The Breakdown
Here’s the breakdown of NVC into what I call the “NVC pyramid.”
The pyramid is a simple model of the entire practice that, in the decoding process, helped me refer to and teach others the methods of NVC through the bare essentials.
As you can see, at the top is the purpose behind the practice, in the middle are the two fundamental skills you’ll need to advance the skill set, and at the bottom are the four key components for both skills.
Let’s go over them.
The One Purpose
First, the purpose.
The purpose of NVC communication as a way of developing stronger communication and relationship skills is simply in bridging connections.
That’s it. That’s the most important thing you need to know when considering this practice for your life. The reason we communicate is to connect with others; any failure to connect with someone, whether through words or gestures, is a failure to communicate, at least through the unique framing of this discipline.
With that established, try not to get caught up in the additional baggage that some people who spend half their life studying different forms of “spirituality” and religion attempt to bring to the practice. Not only does it bog things down, it compromises that one clear and true original purpose in NVC’s simplicity — in fact, it hijacks it and takes it somewhere that can end up being the opposite of connection as it was meant to be just by its very pretension!
More on that another time maybe. Simply keep in mind that connection is the primary and only real purpose of this practice, and you’ll be well ahead of the game.
(Keep in mind that “connection” can just as well be between an individual and a group of people, an individual and oneself (“self connection,” as in “re-centering”), a human being and other animals, and even a human being and the plant world as it is between two human being. But for our intents and purposes, we’ll stick to human beings here.)
The Two Skills
The two skills really necessary for NVC are simply put, empathic listening and honest expression. These have a variety of interpretations comma but in essence Kama empathic listening entails listening primarily without agenda, and being able to receive a person’s pain or Joy or whatever have they with full openness and attention. The second skill is honest expression, which is not the same as crude frankness or hour-long babbling on about the emotional tides and ebb’s in oneself. Again, both of these are also commonly abused, so be very careful who you go to for mentorship in this area.
The Four Key Components
The component actions of the NVC skill set are at once extremely simple and surprisingly challenging. That’s because they call on latent but often underutilized (read: unconscious) parts of ourselves that tend to get drowned out by the “noise” of their more complex counterparts — aspects of ourselves that develop by way of influences on us by the culture and society we grow up in.
It may be useful to know that when psychiatrist and founder of NVC Marshal Rosenberg, PhD., first came up with these components, his main focus was on understanding and expressing (or at least being able to express) the feelings that we are constantly subject to in every situation. As the practice and the philosophy developed, he later realized that the lack of “emotional literacy,” as he called it, correlated with a certain ineptitude in us to comprehending our basic needs, and thus the skill set evolved to include the diverse emotional dimensions of the psyche and a comprehensive “re-learning” of how they serve as important indicators to our universal, underling needs.
The final product, now usually referred to as “OFNR,” therefore came to be these components:
- Observations: perceptions and interpretations of your own or another’s circumstances with as little judgement inserted by you as possible. NOTE: Interpretations of absolutely everything (including the content of our own minds!) are an inevitable fact of existence, but Observations in NVC invite a suspension from taking your interpretations to the bank and judging or acting on them.
- Feelings: act as “indicators” to what’s going on in us, not unlike how a chime indicates that the dishwasher’s done. They are important clues to understanding our Needs (the next component) and are worth taking the time to sort through, in yourself or someone else, in order to get to the “bottom” (if there is such a thing) of our reactions and responses to what happens to us. Feelings can be broken down even further into sensations and emotions, but sticking with Feelings alone is more than satisfactory for the study.
- Needs: are debatably the most critical element to the entire enterprise of the practice. Traditionally, NVC stresses understanding the full spectrum of needs and emotions if only to offer us a taste of the infinitely rich spectrum that is our psyche. For a newbie, though, I advocate getting familiar with just a well-consolidated small number of categories of Needs, my favorite version probably being Tony Robbins’s 6 Basic Human Needs. You can always go the extra mile if you wanted to after getting these few categories down pat.
- Requests: are very important to moving things forward from a conversation into action. Anybody can tell you that being able to ask for what you want (or what you suspect someone else may want) is crucial. NVC Requests highlights the manner of how we do this as well as the likely dependency we tend to have to hearing “yes” in response. Being able to hear and respond from a connected place to a “no” (and certainly being able to say it yourself as well) opens up communication doorways that can be both frightening or empowering, depending on how you look at it!
