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Three things can be helpful to practice when you want to contribute to someone caught in repetitive fears: self empathy, allowing grief for what you wish was true and is not, and empathy for their difficulty. You can also ask them what's helpful.

Listen as Mary Mackenzie shares an eight step path to create your own NVC learning activities, based on your own NVC learning experience. In this session, Mary uses the value of requests and observations as teaching examples.

Mourning, grief and celebration is a way to connect with what we love and want to honor.  In this trainer tip we learn that these three things can become a way for us to understand our emotions regarding our losses and appreciations.

Want to manage more effectively with more ease and joy and get your staff to make changes? The first, crucial step is to learn how to change your behavior to impact what's happening. For example, we can get the inner clarity we need to reframe questions we ask ourselves, recap, make clear requests, give concrete feedback, etc. This article expands on how self-management can increase influence...

Trainer Tip: Make a boring or "dead" conversation more interesting, meaningful and connecting. You can do this by connecting to the other person’s feelings, passions or desires. Read on for examples.

Trainer Tip: When someone acts in baffling ways we can either wonder about what’s going on with the other person, create our own stories about it (blame, resent, make assumptions), or inform ourselves by asking. This is an opportunity to learn something new.

Blame is the game that protects me from the understanding that the cause of all my emotional distress, fear, shame and guilt comes from the part of me I call "the inner voice." As long as I keep the big bony finger of blame pointed in your direction, I can remain unaware of the fact that it is what I am telling myself about your behavior that is stimulating my painful reactions. 

For this exercise choose a situation in which you have said a “yes” to someone‛s request but you didn't experience your “yes” as given freely or joyfully. Then explore judgements, feelings, needs, and alternate strategies that come up in relation to your “yes”, your “no”, and in relation to what the other person might be experiencing.

In this enlightening Trainer Conversation, three veteran CNVC Certified Trainers discuss whether NVC can be learned without first learning Observations, Feelings, Needs, Requests (OFNR). The conversation naturally meanders as the trainers grapple with the question, eventually covering a wide-range of topics including the spirituality and true essence of NVC.