Motivation
Struggling to Achieve Your Goals? Try Validation
Author Caroline Fleck, Ph.D., on how validation can transform your life.
Posted February 17, 2025 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Validation communicates that you are mindful, understand, and empathize with another person's experience.
- Fleck shares how practicing validation can transform your life in her new book.
- Self-validation can unlock your potential to achieve your personal goals.
Caroline Fleck is a clinical psychologist with expertise in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a treatment for borderline personality disorder. According to Fleck, DBT was the first behavioral therapy to balance an emphasis on change with one on acceptance. “The underlying message in DBT is, ‘You’re doing the best you can, and you need to do better.’ DBT therapists learn validation skills to help them communicate acceptance, which paradoxically motivates clients to change,” she explained.
For Fleck, validation skills enhanced not only her clinical work but her personal life as well. Implementing validation in tough parenting moments, marital disagreements, and even moments of self-compassion turned out to be life-changing. “There have been countless books for non-academic audiences on using reinforcement, punishment, and other good old behavioral change strategies to help folks build better habits and influence others,” Fleck shared. “My firsthand experience and personal belief in the importance of validation is why I decided to take these skills out of the therapy sector and into the hands of everyday people.”
Her new book, Validation, offers readers an inside look into the nuanced validation skills that DBT therapists train long and hard to master, helping everyday people become more intentional communicators and lead with compassion in their own lives.
Fleck shared more about her book and the power of validation with Psychology Today.
Q: How do you define validation? How is it counter to the way most people communicate in daily life?
I define validation as “communication that one is mindful, understands, and empathizes with another person’s experience, thereby accepting it as valid. Put simply, validation shows that “you’re there, you get it, and you care.”
Although most people have absorbed the message that it’s important to validate others, they’ve also internalized the belief that they should never seek “external validation,” as though actively seeking validation indicates weakness or neediness. In this case, they appear to be confusing “external validation” with “praise.” Praise is a judgment, albeit a positive one. It says, “I like how you look/perform/fill in the blank.”
Validation, on the other hand, communicates acceptance. It says, “I accept you regardless of how you look or perform.” While there’s nothing wrong with praise, desperately seeking it can become problematic, as you’ll inevitably have to distort yourself to meet or exceed others’ expectations. Seeking relationships in which you feel accepted, however, only requires you to be true to yourself.
Q: This time of year, many people are setting new goals for themselves. How might practicing self-validation help them to successfully make those changes?
In orienting folks toward validating others, I often advise them to consider the type of response they would want to hear if they were in the other person’s shoes. A friend who is livid in telling you about how their Ikea order got delayed for the nth time likely wants to receive validation, not problem-solving on how they can be more interpersonally effective when talking to customer service. Ironically, though, when it comes to validating ourselves, I advise people to be as kind to themselves as they would be to others. Most people operate under the mistaken belief that if they “go easy” on themselves, they won’t achieve their goals. However, research suggests the opposite is true—people high in self-compassion and self-validation show lower levels of processes like rumination and neuroticism, which interfere with goal attainment.
Most people’s negative self-talk has become so ingrained that they don’t even realize how much they are berating themselves to stay on the straight and narrow. To increase awareness of this inner dialogue and cultivate self-validation, I encourage folks to say what they are thinking out loud. Notice all of the “shoulds” that are operating to shame you into your goals and replace them with the chain of cause and effect that explains why you are experiencing whatever it is you’re experiencing in the moment. For instance, if you’re saying, “I shouldn’t be on TikTok right now; I should be spending time with my kids,” I’d encourage you to say this thought out loud or under your breath. Instead of leading with “should,” solve for why. Why did you default to TikTok? Are you exhausted or needing a break? Are you possibly succumbing to the addictive quality of the app that’s intended to keep users engaged and returning for more? Explanations are not excuses. Understanding the obstacles that make achieving your goals difficult is critical to overcoming them.
Q: In our culture, we tend to resist suffering and aim for perfection. You share your own powerful narrative about embracing suffering as a pathway to experiencing deeper connection and empathy. How do you hope readers shift their perspective on suffering after reading your book?
I did not intend to harp on the concept of suffering when I started writing about validation, but that’s exactly what happened. I was aware that I relied on suffering to fuel my work and help me validate others; I just hadn’t intended to emphasize that angle in the book. I suppose I worried that talking about suffering would bum people out or distract them from the skills I’m teaching. The drafts I initially wrote for the first couple of chapters didn’t mention anything about my personal experience with depression or multiple sclerosis, for instance, but they also didn’t resonate with me. In the course of my writing, I found that I could not adequately explore how we communicate with ourselves and others without speaking to suffering.
I fully believe that if you can find a way to use whatever suffering you’re experiencing to reduce suffering in others, that suffering will have been for something. I make the obvious connection that having suffered enables us to empathize and genuinely validate others' suffering. If you’ve been through a divorce or lost a spouse, you’re uniquely positioned to understand, empathize, connect with, and validate someone who is going through that particular realm of hell. But I also discuss how the secret to validating one’s own suffering is to channel the negative energy it creates in ways that reduce suffering in others. My experience has been that finding the utility in an experience functions to affirm its validity.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer just after completing my book. The publication had to be delayed indefinitely, and I needed to take time off from my practice to undergo chemotherapy and radiation. The future felt unbearably bleak, but my next step was obvious—I needed to foster some kittens. It was the only way I could think of to channel the suffering that was eating me alive. And, by God, if those kittens didn’t save my life! I can’t imagine how I would have survived what followed if I hadn’t been faced with the good that came out of it every day (yeah, we totally ended up adopting the kittens). With regard to suffering, the hope I have for my readers is that they will see it as the hand that forces them to relieve suffering in others.
