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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.

• Access, follow and train your intuition: how to know without knowing;
• Navigate difficult situations with care for all through an active awareness of your own power, as well as other sources of power in the room;
• Remain aware of who speaks and who doesn’t, of those whose pain is invisible – and what you can do about it;
• Walk towards someone presenting a challenge to a group you are facilitating, while continuing to hold care for the entire group, and more.

The highest leverage point for effective meetings is preparing with self inquiry. Before saying something, we can ask ourselves about who this is serving, what needs it serves to say it, if there is a request we want to make, how to make the request actionable, and more. If more people at meetings do this, it can reduce the overall number of tangents we experience at meetings.

• Understand the essential relationship between personal healing and social change — and how to communicate it to others.
• Increase your compassion capacity for different ways of being in the world.
• Get clarity about the difference between equity and equality — and how to generate equitable processes in your communities and networks.
• Obtain tools to explore the various factors that contribute to your understanding of power and privilege — including your own.

Shared story has been a way for groups to unite in opposition to a common enemy. But more divergent and virulent beliefs/stories swirl through the internet and social media, facilitating people to polarize against one another. So notice when you're caught in a polarizing story; try shifting focus to observing your mind; somatic presence; underlying commonality; consciousness as universal need, energy, and spaciousness; and the natural compassion and generosity that flow from this.

Trainer Tip: Ask someone what they enjoy about you being in their life. For example, “Would you tell me 3 specific reasons you enjoy having me in your life?” To a vague reply like, “Oh, you know I love you. I just like spending time with you.” Or, “You’re one of my best employees!” ask for more specificity (eg. “Can you tell me what I do and what needs it meets that makes me one of your best employees?”). This may reveal more to both of you.

Trainer Tip: When we withhold our truth or lie, we can create emotional and physical distance in our relationships. By being honest, we can strengthen relationships. And when someone doesn’t appreciate your honesty, try empathizing with them. It can help to notice how your actions stimulate feelings in other people -- even as they are not the cause of their feelings.

Trainer Tip: Love can be both a feeling and a need in Nonviolent Communication. It can be seen as a need if we do something to meet our need for love. We can also experience love as a feeling, just as warmth, affection, and excitement are feelings. Often, but not always, we can feel love and meet our need for love at the same time.

What does nonviolence have to do with group facilitation?

Miki Kashtan believes that nonviolence is a way of being and living that orients us in all our thoughts, words and deeds toward the integration of truth, love and courage. All nonviolent individual and collective actions are aimed at preserving what serves life and challenging what does not. Facilitation is one clear path for bringing nonviolence to the world!

How can we act now, as facilitators, as if the world of our dreams, the Beloved Community, is already in place?

• Reclaim the lost voices of your ancestors
• Understand the impact of collective trauma on your family line
• Open yourself up to have more warmth for yourself and your children
• Restore the flow of love and energy from past generations

Dear friends,

How was 2024 for you? For me, it was a bumpy ride. There were moments of joy spending time with our 3-year-old grandson, mine and Kim’s first international trip together (a bonafide vacation that was void of work), and precious time with family and friends. There was also heartbreak...

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.

Trainer Tip: Identify one goal and take one small step toward achieving it today. It doesn’t matter how much or how often. The reward is in taking the first step, and then the second and third until you’ve attained your goal.

• 3 full-length courses to deepen your empathy practice
• Learn your body’s “language” and how to listen deeply to it
• Quickly reconnect and return to empathic presence when you are triggered
• Enhance your listening skills and experience greater ease and joy in all your interactions

Trainer Tip: Accepting our true feelings, needs and values can lead us to a more compassionate life. Are you being true to yourself?

Trainer Tip: Find your deepest need. Then notice when you do things, or have done things, that keep you from meeting your most important need. And then take conscious action that is in alignment with the need you want to meet.

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.