Make Life More Wonderful
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) was founded by Dr Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been taken up and elaborated on by people around the world.
From Marshall's book "Nonviolent Communication":
NVC helps us connect with each other and ourselves in a way that allows our natural compassion to flourish. It guides us to reframe the way we express ourselves and listen to others by focusing our consciousness on four areas: what we are observing, feeling, and needing, and what we are requesting to enrich our lives. NVC fosters deep listening, respect, and empathy and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart. Some people use NVC to respond compassionately to themselves, some to create greater depth in their personal relationships, and still others to build effective relationships at work or in the political arena. Worldwide, NVC is used to mediate disputes and conflicts at all levels.
In explaining the purpose of NVC, Marshall would talk about the contrast between two different games that humans play. One is the game of "making life more wonderful" through what he called natural giving. The other is the game of "who's right" where we seek to bring about change using punishment and reward.
NVC is a process of communication in which we aim to get everyone's needs met, through natural giving. That means respecting that even if someone does something I don't like, they are doing it in an attempt to meet real needs. Getting clear on what those needs are, and expressing our own needs clearly, can help us find solutions that work for everyone.
Using NVC we can work towards a world in which everyone's needs matter.
This delightful series of videos shows NVC in action in a school in Denmark:
Inbal Kashtan had a huge influence in the NVC community around parenting. Two short videos of her teaching:
This long video of Marshall Rosenberg teaching a workshop in San Francisco is a classic in the NVC community: