• 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...

[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...