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Exploring how to connect with your reasons for offering empathy when someone shares pain.

Ask the Trainer: Guidance for NVC groups on when and how to make requests, especially negative ones.

Ask the Trainer: Get ideas to help your girlfriend accept you aren't responsible for her feelings.

Some of my core beliefs make experiencing gratitude difficult . For example, it’s difficult to celebrate others or myself when I think I have to prove my worth in order to be accepted. So much energy goes into proving myself, there’s little left for celebration.

Transform your relationship with money, scarcity, and abundance in this inspiring program.

In June, 1996, I had an epiphany. In a motel room in Indiana, the night before returning home from a solo camping trip in Michigan and Canada, I discovered how much I had lost in my life because of so fiercely protecting myself. Up until that day, bringing forth my vulnerable self was to be avoided at all costs, which kept me numb much of the time, disconnected from myself and from much of life. Alone in my room, I cried, I talked out loud, and I finally exclaimed to myself that I wanted to reclaim every last bit of my vulnerability, just like I had it as a child.

No one likes demands. Do you want to have access to choice when requests or demands come your way? Join CNVC Certified Trainer Arnina Kashtan as she provides tools to free yourself from the submit/rebel dynamic.

Trainer Tip: Mary offers 3 foundational tips for making requests: positivity, specificity and doability.

Trainer Tip: Do you ever feel certain that other people see things the way you do, only to find out they don’t? Read on.

Trainer Tip: When there's conflict if you set the intention to connect and build trust first, you're more likely to move towards resolution. This can be built through offering reflections that captures essence of what's important to each party. Once connection and trust is established, then begin the process of creating strategies and solutions.

Trainer Tip: People struggle to come to agreement when they don’t feel heard. So as a mediator, facilitate the process by asking all parties to reflect the essence of what's important to other parties. This is critical. Once everyone is confident that their needs have been heard, you'll notice the energy in the room relaxing. Then you can brainstorm strategies that will value everyone’s needs, and are focused on what they want to happen.

Trainer Tip: Be aware of opportunities to be honest holding the intention to connect with people. If you do this with the elements of brevity, directness, and respect, you can increase your chances of being heard. If they don't like your honesty, consider switching to empathizing with them by listening to their feelings and needs.

Trainer Tip: Our inner critic judges ourselves and other people; and it is the most likely to get scared when we begin to make a change. It holds wisdom for us if we are willing to listen. When we acknowledge our inner critic and empathize with its need, we gain insights into ourselves and we clear the way for resolution.

Gain practical tools to lead from any seat, engage fear with clarity and step into everyday power.

Trainer tip: Empathy can offer profound learning opportunities to children, expand their feelings and needs vocabulary, and teach them the positive results of valuing everyone’s needs. Read on for a story that illustrates this.

We can ask for what we want but if we repeatedly don’t get it from one source, it's our responsibility to find a new way to get it. We don’t honor our relationships when we insist that people who are unavailable or unwilling to support us meet our needs. Read on for related a parable about a woman persistently asking to get milk from a hardware store.

Trainer Tip: When they say "no", acknowledge what people are saying "yes" to. From there, you persist towards a resolution that values both party's needs, without demand. Persisting is when we try to meet needs by continuing to connect with another. Demanding is when we insist someone do something, or else face negative repercussions. Showing care and willingness to work with people can help them to want to collaborate and resolve conflict.