Monday Morning Motivation – Validate
(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Validate
Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time studying and learning about relationships. Learning about what leads to a strong connection between individuals. For the month of October I’m going to take on the issue of connections. I’ll be talking about the effect of the emotional mind, the rational mind, and the wise mind. How validation ties all three of these together; and, finally, how when these four things come together successfully the result is that of connection. My hope is that at the end of the month, you will have a better understanding of why you think and act the way you do, why others think and act the way they do, and how to leverage this understanding to improve your relationships – personally, professionally, and spiritually.
Do you know how to validate another person’s circumstance?
So the last three weeks we have spent our time inside our own minds. We have gone over how we filter things through our emotional mind, develop courses of action in our rational mind, and how we can maximize our probability for success when we combine the two sides and operate in our wise mind.
There is just one little problem. We don’t live ONLY in our mind! We live in a world where there are literally billions of others; and, our relationships with them are what make life so rich!
And each of them has an emotional, a rational, and a wise part of their mind. Today we are going to talk about one of the most important skills that you can possess in dealing with other individuals – the skill of being able to validate the reality that other individuals are facing.
One of my favorite sayings of all time is:
- Perception is reality
We each have our own perceptions; and, therefore, we each have our own reality.
So guess what happens when you decide to “state the facts” to another individual that does NOT perceive them in the same way? Well, since perception is reality you pretty much tell them that their reality does NOT exist as your perception (reality) is often entirely different than yours.
The individual living in their purely rational mind is going to point out that their facts ARE right, that the other individual needs to FACE these facts and that WHEN they do that, things will improve immediately. To which I respond “How’s that working out for you?”
Here’s a HUGE secret (not really) for anyone reading this:
- People want to know that they are being heard
Put another way:
- People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care
This leads us to the skill of validation. When you validate another person you:
- Truly listen to what they are saying;
- You communicate back to them BOTH what they said AND what it SOUNDS like they are feeling.
An example would be:
- It sounds like you are feeling upset because your boss did not listen to you about the issues that you needed his help on so that you could get him the report he needed.
The key is to:
- Listen
- Understand how they feel
- Understand the challenge that they are faced with
When you validate, you are NOT saying that they are right. You are NOT agreeing with what they feel. You are NOT agreeing with their assessment of the facts. You are NOT agreeing with what they are proposing.
You are HEARING them, letting them know that you understand their FEELINGS, and letting them know that you understand they are suggesting. Think about that for a moment.
How would you feel if you knew the person you were talking with listened to you, understood your feelings, and understood what you would like to do?
When you learn to validate, you will have the ability to connect (next week’s topic) on a much deeper level with individuals.
That brings us to this week’s question:
- What would your relationships look like if you were able to develop the ability to validate others?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.
Curt
(Note: Each week I publish “Monday Morning Motivation” in the hopes that one person will find a bit of inspiration and that inspiration will have a positive impact on their life. My motivation comes from experiences, reading, sermons, and discussions.)
Blog posts from this past week:
At F5 Financial Planning we focus on helping individuals and families find balance between faith, friends and family, fitness and finance. We make sure that they have the financial freedom to enjoy those things in life that are important to them. And while we believe the left-brain facts and data are critical; we work with our clients to get them in the right state of mind to focus on the goals they want to achieve.
Some other posts that you might like: