How I Built Better Relationships With People After Reading One Book
Michael Sorensen, author of I Hear You, offers an effective and affordable way to improve your relationships.
“I hear you” is the book that helped to improve my relationship and become happier. Now I have more profound contact with my colleagues at work, and I better understand my fiancee.
Seeking to understand how other people are feeling is a critical human skill as a species. The author offers a simple but effective way not to listen but to hear people.
WHAT IS VALIDATION?
Michael Sorensen claims that listening to whom you talk is half the work. It is much more important to try to understand and then accept what you have heard. To hear is the secret to a productive conversation, and this is what validation is. The validation formula is simple:
“I hear you and I understand your feelings. I believe that there is nothing wrong with these feelings.”
Accept the feelings of others or not
You can react to the words of your conversationalist in two ways. On the one hand, you support him. On the other, you answer as if you want to dismiss his feelings. In the book, we have an example:
Let’s say your friend is anxious about an upcoming exam. Compare the two answers:
1) “Come on, you’ll do great, I’m sure of that.”
2) “I understand. The final exam is challenging.”
In the first answer, we don’t accept friend feelings. In the second, we empathize with him. We accept his feelings and share them.
There are no good or bad feelings about emotional life. There’re only our interpretations. Pull yourself together — this is a bit of joke advice. In contrast, accepting responses give the green light to all emotions.
For validation, it isn’t necessary to always agree with the talker. Accepting the feelings doesn’t mean sharing his point of view.
How to develop empathy for validation
Michael Sorensen assumes that everyone can develop empathy. Here are his tips:
- Show curiosity about other people more often. Ask meaningful questions about what happened more often.
- Look at the other person’s face more often. In conversation, your worries will capture you. You won’t be attentive to the reaction of another person. You even won’t be looking at his face.
- Imagine that you are talking to a small child. It would be much easier to feel his vulnerability. You’ll reduce the degree of aggression in a difficult conversation.
- Pay more attention to your emotions. To recognize other people’s emotions is difficult if you ignore your own.
- Don’t judge your feelings. Do not avoid them, do not ignore them. You have to catch yourself when you are not accepting your feelings.
HOW TO BUILD BETTER RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE
The book offers us four practical steps that will lead you to a better relationship.
1. Listen with empathy
You have to listen with empathy to understand emotions, not only words. There’re several principles of empathic communication:
- During the dialogue, clarify whether you understand everything correctly. A very effective way to be on the same page with the interlocutor is to ask clarifying questions. (“You look worried.” or “Did it happen last Saturday?”)
- The fact that you’re interested in the conversation must be clean. If you’ve responded to someone’s urge to talk while you work, close your laptop. Take off your headphones, even if no music is playing.
- Be on the same wavelength with the talker. Would you mind showing respect for his sadness and excitement? A passive reaction to sincere feelings hurts no less than deliberate criticism.
- Do not rush to interfere with the situation. Do not tell unless asked to do so. A person wants to speak out as a rule because he needs to be heard, not advised.
- Please don’t add more negativity to the situation, but do not embellish it either. “At least it could have been worse”, “You did great” while someone made a serious mistake.
2. Accept the other person’s feelings
Here you have to recall the steps of validation:
- You embrace the emotions of others
- Justify them
You don’t need to correct the situation or share the opinion of the interlocutor.
If the situation is familiar to you, then inform the talker about it. There is no need to say, “I understand you perfectly.” We cannot know his feelings. We all feeling differently.
Say, “I know this feeling.” But if the situation isn’t familiar to you, then be sincere and tell about it. You show respect for other people’s circumstances.
3. Offer support, but be careful.
You can find out if the other person is ready to receive feedback in two ways:
- ask how you can help directly;
- ask if you can share your opinion about the situation described.
If you haven’t received consent in return, it is better not to express your opinion. When you have already begun to voice your opinion, beware of pitfalls:
- Start your advice with an acceptance. (“I know this feeling very well. This is how I see it”);
- Use “I” not “you”. (There is a big emotional difference between the phrases “You are wrong” and “I think you are wrong”);
- More careful of the “but”. Often, he devalues the whole first part of what you already said. (“I remember how upset you are, but Tiffany feels even worse”);
- Avoid categorical words “always”, “constantly”, “never”. They rarely reflect an accurate picture. Soften your opinion with the “I”. (“I think you always do this”).
4. Accept the other person’s feelings one more time
Whatever emotions a person shares with you, he decided on something important — to open up to you. The final accepting comment will convince him of the correctness of this decision.
Your conversationalist will understand that now he can confide in you. He will speak without the risk of running into neglect or indifference.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Validation is not a practice that takes years to master. Validation is an effective way to teach you to hear people close to you from today.
The ability to accept other people’s feelings disposes people to you. Also, it teaches you to understand the feelings of others better.
Develop empathy. Empathy makes it easier for you and your friends and loved ones to open up to each other.
Thank you for reading
