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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.

This exercise brings forth presence, awareness, and witnessing regarding what you observe. And also the inner form of experiencing: thinking, feeling, sensing, longing, and noticing any inner resistance. This exercise is designed to allow self-compassion to clear the inner space, and to help you feel it as a flow of energy, presence to the other, and bring in a more relaxed experience and more availability to vulnerability.

In moments where we would like to see change, personal growth or spiritual transformation, rather than immediately acting to make a change, Robert suggests we practice unconditional self-acceptance through a spacious presence to our inner experience. Robert asks us to give our attention and spacious awareness to our own judgments, inner contractions, and other experiences we often regard as undesirable.

• Cultivate thriving interpersonal relationships
• Discover paths to move beyond anger, blame, and judgment
• Connect with the Divine essence in other people
• Experience greater ease and joy in all your interactions

This audio training with expert trainer Rita Herzog explores the NVC alternative to family relationships: stay grounded in your own needs and values so you are able to reach out with empathy to family members.

Ask the Trainer: "I have the understanding that the unconscious is vast compared to conscious mind. When I state 'needs' how well can I depend on there being something beneath my awareness that is actually the motivation?"

What is a good baby? If you have been raised in a Western culture, chances are you know the answer right away (whether or not you agree with it). A good baby is one that doesn't cry! The training against vulnerability starts very early in life.

Miki speaks to peace activists about connecting with the life vision in those who stimulate pain in them.

In this potent audio, expert trainer Miki Kashtan demonstrates the eye-opening experience of translating judgments into needs. She works with a mother who is stuck in a loop of feeling judged by family members and judging them back.

Inbal offers parents and anyone with children in their life a lucid discussion of the important role self-empathy plays in creating healthy, supportive relationships.

Does NVC seem like a good idea, but not practical? Do you feel frustrated when you find yourself in the same jackal scenario repeatedly? Let beloved trainer Kathleen Macferran guide you toward integrating NVC into all aspects of your life.

Ask the Trainer: My question is about wanting to empathize more with my husband. Sometimes we connect very deeply, other times he slips back into "jackal talk..."

Ingrid guides parents to navigate everyday parenting challenges using the NVC model, such as the behavior of a frustrated child, a messy room, transition times and a child who collapses when things don't work out as she had hoped.

Listen to this audio to learn the value of focusing on needs in an NVC model, either for the first time or as a refresher course. Living from a needs-consciousness creates abundance, clarity and choice. Using three examples from participants, Mary guides the group towards identifying and then connecting with the needs of both parties involved in each situation. It becomes clear very quickly that people choose different ways to support their needs; and many times they have the same needs in a given situation. When we understand this, we are able to create peace in our relationships and negotiations.

“Everything someone does or says is an attempt to meet a need,” says CNVC Certified Trainer Mary Mackenzie. This simple statement is a foundational understanding in Nonviolent Communication; once you gain skills at living in a “needs-consciousness” you will literally change your life and your perception of the world, and improve all of your relationships.

In this inspiring interview, Wes Taylor relays a story of how Nonviolent Communication is successfully used in law enforcement, and some of his challenges and joys in infusing Nonviolent Communication into a Maryland hospital culture.

Join CNVC Certified Trainers Inbal Kashtan and Roxy Manning, for a passionate and intimate exploration of how NVC can support personal and social transformation in the area of power relations and social divisions.

Watch this video with CNVC Certified Trainer Jim Manske to explore the practice of Self-Empathy through a different lens.  Included is a unique four-step Self-Empathy process that culminates in a focus of gratitude.

The wisdom which NVC is based on is as old as humanity itself. This telecourse recording draws insights from NVC’s elder siblings of Taoism, Buddhism and indigenous culture to offer new ways of approaching common NVC ‘stuck’ places.