Validation-Framework.txt

The ACCEPTED Validation Framework: 8 Steps Every Co-Founder Needs to Know
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For 50 years, cognitive behavioral therapy has been the gold standard for mental health treatment. But for a specific group of patients, it was actually making them worse.
CBT's big idea is simple. Change your thoughts, change your feelings. Sounds reasonable, but for people in real emotional crisis, being told to just think about it differently felt like telling someone that their pain wasn't real.
I'm an executive coach who works with startup founders that are on the verge of blowing up their companies, not growing them, destroying them. And these eight steps are the single most useful tool I found for getting two people who are really frustrated with each other to actually listen. This is the ACCEPTED validation framework. Here's how it works and why it might even be more powerful than love.
CBT works by helping people challenge distorted thinking. You believe nobody likes you. CBT says, let's look at the evidence. Let's reframe that thought. But in the 1980s, psychologist Marsha Linehan was working with patients with borderline personality disorder, people with extreme emotional sensitivity, and she found that CBT was backfiring. These patients felt like their therapist was telling them their feelings were wrong. The reframing felt like a rejection.
So Linehan developed a new approach called dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT, and the core innovation is this: before you help someone change their thinking, you first make them feel understood. You have to validate their experience, not agree with it. Validate it. That distinction matters.
Now, psychologist Caroline Flack took these ideas and wrote a book called Validation that breaks down this skill into a practical framework that anyone can learn. And when I read it, I immediately saw the application to my work coaching startup founders through conflict.
Because what I've seen over and over again in my coaching practice are two co-founders who sit down, and the first thing they want to do is argue about who is right. They want to fix the problem. They want to debate the decision. But the reason they can't resolve anything is that neither person feels heard. They are stuck in the same trap that those BPD patients were in, getting problem solving when what they actually need is validation.
So what is validation really? It is the act of making someone feel seen, heard and understood. It's communicating that their feelings make sense given their situation. That's it. It's not praise. It's not agreement. It's not telling someone that they're right. It's telling them that they're not crazy for feeling the way they do.
Let me give you a founder example. Your co-founder comes to you and says, I feel like you don't trust me to run the sales process. The common response might be, that's not true. I do trust you. I just think that we should review the pipeline together. Sounds reasonable, right? But what your co-founder just heard is your feelings are wrong. You're making something out of nothing. And now they're more defensive than ever.
A validating response would be something more like, I can see why you'd feel that way, especially since I've been jumping into your deals without asking. That would bug me too. You haven't agreed that you don't trust them. You've acknowledged that their interpretation makes sense given what's happening. And now the conversation can actually go somewhere. This is the unlock that most founders miss. You do not have to concede your position to validate someone's experience.
Doctor Flack lays out eight micro steps for validation using the acronym ACCEPTED: A-C-C-E-P-E-D. Think of it as a ladder. The bottom rungs are simple and low risk. The higher you climb, the more powerful the connection, but also the more you can get wrong. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through each one and show you how it can be applied to co-founder dynamics.
Let's start with A. A stands for Attend. This is the foundation. Put your phone down. Close your laptop. Make eye contact. Use verbal cues like "mm-hm" or "go on." This sounds basic but I can tell you that there are co-founder sessions where things start to break down because I see a founder wander off, whether they're distracted or they're just no longer seem interested in the conversation.
I've seen people check Slack while their co-founder is telling them something vulnerable. I've seen people physically turn away or take off their glasses and rub their eyes. And when you do things like that, your co-founder no longer feels like you're listening. And if that's true, then nothing else is going to land.
So if you're genuinely not in the headspace to listen, you should say so. You should say something like, I want to give this my full attention. Can we do this in an hour or can I submit this thing first? That is honestly itself a form of validation. But if you are present and you are saying you're ready to listen, then demonstrate it through your actions and through your words.
Okay, next we have the first C: Copy. Also called mirroring. You repeat back what the person just said using their words. Your co-founder says, I feel like I'm doing all the fundraising alone. You say, you feel like you're doing it alone. That's it. Don't clean it up. Don't rephrase it into something more polished. If they say I'm pissed, don't say you're feeling frustrated. Use their language.
This does two things. It proves that you're actually processing what they said, and it slows the conversation down, which is almost always what a heated co-founder conflict needs.
The second C is Contextualize. This is where you use what you know about the person's history to put their reaction into context. If your co-founder is upset about being left out of a key hire decision and you know that in their last startup, they were pushed out by a co-founder who made a unilateral decision, you might say something like, I know being cut out of decisions is something that really burned you before. So I can see why this would feel like a pattern.
That kind of response shows that you see them as a whole person, not just someone who's overreacting to today's incident. You understand their history. Quick warning though, you do have to get the context right. If you misremember or make the wrong assumption, it can backfire. So if you're in doubt, you might ask, is this connected to your last company, or is this connected to something that has happened in the past with us? This reduces the chance that you contextualize in the wrong way.
Next we have the first E for Equalize. Equalizing is about normalizing their experience. You're communicating that they're not the only person in the world who would probably feel the way they feel now. For founders, this is huge, because startup culture tends to make people feel like they should be tougher, should be more resilient, less emotional.
