Non-Violent Communication

Nonviolent Communication Skills
Marshall Rosenberg's NVC offers practical, concrete skills for manifesting the purpose of creating connections of compassionate giving and receiving based in a consciousness of interdependence and power with others.

These skills include:
1) Observations:
a) State the observations that are leading you to feel the need to say something.
b) Differentiating observation from evaluation, being able to carefully observe what is happening free of evaluation, and to specify behaviors and conditions that are affecting us;
2) Feelings:
a) State the feeling that the observation is triggering in you. Or, guess what the other person is feeling, and ask.
b) Differentiating feeling from thinking, being able to identify and express internal feeling states in a way that does not imply judgment, criticism, or blame/punishment;
3) Needs:
a) State the need that is the cause of that feeling. Or, guess the need that caused the feeling in the other person, and ask.
b) Connecting with the universal human needs/values (e.g. sustenance, trust, understanding) in us that are being met or not met in relation to what is happening and how we are feeling; and
4) Requests:
a) Make a concrete request for action to meet the need just identified.
b) Requesting what we would like in a way that clearly and specifically states what we do want (rather than what we don’t want), and that is truly a request and not a demand (i.e. attempting to motivate, however subtly, out of fear, guilt, shame, obligation, etc. rather than out of willingness and compassionate giving).