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• Make use of felt-sense and somatic awareness to support faster and deeper shifts in yourself and others
• Master silent empathy to give more ease and flow in your empathy guessing
• "Streetify" your NVC practice by learning how to make your NVC practice more fluent, colloquial, and "natural" and match the person you're speaking with
• De-mystify empathy guessing by learning to identify key linguistic queues
• Build an "emergency empathy" tool kit---with "quick fixes" for challenging situations by using each step of the model for maximum effectiveness
• Interplay both the NVC "mindset" (consciousness/intention) and the NVC "tool kit" for greater ease, fluency and effectiveness

• Gain a new, surprising, and exciting connection to yourself that will enable you to both deepen the sense of power in your life and actualize everything you've always dreamed of… 
• Experience being fully present in the world — despite your habits — so that you'll always be connected to your inner center and thus be able to choose at any given moment where to take your life…
• Understand how to create within yourself (and others!) a sense of flow and love, making your life much more beautiful and exciting… 
• Learn how to open up in your relationships in ways you never thought would be possible, creating an entirely different closeness and intimacy in your life… 

How excited do you get about connecting with people who are proving themselves right and who act like they know it all? Do you prefer the company of not-knowers who are in awe of the mystery of life and exploring with humility and innocent curiosity? Masking our vulnerability in not-knowing can point to deep wounds inside us, where perhaps the common denominator is our desire to prove our worth.

• Explore what makes the capacity lens radical and practical
• Understand the complexities of how capacity and willingness interface
• Mourn capacity limits within and around us without jumping to conclusions
• Orient to agreements as behavioral anchoring in support of your commitments

Judgment is an attempt to protect from hopelessness or insecurity, at high cost. Instead, check in with fear, grief, or hurt. Then wonder what needs are at stake for everyone. This makes space for grief instead of anger, for negotiation rather than control, and for "calling in" rather than excluding. Wonder: “For whom would this be life-serving or not?”, “What strategies would care for all needs?” or, “What can I contribute now?”

• Focus on living from the inside out
• Bring a field of inner kindness to your inner distress
• Attend to your inner experience with compassion
• Cultivate an inner spaciousness of freedom

• Increase your sense of connection and compassion, even in the heat of conflict
• Deepen your access to needs consciousness and the powerful energy of gratitude
• Learn how to make powerful requests that support the flow of connection
• Expand your self-empathy skills to help you shift away from reactivity

• Explore how gender power dynamics impact everyday interactions
• Learn how to navigate these complexities with curiosity and compassion
• Gain the skills to build inclusive personal and professional environments
• Contribute to a world where every voice matters!

If you dread family gatherings because of family tensions, you can find ways to excavate through piles of hardened judgments and hopelessness, build on your inner strength, and engage with family conflicts with open-hearted curiosity, greater presence, and connecting with what really matters to everyone.

If you're unpleasantly triggered during the holidays you may find yourself responding in ways you don't like. Start by acknowledging how affected you are to bring in more curiosity, mindfulness and eventually, authentic and discerning choices.

When someone wants to speak angrily about another, do you want to move away, try to calm them, argue, set a boundary, or offer empathy? What supports you to stay self connected? You can set boundaries regarding listening so that you're less likely to defend the other party, or attempt to talk your friend down from their judgments, thereby escalating the situation. Disagreements can also ignite curiosity and celebration. Read on for more.

If you’re interested in improving your relationships, advancing in your career, or enhancing your capacity for change in life in general, communication is a powerful lever. Presence, listening, bringing curiosity and care, focusing on what matters, and pausing with silence, are all key. Read on for five foundational and advanced core practices you can start using today to improve your communication.

For effective dialogue clarify your needs, boundaries, and requests beforehand. Setting boundaries is telling someone what you're going to do in order to meet or protect needs for yourself or others. Whereas with requests, even if you have preferences, you still hold open curiosity about strategies to collaborate with others in meeting needs. Read on for more.

When conflict or criticism occurs, we can notice two layers of meaning to create connection: the content and the needs the speaker is holding. When we are able to recognize this --and ideally engage open-heartedly, with curiosity, make clear requests, imagining what they want, no matter how their expression was framed -- we have more opportunity to support the longevity of our relationships, and to decrease our loneliness when together.

Follow worry to the underlying universal need and discern wise action. To get there, we can try out prayer, wishes, savoring the need, or compassionate witnessing. If you notice and name the aspects of worry continuously, the compassionate witnessing practice will interrupt the habitual spinning of worry-filled stories. There are at least six things you can witness with curiosity. Read on for more.

Love keeps the thread of connection intact in times when all around us we see the human fabric becoming threadbare. When we dig deep with love into guessing what others care about that had given rise to their actions, it changes us. It brings us closer to understanding the incomprehensible -- and closer to vision, imagination, humility, curiosity, commonality, and loving action. Read on for more on applying this to people we deem "conspiracy theorists", and those who are on the other end of the political divide.

However indirectly expressed, any judgement or criticism is about the person's own thoughts, feelings, needs, and requests.This awareness can help you take people's comments less personally, and give you options: silent self-empathy, standing in your truth, contact and curiosity, and honest expression.

With these exercises you can practice identifying the reactions to conflict, such as fight, flight, freeze, the posture taken, what you see, hear, smell, touch taste and what needs are at play. They will also bring in curiosity about what next step may help. One of these exercises prompts you to journal some of these things this week.

Reflect on a time when you were either expressing gossip or participating passively. What feelings and needs were up for you at the time? How might you have interrupted the gossip with connection? When interrupting gossip it can take a few rounds of empathy and honest expression to bridge understanding, and create a space in which mutual care and curiosity arises. Read on for an example.

Here we explore variants of conflict patterns in part two (of this two part series) that include: refuting "straw man arguments"; not checking understanding, repeating unhelpful behaviour; repeatedly asking for what's already given; asserting rather than demonstrating responsiveness; assumptions; denying conflict exists; neglecting interdependence; stonewalling; absence of curiosity, humility, respect, empathy or care (even when reflecting).