📝What is NVC
- A way to give from heart
- Hear our own deeper needs and those of others
📝Components of NVC (applied to both expressing honestly + receiving empathically)
- Observation
- Feelings
- Needs
- Requests
📝Communication that blocks compassion
- Moralistic judgements
- Imply wrongness or badness on people who don’t share our values
- Such judgements are actually expressions of our own needs and values
- Value judgment vs. moralistic judgement
- value judgment: beliefs of how life can best be served
- moralistic judgement: they’re made when people fail to support our value judgements
- Making comparison
- Denial of responsibility
- Our language obscures awareness of personal responsibility
- Instead of implying lack of choice, acknowledge choice
- Communicate desire as demand
- Demand threatens listeners with blame or punishments if they fail to comply
- People change not to avoid punishment but to benefit themselves
📝Observing without evaluating
- When combining observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism.
- NVC discourages static generalizations; Instead, evaluations are made based on observations specific to time and context.
📝Identifying and expressing feelings
- If we’re not aware of feelings, we can’t express them
- Feelings vs. Non-Feelings
- Feelings != Thoughts
- Feelings != What we think we are (eg. “I feel inadequate as a guitar player”)
- Feelings != How we think others react or behave towards us (eg. “I feel understood”)
📝Taking responsibility for our feelings
- What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause
- 4 options for receiving negative messages
- blame ourselves
- blame others
- sense our own feelings and needs
- sense others’ feelings and needs
- Connect feeling with need: “I feel…because I need…”
- Judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our own unmet needs. If we express our needs, we have a better chance of getting them met.
- 3 Stages
- Emotional slavery: believe ourselves are responsible for the feelings of others (eg. feel overwhelmed when seeing partner in pain)
- Obnoxious: refuse to admit to caring others’ feels or needs (eg. “That’s your problem! I’m not responsible for your feelings!”)
- Emotional liberation: accept responsibility for our own feelings but not the feelings of others, while being aware that we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others.
📝Requesting that which would enrich life
- Make request with positive and concrete actions that reveals what we want
- Make request consciously
- Make request != express feelings
- We are often not conscious of what we are requesting (eg. complained loudly ”I’ve never seen a train go so slow in all my life!”)
- Request may sound like demand when unaccompanied with by speaker’s feelings and needs (eg. “Why don’t you go and get a haircut?”)
📝Connecting compassionately with ourselves
- Avoid shoulding yourself!
- Self-judgements, like all judgements, are tragic expressions of unmet needs
📝Expressing anger fully
- Hurting people when we are angry is superficial - we want a more powerful way to fully express ourselves
- Steps to express anger
- Stop. Breath.
- Identify our judgmental thoughts
- Connect with our needs
- Express our feelings and unmet needs
📝Conflict resolution and mediation
- Resolve conflicts by building human connections
- We are taught by society to criticize, insult, and otherwise communications to that keep us apart. In a conflict, both parties usually spend too much time intent on proving themselves right and the other party wrong, rather than paying attention to their own and others’ needs.
- Steps
- Express our own needs
- Search for real needs of the other person
- Verify we both accurately recognize the other person’s needs
- Provide empathy to hear each other’s needs accurately
- Propose strategies for resolving the conflict, framing them in positive action language
📝Liberating ourselves and counseling others
- Focus on what we want rather than what went wrong
📝Expressing appreciation in NVC
- Express appreciation to celebrate, not to manipulate
- Thank you = This is what you did + This is what I feel + This is the need of mine that was met