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Reveal what's in your heart before asking a question to help build trust, especially if you're in an authority figure. Otherwise, your question may sound like a demand, blame, trap, intrusion or accusation, and it may elicit a defensive response. If you get a "question" like that, give them empathy. Read on for reflection questions to see how our revealing and our withholding impacts our relationships with others and with ourselves.

While we can’t control other’s behavior, we can choose how we show up. With forethought and care, we can approach interactions with more clarity, love, and skill. Read on for practices that include: Choose wise attention, ask better questions, practice deep listening, structure the conversation, know your limits, speak your truth, share your personal stories, be present and recall permanence.

Join Itzel Hayward and Kathy Simon as they present two role-play scenarios showcasing diverse approaches to navigating difficult conversations. Throughout the demonstration, they underscore the significance of cultivating self-empathy and mindfulness to effectively engage in challenging dialogues. Specifically, they introduce a role-play scenario concerning affirmative action, aimed at illustrating the contrasting outcomes when utilizing or not utilizing nonviolent communication skills.

Eradicating judgments is likely impractical as our minds naturally form them. However, understanding inevitable judgments as indicators of our needs rather than truths can foster empathy. Expressing needs rather than judgments can better support connection and openness between one another.

Clear, actionable requests are vital for fulfilling needs and maintaining relationships. In NVC, a true request differs from a demand by honoring both parties’ needs equally. Effective requests are specific, present, positive, and doable, and using them strengthens connection, prevents resentment, and promotes mutual understanding. Here are three key skills to making effective requests and three types of requests.

The regeneration movement employs practices for healing our planet from damage, and boosting Earth sustainability. Environmental and social degradation is deeply connected -- as it comes from the same extractive, exploitive mindset of economic and related systems. Connecting with universal consciousness and needs underlying conflicts, we connect with commonality of all planetary life. This helps tap new abilities for working together. This can contain power to regenerate and heal ourselves and Earth.

If you’ve ever dreaded attending a meeting – or watched in dismay as your group collapses into conflict – know that a methodology known as Convergent Facilitation offers you possible solutions.

It’s based on one simple experience: that people come together at the level of their underlying principles, needs, aspirations, and dreams, not at the level of their surface positions.

Convergent Facilitation is a highly efficient decision-making process developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication. It enables you to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s important to different stakeholders, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions. As a result, it readily produces solutions and decisions that everyone can embrace.

“Nonviolence” is not just a political tactic. It is a “soul force,” a courageous and compassionate stand in the face of what seems to us unjustly unequal, oppressive, and violent. It is the force of love meeting and transforming what appears to not be love.. It is the force of love meeting and transforming what appears to not be love. It is speaking and listening with courage, compassion, and an open heart and mind and rooted in our truth in a way that bridges understanding. And doing so without demand nor trying to convince -- all in the face of any anger, fear, oppression, inequality, violence or disagreement.

Sometimes I hear people say things like, “I didn’t do Compassionate Communication this week.” Or “I tried Compassionate Communication when I was arguing with my wife last week.” Compassionate Communication is not a thing to do, or to pull out of our bag of tricks once in a while. Compassionate Communication is a consciousness of valuing everyone’s needs and of valuing connection more than being right, winning or protecting ourselves. It is a way of living.