that I haven’t yet spoken about on the show. I get into specifics of how to do the things I preach here, and then give you the tools and training you need, and then back you up with an exclusive online support community – something I’m pretty excited about, even though it’s still in its infancy.

[00:02:36] In the course, I discuss how to recognize the need for boundaries, how to set them, and how to hold and enforce them, and how to use them to connect better with others.

[00:02:45] Again, we’ve touched on that at a fairly high level here, but we go much deeper and dove into many questions that people have written about to hopefully really round out that understanding.

[00:02:55] I dive deep into validation, as you would expect, including how to validate people when you don’t agree with them, how to validate when someone’s angry with you, how to deal with constant complainers, how to invite your partner to learn about validation, and much more.

[00:03:10] We make you a master at identifying and getting out of drama. In the course, we tackle the daming habit of codependency and give you practical, proven methods for healing it. We go into conflict management, how to teach thes...

• 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...

• Book: I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships (Amazon, Audible)
• Article: Is Your Partner Making You Unhappy?
• Article: Boundaries: The Secret to Finding Balance and Happiness in Life

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

[00:00:00] Hello, hello and welcome back to the I Hear You podcast, I'm your host, Michael Sorensen. In today's episode actually picks up where we left off in last week's episode, talking about personal responsibility in relationships. And I know that doesn't sound very sexy when we're talking about relationships, but this is my second episode here because this is a foundational principle, a core principle that we all have to understand if we truly want to live happy, healthy, connected lives. So today we're going to explore a handful of different things. We're going to explore resentment, including how resentment forms in a relationship and whose responsibility it is to clean it up. We're going to discuss the sneaky little lies that we buy into that sap, our happiness and energy, as well as ways to get out of that victim mentality and regain our power and happiness when we feel we've lost it.

[00:00:53] This is a powerful principle that applies to every relationship in your life, romantic, professional or otherwise. Let's get to it.

[00:01:20] All right. I want to start off with a question. Whose job is it to make you happy?

[00:01:27] Who has the power to make or break your day? Who is it? Can just get underneath your skin and then 30 seconds can can set you off on this downward spiral for the rest of the day, week, month, year. I don't know. Or on the flip side. Who do you feel you are supposed to make happy?

[00:01:46] Are there people that you feel like their happiness hinges on whether or not you show up a certain way, whether or not you say the right things, whether or not you dress a certain way? Do you feel like you have a responsibility to control other people's happiness or satisfaction with you?

All healthy relationships require a solid understanding of the following truth: you and only you are responsible for your own happiness.

[00:02:11] No one can make you happy or sad. No one can ruin your day and no one can break your heart without you letting them. Now, to some of you, that might sound crazy, you might be calling B.S. right here, right now, saying, I don't believe that. Well, I have to be very clear here. First off, I'm not saying that people's actions won't affect you. I'm not saying people can't say hurtful things, they can't do things that will affect you because they absolutely can, both physically and emotionally.

[00:02:38] But what I'm talking about here is that your happiness is not contingent on what other people do want and on what other people say your happiness as a direct result with how you interpret certain things. It's a direct result of how you choose to react when things like that happen, because people will absolutely do things you don't like. They're going to forget important events. They're going to say unkind things to you. They're going to show up in ways that you that you don't want them to show up. All of t...

• 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...