In addition to the list, each component is deliberately contrasted to its more commonly encountered counterpart:
Observations ↔(Moral) Judgments
Feelings ↔ Thoughts
Needs ↔ Strategies
Requests ↔ Demands
Mentorship & Mastermind
Plain and simple, get a mentor. It doesn’t even have to be a permanent arrangement: a brief email expressing that you are an ambitious learner of NVC and would love to accelerate your learning experience by getting their top recommendations and advice, as well as precautions, suffices nicely.
But certainly not taking this step, in whatever way you choose to, would be a major oversight. Just contacting someone who has mastered NVC even one time could save you years of toil (yes, years) and avoid many of the very common rookie mistakes that befall even the very best intended students of this beautiful but sometimes bewildering practice.
Now, a quick word on this. There’s a lot of garbage out there when it comes to NVC. (Yep, that’s a Judgement — more on that in a moment.) What I mean is that similarly well-intending “high level” trainers and teachers (including the certified ones) are often themselves relapsing from a disfigured childhood or a disillusioned past that leaves them hating nearly every element of society underneath the “gentle” overtones of flowery praise for the human spirit and “NVC consciousness” (there’s that word again).
I’m not saying this purported “consciousness” isn’t real in some sense or other, only that it’s more typically, in my experience, an overused filler of a buzzword for someone who “gets it” versus someone who “doesn’t,” an easy way to justify the difficulty many people experience at the beginning with changing their communication patterns from frequently disconnecting to more easily connecting. So much for building connection through inclusion, though. I hope you can see my point (even if you’re one of those out there who disagrees with me).
In any case, I would not recommend consulting much with someone (even a certified NVC trainer) who holds anything less than equal respect and value to Thoughts and Strategies, Judgments and Demands, as they do the beloved four key components.
The reason is twofold: (1) judging the counterparts to be simply and utterly “wrong” commits same basic error that practicing Observations is meant to be an antidote to; and (2) we’re talking about the human psyche here! Just because these so-called counterpart aspects of ourselves are more abstract and more easily shaped by society, they are still intrinsically valuable (and in today’s world, I’d say indispensable) to our psychology.
The goal of NVC is not to throw anything out — it’s to build greater awareness of all the many parts of yourself, components and counterparts both. NVC at it’s best does not chastise the use of judgments or demands
Alright, enough soapbox talk. The point is choose wisely who you consult with on this subject. My recommendation is to learn the ropes from someone like (or at the very least who trained with) Miki Kashtan, a phenomenal Israeli-born sociology professor who has managed over many years to preserve and enhance the most basic tenants of NVC while maintaining a laser focus on effectiveness and clarity toward it’s original purpose (can you remember what that was now?).
As far as finding or creating a mastermind group that will support you and accelerate your progress, definitely look into any NVC practice groups, preferably in your local area, but online groups (like Facebook or other forums) can be helpful supplements as well so long as you arrange actual face-to-face time with someone to practice with (yay, Skype!).
Like the mentorship dilemma, you’ll want to be selective about who you collaborate most with in these groups, and it’s all the better if, after meeting and getting to know a few folks who have the same goal as you, you start a whole separate group yourselves that covers the basics but also retains focus on the results you want, instead of relying on the same extended less results-oriented curriculum everyone else tends to follow.
Goals Engineering
In whatever subject or discipline you aspire to learn, reverse-engineering your goals (also known as “starting with the end in mind”) is key for true success in a timely fashion. Rather than just set goals that sound doable or might get you recognition for your skill, ask yourself instead what you truly want from this study you’re about to undertake and work your way backward to figure out what exactly you will need to learn and do to achieve those results.
So step one is to figure out exactly what results you want for yourself. And I mean clear results: don’t settle for “to be a better communicator” or “to share more with my wife/husband/domestic partner/etc.” when what you might really mean is “to be able to clarify what I want and respond compassionately to (so-and-so’s) answer” or even “to be able to deescalate an intense negotiation with an opposing party or foreign ambassador.”
