The Importance of Self Validation: The Good, the Bad, and the Neutral
Self-validation involves a lot of acceptance and acknowledgement to work correctly. For example, when you engage in self validation, it may be over…
● Some difficult emotions you’re currently experiencing
● A choice you made (or will be making sometime soon) that is going to strongly affect yourself or someone else
● An aspect of your personality
● Something you want for yourself, such as reaching a major goal or making a dream come true
● The way you like to present yourself to the rest of the world
● …and many other things!
When you are mulling over any of these emotions and thoughts, you can engage in self validation by accepting what happened, who you are, what you want for yourself, a decision you want to make, and more.
As your emotions and thoughts begin to arise, you can self-validate by acknowledging exactly how you feel and what you’re thinking. Accepting these thoughts and feelings – even if they aren’t great or aren’t what you thought they would be – is an important step in the self-validation process.
You can self-validate your happy feelings, bad feelings, good choices, and bad choices. It simply means that you can accept these experiences as your truth so you can begin to move forward with them.
This is hard for adults to both learn and embrace, but even harder for our teens. As a coach with over 25 years of experience working with teens, I can help your teen take a deeper look into their own feelings and choices.