So when a co-founder says something like they think they might be burning out or they're scared the company's going to fail, you can say, look, every founder I talk to is scared of failing. Whether they are willing to admit it or not. Maybe they're mad at you for not getting something done when you said you would. You might think that you have good reasons for missing the deadline, but you could still validate them by saying something like, nobody likes it when they're promised something and then it doesn't come through. That is a true statement. That is a fact, and it helps normalize or equalize what they're experiencing. Again, this is about normalizing a human reaction to an abnormally difficult or frustrating experience.
Next you have P for Propose. This is where you start to go out on a limb. You might name a feeling or interpret what the person is experiencing in a way that they haven't said necessarily out loud themselves. This is one of those higher risk, high reward situations. You've got three levels: asking a question, making a suggestion, and making a direct statement, each with increasing levels of risk and reward.
You might start by asking a question. Do you just kind of wish you had done the task yourself? You might make a suggestion. Maybe you felt the deadline already was kind of tight, but you didn't want to say anything in order to not hurt my feelings. Or you make that direct statement. You're not going to believe me the next time I say I've got something handled, and you're going to want to follow up multiple times.
When you propose and you get it right, the other person feels deeply understood. If you miss, just own it and drop back down the ladder saying, look, I think I misread that. Why don't you tell me what's actually going on?
T is for Take Action. Sometimes the most validating thing you can do is help solve the problem. If your co-founder is drowning in investor follow ups, you could say all the right words, or you could say, send me the list and I'll take five of these calls off your plate. But you have to read the room. Some people need help. Some people just want to vent. If you jump into fixing too quickly when they just need to be heard, it actually feels dismissive. So offer action, but leave space for them to say no. Would it help if I took that meeting off your plate?
The second E is Emote. That means showing genuine emotion in response to what they're sharing. This is honestly something that I struggle with sometimes in my own relationships. If your co-founder says that they just closed a huge deal, don't just say, oh, nice. Let them see that you're actually excited. Amazing. That's so great. And if they tell you that something awful happened, showing genuine shock or concern carries a lot more weight than a flat "that sucks."
The point is that you're showing the other person that what happens to them affects you, affects your mood. In co-founder relationships, emotional flatness can be a slow killer because people stop sharing their issues because they don't think their partner actually cares.
D is for Disclose. This is the top of the ladder. This is where you share a relevant, vulnerable experience of your own. Maybe your co-founder confesses that they feel like they've made a bad hire and they feel stupid about it. And you might say something like, yeah, I made a bad hire in my previous company who wasn't right, and I wasted a lot of money keeping them on the payroll because I didn't want to admit that I was wrong, something I really regret.
The point is, it's not about you. But this kind of disclosure removes shame. It tells the person, look, I've been where you are. I'm not judging you for this. I don't think less of you. The goal is to keep it brief and relevant. It's not about you. It's not your moment. You're opening a door for them, not redirecting the conversation to yourself.
So that's the ACCEPTED framework. Eight steps arranged as a ladder. You can use one or two in a given conversation. You don't have to climb all eight. And if you do overshoot and say something that doesn't land, just take a step back down the ladder and do something on a lower rung and reset.
Now let me touch on some of the mistakes that I see founders make when they try to do validation. First mistake that comes up most often is the fix it trap. Your co-founder raises a problem and you immediately jump into solutions mode. This is the default for most operators, but if someone hasn't felt heard yet, your solution is going to be met with resistance. People are going to be unlikely to adopt it, even if it's brilliant.
Number two, the comparison trap. Someone says something negative or concerning about the financial situation. You say, at least we have six months of runway. Other companies have it way worse. This is going to minimize their experience, is going to make them feel like they don't have the right to struggle, and that you don't care.
Number three, the silver lining trap. Maybe losing the client was a blessing in disguise. Nobody wants to hear that when they're still processing the loss. Let them sit with it first. Absorb it. Accept it.
And number four, the minimization trap. It's not that bad. We're totally going to get over this. This is also common between co-founders who feel like they're being encouraging. Hey, forget about that. But it doesn't always work because they're telling the partner that your emotional response is an overreaction.
One more thing before I let you go though. You can't validate someone else if you can't validate yourself. If you're constantly telling yourself that your anxiety about the business is a weakness, that you shouldn't feel hurt by something your co-founder said, you're going to do the same thing to them. Self validation is a foundational skill that you need to develop. It means acknowledging that your own feelings make sense given what you're dealing with, without judging yourself for having them.
A lot of founders struggle with this because the culture rewards toughness and speed over being honest about your own emotions. But the founders that I work with who have learned to sit with their own feelings first, acknowledge them and process them, are the ones who can then hold space for their co-founders or their team members, or customers or whoever. And that is how you build relationships, even if they are damaged.
So if you are in the middle of co-founder conflict right now, I want you to try just one thing from this video. Next time your co-founder brings something up to you, resist the urge to fix it, debate it, or defend. Just sit there. Listen. Pay attention. Copy. Repeat back what you heard. See what happens.
You want to go deeper on this? I have a link to a blog post that I wrote about validation, and Caroline Flack's book Validation is one of the best books I've read this year on building connection and influence. And if you are a founder going through serious co-founder conflict and you want help, that's literally what I do. I'm Jason Shen, I'm a three time startup founder, a YC alum, and I run a coaching practice called Refactor Labs, where I help co-founders work through conflict. You can find out more at cofounder.repair.
Now, if you found this interesting, you probably care a lot about partnership and building a strong partnership. I have created a video that goes over the research by the Gallup organization about the eight factors that are at the root of the most highly successful two person teams. So if you're interested in that video, go ahead and check it out.