If we ask two questions, we will see that punishment never works. First: What do we want the other person to do? Second: What do we want the other person’s reasons to be for doing as we request?
Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward.
There are the two main reasons we don’t get our needs met. First, we don’t know how to express our needs to begin with and second if we do, we forget to put a clear request after it, or we use vague words like appreciate, listen, recognize, know, be real, and stuff like that.
NVC can be effectively applied at all levels of communication and in diverse situations: intimate relationships, families, schools, organizations and institutions, therapy and counseling, diplomatic and business negotiations, disputes and conflicts of any nature.
Teacher, school administrators and parents will come away from Life-Enriching Education with skills in language, communication, and ways of structuring the learning environment that support the development of autonomy and interdependence in the classroom.
Empathizing with someone’s ‘no’ protects us from taking it personally.
Conventional compliments often take the form of judgments however positive, and are sometimes offered to manipulate the behavior of others. NVC encourages the expression of appreciation solely for celebration.
Before we tackle the gangs and the basic story, we have to make sure that we have liberated ourselves from how we have been educated and make sure we are coming from a spirituality of our own choosing.
The number one reason that we don’t get our needs met, we don’t express them. We express judgments. If we do express needs, the number two reasons we don’t our needs met, we don’t make clear requests.
Clinical training in psychoanalysis has a deficit. It teaches how to sit and think about what a person is saying and how to interpret it intellectually, but not how to be fully present to this person.
With empathy, I’m fully with them, and not full of them – that’s sympathy.
We recognize that real educational reform is essential if today’s and tomorrow’s children are to live in a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world.
Once you have access to key people in an organization, if you go into a meeting with enemy images of those people – then you are not going to connect.
Unless we as social change agents come from a certain kind of spirituality, we’re likely to create more harm than good.
If the other persons behavior is not in harmony with my own needs, the more I empathize with them and their needs, the more likely I am to get me own needs met.
The punitive use of force tends to generate hostility and to reinforce resistance to the very behavior we are seeking.
Social change involves helping people see new options for making life wonderful that are less costly to get needs met.
Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.
NVC enhances inner communication by helping us translate negative internal messages into feelings and needs. Our ability to distinguish our own feelings and needs and to empathize with them can free us from depression.
We want to take action out of the desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, or obligation.