Nonviolent Communication

Tags: #books #non-violence #communication #relationships #politics #non-fiction #self-improvement

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about understanding that communication is listening objectively and empathetically. By evaluating we are perceived as judging, which is not a good or effective way of communicating. Express yourself through describing how you feel rather than what is affecting you.

🎨 Impressions

It was a bit of a 60s vibe of the book, it was not a particularly gripping read, but I thought it was a cool book all in all. The point is maybe being better at communicating and maybe i should try to think about this more and being better at following through on the advice. Sometimes I feel like communication is like driving a motorbike, you have to train your brain to do things that it is conditioned to avoid. And just like on a motorcycle, if you do the conditioned thing you crash.

This book is the last in a long line of books where I read about communicating and hope that I can condition myself to be a better one. Step by step I might be improving.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• As a person of color, growing up in apartheid South Africa in the 1940s was not something anyone relished. Especially not if you were brutally reminded of your skin color every moment of every day.

• *Four components of NVC:

  1. Observations
  2. Feelings
  3. Needs
  4. Requests

• Two parts of NVC: expressing honestly through the four component receiving empathically through the four components

• Life-alienating communication, however, traps us in a world of ideas about rightness and wrongness—a world of judgments. It is a language rich with words that classify and dichotomize people and their actions.

• Classifying and judging people promotes violence.

• We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves:

• In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which documents the war crimes trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann saying that he and his fellow officers had their own name for the responsibility-denying language they used. They called it Amtssprache, loosely translated into English as “office talk” or “bureaucratese.”

• “OBSERVE!! There are few things as important, as religious, as that.” —Frederick Buechner, minister

• When we combine observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism.

• “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.”

• The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.

• Country singer Reba McEntire wrote a song after her father’s death, and titled it “The Greatest Man I Never Knew.” In so doing, she undoubtedly expressed the sentiments of many people who were never able to establish the emotional connection they would have liked with their fathers.

• Likewise, it is helpful to differentiate between words that describe what we think others are doing around us, and words that describe actual feelings.

• Distinguish between giving from the heart and being motivated by guilt.

• Instead of directly stating his needs, a Palestinian mukhtar (who is like a village mayor) answered, “You people are acting like a bunch of Nazis.” A statement like that is not likely to get the cooperation of a group of Israelis!

• Because women are socialized to view the caretaking of others as their highest duty, they often learn to ignore their own needs.

• First stage: Emotional slavery. We see ourselves responsible for others’ feelings.

• Making requests in clear, positive, concrete action language reveals what we really want.

• In India, when people have received the response they want in conversations they have initiated, they say “bas“ (pronounced “bus”). This means, “You need not say more. I feel satisfied and am now ready to move on to something else.”

• Studies in labor-management negotiations demonstrate that the time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees, before responding, to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said.

• Speakers prefer that listeners interrupt rather than pretend to listen.

• In the play A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner, the protagonist refuses to release his twelve-year-old nephew to child-welfare authorities, declaring, “I want him to get to know exactly the special thing he is or else he won’t notice it when it starts to go. I want him to stay awake … I want to be sure he sees all the wild possibilities. I want him to know it’s worth all the trouble just to give the world a little goosing when you get the chance. And I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair.”

• The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things “because we’re supposed to.”

• When we fear punishment, we focus on consequences, not on our own values. Fear of punishment diminishes self-esteem and goodwill.

• Express appreciation to celebrate, not to manipulate.

• Saying “thank you” in NVC: “This is what you did; this is what I feel; this is the need of mine that was met.”