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Jim and Jori discuss sharing power through exploring our experience of having and not having power, how we make choices about our power and examining our relationship to power itself.

Trainer Tip: If you are motivated by fear, guilt, blame or shame, your actions will usually be motivated by avoiding pain. The best way to experience permanent, lifelong change is to focus on how your life will improve when you make a change. Notice when you attempt to motivate yourself and others with guilt, blame, or shame today, and then look for motivations that enrich life instead.

Self responsibility is owning what's yours. It involves identifying your observations, evaluations, feelings, longings, and more. When we identify what's truly ours we are unlikely to mistake it as coming from outside of us. Self responsibility is not self blame. Without self responsibility, we project, blame and judge. Self-responsibility is central to clarity and full self-awareness. This exercise will guide you there.

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.

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.

Dear friends,

My book, Peaceful Living: Daily Meditations for Living with Love, Healing and Compassion has been on my mind a lot lately. It turns 20 years old next year, which I feel joyful about. Along the way, I came across this meditation that I wanted to share with you:

November 26
Change your thoughts and you change your world. – Norman Vincent Peale

Developing Tolerance

I used to think that Chihuahuas were dumb dogs and bulldogs were ugly. Then one of my friends bought a longhaired Chihuahua named Tilly and another bought an English bulldog named Emma. Once I got to know these dogs and could see how truly sweet they are, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with both of them.

In this excerpt from Roxy Manning's 2019 Social Change session at the NVCfest, she explores the application of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to address both immediate conflicts and broader systemic issues. She emphasizes the importance of intervening at multiple levels, from stopping harmful behavior in the moment to driving long-term societal change.

Instead of allocating resources based on needs, we cling to having more money or privilege than others because its close enough substitute for our deeper longing. We may cling to narratives that seem to legitimize this inequality as something we deserved -- such as earning it; having more talent or ability; or needing more for company growth. This soothes our discomfort of having more than others. But these narratives still block us from genuinely getting in touch with the needs of life.

• Learn how every decision we make perpetuates the status quo or brings us closer to the vision of a world that works for all
• Find out about our big brain capacity to integrate needs, impacts, and resources to make decisions that work for everyone
• Understand why power differences interfere with collaborative decisions and what can be done about it
• Discover tools that support collaboration in larger groups and organizations— even across power differences!

Has someone ever talked to you to the extent that you're no longer enjoying it, and you now wonder if they even know you're there? Learn ways to bring in emotional understanding, engage more honestly and open-heartedly, and bridge next steps to the type of conversation that engages everyone's needs.

Want to learn how to live your life more fully than you ever dreamed? In this course you’ll learn how you can shake off old behaviors that no longer serve you, get inspired to embrace a daily happiness practice, and begin experiencing a brand new sense of personal joy and inner peace.

When we're received with resonant understanding painful moments can lessen their charge and became part of the whole tapestry of life -- important but no longer able to hijack us into the eternal re-run of pain. When held this way, we can touch the memories with our attention the way one touches a newly repaired tooth with the tongue, searching for the old roughness, the old wound, but not finding it.

Empathy alone can be unreliable in guiding compassionate action. As seen in historical events, military training, personal anecdotes, and scientific experiments, empathy alone may not prevent people from harming others. A sense of duty or obedience, often instilled through fear of punishment and shame, might inhibit empathic action. The antidote may be to fostering empathy without resorting to control, shame, or punishment.

Eric Bowers explains how needs and strategies correlate to different brain hemispheres, and how relaxing into our needs opens us to greater possibilities.

Dear friends,

This morning, I woke up thinking about a poignant moment from a few years ago. My wife, Kim, and I were driving down a busy 4-lane road, and we were in a hurry to get somewhere important. Then we saw a mama duck with many small ducklings trying to get across the street. Kim pulled over, and we both hopped out to stop 4 lanes of traffic so Mama Duck could get across with all her ducklings. The last one had some kind of injury, so it took a very, very long time for all of them to make it across.

As parents, we often face challenging situations on a daily basis and struggle to create what we most long for. In this 6 session telecourse recording, you will learn how Nonviolent Communication can support a family culture where cooperation, trust, and peace are nurtured, and children and parents can flourish together.

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

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.

• Learn how to transform NVC into a tool for systemic awareness and healing
• Examine the influence of difference, and uncover pathways that strengthen its capacity
• Learn to receive and offer feedback on impact in situations fraught with power differences
• Explore specific ways in which NVC systemically supports the full flowering of humanity
• Delve into the dynamics of cultural differences, and discover how NVC can systemically contribute to a liberation perspective