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What's my intention? What needs am I trying to meet? What do I want the other person to know or understand? How can I say it in a way they are most likely to hear? These are four questions we can use in preparation for an important conversation. Read on for more on this, plus four accompanying practices.

Listen to CNVC Certified Trainer Dian Killian guide and ease you into a more natural expression of empathy. This is a three person exercise. Listen in and then give it a try!

This resource is free for all to enjoy during May. Sarah Peyton explains how your brain's left hemisphere excels at pattern making. NVC can help integrate both hemispheres, enabling you to use the left side's love of patterns for abstract thinking.

Trainer Tip: Here are some options for tense moments in conversations: try a "redo", understand and recognize your habits, pause to regroup, empathize with the person so they feel heard, check your mind frame before speaking, and name some appreciations about one another.

Transform arguments with these steps: take responsibility for your mind, increase your capacity for discomfort, slow down, show up and remember your values, offer understanding, take risks, and speak from your heart. Learning new skills takes time, energy and effort. However, it’s entirely possible to radically shift the way we communicate. The key is patience, persistence, and taking it one step at a time.

There are five aspects helpful to consider when creating conditions and atmosphere where you can be heard deeply and hear others deeply: context, self-connection, autonomy, security, and specific requests. Read on for more, and reflect on moments when you have been heard deeply and name everything that contributed to that experience.

Use this exercise to stay in dialogue and connect to needs while facing a “no”. Identify a situation where you have low confidence that you'll get your needs met, and it'll be hard hearing a “no” to your request. Explore your response to the “no” by working with feelings, needs, request and alternate strategies. Thus you can work towards meeting your needs while also releasing the idea that your needs “have to” be met.

Blame is opaque when we don’t reflect on it deeply. We blame when we don’t see ourselves as having power to shape things, and see others as the ones who can. Blame and how we respond to it, is both a symptom of inability to step into power, and an impediment to empowered relationships. Transforming blame requires self-responsibility. Read on for practices involving empathy, inner connection, power, preparation and engaging options.

Whether we have more or less power and privilege, anything without liberation for all is within patriarchal separation, and will continue cycles of oppression. To liberate ourselves and one another we need to increase our collective capacity through developing related knowledge, skills, research; build an understanding of patriarchal roots; confront lovingly; co-hold dilemmas about privilege; co-shape outcomes; etc.

Often, honoring someone’s choice supports more connection. Thus, checking in with someone’s choice to listen or not (offering autonomy) sets the stage for being heard more fully. On the other hand, when someone has the perception that you are talking to them without considering their choice, resentful listening might result. Here are ways to mindfully check in about choiceful listening before starting a conversation.

Join Dian Killian as she reframes the 4 steps of NVC (observations, feelings, needs, requests) into everyday words you might hear at work.

• Discover how to figure out what you really want, then how to ask for it
• Learn how to make requests with ease and how to guess the requests of others
• Practice strategies for turning ‘demand energy’ into ‘request energy’
• Be able to stand firmly for your needs and assertively ask for what you want

Ask the Trainer: "Can you share stories of transforming group conflict, or is NVC strictly intended for 'one-on-one' work?"

In this video download, expert parent trainer and author of Parenting From Your Heart, Inbal Kashtan responds to the age-old question: "Why do children do things to annoy parents?"

Who does not want to be understood? In Tip #6, Eric shows you how to deepen connection and trust by checking your understanding with the person you are conversing with.

• Discover the healing magic that comes from welcoming pain rather than avoiding it
• Learn how to navigate ‘healing dialogues’ when hurt or pain is present
• Increase your empathy/honesty skills and your ability to navigate painful conversations
• Embrace pain as a precious life-guiding force that teaches us how to be together!

How do you know when you’re projecting disowned parts or replaying old relationship dynamics? It’s hard to know for sure, but if you find yourself upset or shutting down and unable to have a dialogue in which you can speak clearly about your feelings and needs and empathize with the other’s feelings and needs, there is likely a projection. The stronger your reaction, the more likely you are projecting.