Most of our interactions with others are through communication, primarily through spoken and written language. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an approach to communication that engages our emotional intelligence.
This technique, developed by the American psychologist Marshall Rosenberg (1934-2015), allows us to understand and act to make exchanges and interactions more pleasant and more fluid… Its primary ambition is to help reduce conflicts and improve relationships.
The technique is based on the application of four fundamental principles which, to inspire compassion and empathy, require each user to learn to:
- Observe any situation without judging others.
- Express your own feelings.
- Express your needs.
- Formulate what he expects from the other.
The 4 stages of non-violent communication
At the heart of Nonviolent Communication is the idea that people are capable of giving and receiving compassionately and that it is all about understanding our needs, how to meet them, and communicating these strategies to others.
The NVC process has four stages:
1. Observations
Observes what is happening without adding meaning or evaluation to the event or circumstance. Example: I am in the process of starting a professional transition process and I am afraid of making mistakes, of making the wrong choice, of failing and of being judged by the people around me.
2. Feelings
Ask yourself how you feel about what is happening, describe the emotion that rises within you? For this self-analysis, take advantage of everything you have learned about personal development and self-knowledge. Example: I feel sadness, fear and anger at my inability to choose and take action.
3. Needs
Dig deep and connect your feeling to a particular need you have. It is common for the fear of failure to hide a need to be recognized and loved. This need can tend to make us believe that we would be loved and recognized if and only if we do the right thing. And depending on the individual, right action will be materialized by various drivers: perfection, speed, kindness, effort.
4. Requests
If your need is not met, ask for a concrete action that someone can do to help you satisfy it. Ask yourself for indulgence and accept imperfection in how your needs will be met. Accept that you are imperfect and ask for help to inform your choices. Ask yourself if this project is beneficial and useful for you? If it is feasible? In line with your values?
Compassionate reception is only half of Nonviolent Communication. The other important half is compassionate giving, which involves empathetic listening when people express how they feel about a situation, the needs they have, and their requests for certain reactions from us to meet their needs.
In other words, NVC is similar to good old “give and take,” but doing it with the compassion of our heart. This is why NVC is also called collaborative communication and compassionate communication.
NVC as a decision-making tool
Nonviolent Communication aims to develop the emotional intelligence of individuals and groups. We envision a world filled with people who are emotionally intelligent, have heightened self-awareness, are empathetic, and can communicate effectively with others in order to collaborate and create good things together. We thus contribute to the development of a society whose emotional intelligence matches its technological and scientific knowledge.
Choosing between two things can sometimes mean choosing the first step in our change process. Changing the dynamic with which I occupy the environment can be enough to give a boost, without having to radically transform the job I do.
When several paths emerge and several activities can please us, it is common for doubts to end up preventing us from taking action.
In these cases, practicing Nonviolent Communication is easily actionable and very powerful for taking a step back and bringing clarity to our decisions.