For instance, building on that last phrase I wrote, you might be the ambitious type and wish to learn NVC for the purposes of political diplomacy, in which case, you’ll want to devote less time to an unending task delving into the vast ocean that is the Feelings component and instead devote more energy to the perceptive reading and expression of basic Needs, as well as adeptly utilizing Requests.
If, on the other hand, you’re someone more focused on improving their communication in parenting or your relationships (marriage or otherwise), it would behoove you to dedicate greater study to, say, Observations and Feelings than the former diplomacy student.
My recommendation is, after deciding what specific result you plan to achieve, to go to any well-established website like NVCacademy.com (I highly suggest a trial membership — and no, this isn’t an affiliate link) and browse the multimedia library by the subjects that most relevant to your goal. Feel free to poke through some of the lectures and courses there, but rather than spend precious time listening to lectures or conference calls, see if you can find a transcript for it instead. In the worst case, if you can’t find anything, simply look up the work of the person leading the conversation or lecture and get the beef on their principles and practice on their own website or elsewhere.
(Hint: in doing this, you might even want to go back to the mentorship step and consider gleaning their advice in regard your personal goals.)
Fast Track Steps
While the majority of intermediate students/trainers of NVC wouldn’t be apt to use the scare-quoted word above (and more than likely against the very idea) the truth is that there is a longer way and a shorter way to attaining the NVC skills.
One means to a faster learning curve is practicing specific patterned phrases that will seem odd at first but will ultimately force your brain to approach people and situations differently over time (the shorter, the better).
In fact, basic cognitive rewiring of typical language patterns through different parts of the brain is the beset way to bring more attention and focus to emotional awareness over the typical (often unconscious) emotional discharging many of us do instead.
An example exercise in this is avoiding the phrase “you make me feel (angry, sad, stupid, happy, etc.)” and instead switching to “when I see/hear you do X, I feel…” Seem awkward? It is. But so is a slow, bumbling student of a new foreign language at the beginning, using all sorts of word combinations a native would never dare to say lest they wish to ostracize themselves from the general public. Everybody goes through this stage — that’s what learning looks like. It’s only temporary, though, and as long as others are on board with you about it (and are aware that you won’t continue speaking this way beyond the necessary time period), you shouldn’t run into a wrecked home over it.
But why do this? Well, despite the awkwardness in this phrase, saying and meaning it quickly results in an awareness that the things that somebody else does is not directly responsible for how you react to it, provided it’s expressed in a way that is authentic to your Feelings (and is not just a backhanded way of insulting someone for not being part of the “higher consciousness” clique of occult humanists).
Furthermore, practicing this sort of language pattern, over simply understanding the point of it in principle, really and truly accelerates the rewiring of your brain and facilitates the awareness needed to recognize this important principle in a visceral, intuitive way — even when returning to normal phrasing in everyday language. It’s how you can be sure you’re ultimately enhancing the experience you have in communicating with others toward building deeper connection with them.
Another excellent shortcut to this awareness is pausing at any random moment throughout the day, whether in a highly intense state or not, and reflecting on what the four components of your immediate state (right now) are. Doing so as often as you can make time for brings greater clarity of how you behave and respond to others and to what happens to you.
A third and final example exercise: schedule a good chunk of time (at least an 1-2 hours) to create what we can call a “mind map” that fully extends into the many levels of emotions and needs at play around a heated or ongoing issue for you. Taking the time to do this often becomes the best spent hour you take to building a powerful awareness of the diverse elements of your psyche that will last you for months following.
To see this last exercise at work, check out this video where I break it down and show you how:
[youtube vid]
Alright, for a quick summary, here’s an example full deconstructed diagrammatic outline to becoming competent in Nonviolent Communication (using one of the goals I personally set for myself when I started my studies some six or so years ago) that will set you on your way to a new and incredibly worthwhile skill set!
[Provide one full example of the steps and the game plan]
I’ll also recommend downloading a free copy of new ebook, The Plateau Principle. In it are hundreds of more tips to how to accelerate your learning curve and get the most out of any subject you set your mind to, as well an explanation to why some things stick with us (or we stick to them) and something don’t. You can find it here on the homepage.
Please be sure to share this article if you found it helpful, and stay tuned for more exciting content coming soon!