How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 412

to do is express her feelings and Tom will probably feel supported that
his feelings are okay.
Often someone needing validation will tell their story over and over
again to different people, unconsciously searching for someone who
feels the same way they do. Natural validation works well and does not
require any specific skills. It is limited, however, to situations where the
speaker and the listener feel the same way.
The Skill of Validation
When you do not feel the same way as someone you are listening to
does, you can still validate their feelings. Doing so requires that you
identify in yourself "sub-feelings" or different parts of yourself. While
you may have a primary or dominant feeling about something, you can
often have sub-feelings that are quite different.
When a friend moves away, a person might say she feels sad. While
sadness may be the largest single feeling she has, she may have subfeelings as well. She might feel angry at the friend for leaving. She might
feel relieved that the friend is finally going to do what he has been
talking about for years. Or she might feel afraid that her friend may be
making a mistake.
There is a common misconception that we only feel one thing at a time.
This error can make it difficult for a person to articulate his feelings. As
soon as a person identifies one feeling, he hears a nagging voice inside
saying “Oh no you don’t, you feel just the opposite!” Trying to decide
on a single feeling with which to represent oneself can result in a
confusing inner conflict, causing a person to become tongue tied. By
allowing for the existence of sub-feelings, even contradictory ones, we
can identify and express a more thorough picture of how we feel.
Identifying sub-feelings can also help us validate someone whose
predominant feeling is different than our own. Imagine someone
describing to a friend how angry he is at the thief who just held up a
store he was in:
"I was so angry I just wanted to follow the guy out and beat him up!"
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