Nonviolent Communication summary

Expressing emotions is never straightforward, especially when they are negative. Luckily, there’s a powerful method to help us.

It’s called Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a way of communicating that allows us to connect with others and ourselves from the heart. The term nonviolence is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, and refers to the natural state of our hearts: free from violence and full of compassion.

We’ve established the connection between good communication and observation, so now let’s look at how to improve our observational skills.

First of all, focus your energy on being aware of the present moment. Listen carefully to what the other person is saying and ask yourself, how is this affecting my well-being? Engage your senses – touch, sight and sound – to connect as much as possible with the situation.

We’ve now established that clear observation is the first step of NVC. But we now need to learn how to fully express our own feelings in order to communicate as effectively as possible.

To achieve this, we can begin by articulating our feelings accurately. This can be problematic because we are rarely required to analyze our true emotions. The best way to express ourselves is by being specific, especially because the English language itself can be unclear at times.

At this point, you should be getting more familiar with NVC and should be able to pay closer attention to your feelings as a result. But there’s more to developing your emotional responses – you need to take responsibility for your feelings.

You can do this when interacting with others by first recognizing your own needs. While another person’s action can be the stimulus of our feelings, they are not the cause. Rather, our reactions determine how we feel about what people say to us. For example, we’ll intuitively react in a negative way if someone tells us, “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met!”

With a better grasp of our reactions and feelings, let’s now look at another challenging topic: identifying your needs. The reason this is so difficult is that people simply don’t have enough practice doing it; instead, they fall into the blame game.

The blame game is a classic catch-22 because we don’t usually express our needs, and then blame others for not fulfilling them. We might berate our partners for being messy because they don’t meet our standards of orderliness – like when they might leave unwashed dishes in the kitchen – without having communicated that we need the kitchen to be orderly. And when we blame them, it’s likely they’ll feel guilty and quickly become defensive.

So far, we’ve covered three components of nonviolent communication: observations, feelings and needs. Let’s move to the final stage of NVC: requests. How can we express our requests in a way that will help others respond to us compassionately?

A request should be made clearly to express what you really want. And the clearer we are about what we want from others, the more likely we are to get it.

As we’ve seen, NVC is a great tool to improve relationships with others; but it has the power to go even further, helping you improve your relationship with yourself.

The first step to a better self-relationship is to realize when you are not being compassionate to yourself, and a key indicator of this habit is judgmental self-talk. This is the voice in our head that criticizes us for even the smallest mistakes. You might have already heard yourself say, “I’m such an idiot!”, “I can’t believe I’ve done it again!” or “How could I be so stupid?”

Up until now, we have focused on four components of NVC that are important for accurate self-expression. Now let’s see how to apply the same principles to our listening skills.

First of all, if we want to fully understand another person, we need to listen empathetically.

None of us can escape the conflicts in our day-to-day lives. Fortunately, the principles of NVC provide useful tools for resolving conflicts. So, here’s what to do next time sparks start to fly:

First and foremost, you need to establish a human connection. This connection is the starting point from which the parties involved can understand each other’s feelings and needs.