Center for Nonviolent Communication

Sura Hart from the Center for Nonviolent Communications will be a keynote presenter at both our conferences in April and November. Here is some background information for those of you who are not already familiar with the Center's work.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) is a global organization whose vision is a world where all people are getting their needs met and resolving their conflicts peacefully.

In this vision, people are using Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to create and participate in networks of worldwide life-serving systems in economics, education, justice, healthcare, and peace-keeping.

A Brief History

As a child growing up in a turbulent Detroit neighborhood, Marshall Rosenberg knew he wanted to find a way of speaking that would stop the need for violence.

As a clinical psychologist in 1961, he set out to create such a language—and teach it.

Forty years later, people on five continents speak it.

From his childhood years, Dr. Rosenberg was intent on understanding what motivated people toward violence and why some people, even in trying circumstances, were moved to compassion instead. After studying comparative religions and the stories of peacemakers throughout history, and using his own varied life experiences, he was convinced that human beings are not inherently violent. That belief is the basis of the concepts and skills of Nonviolent Communication.

In the early 1960s Dr. Rosenberg left his clinical practice and literally went on the road, wanting to teach people what he had learned. He wanted to “give away” the communication skills that he had been teaching his clients as a therapist.

In his efforts to apply these skills to the needs of people in everyday life, Dr. Rosenberg found people all over the country who wanted to learn Nonviolent Communication and offer it to a broad base of people in their communities.

To meet this need and to more effectively spread the skills of NVC, he founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 as a non-profit organization. A volunteer staff who shared his vision of a more peaceful world started to organize workshops in an ever-increasing network of communities across the United States, and then in Europe as well.

In addition to groups across the U.S., CNVC now has regional teams of trainers and organizers in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Western Europe, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, and several countries in Latin America. By 1998 the CNVC team in the former Yugoslavia alone, had trained over 600 hundred teachers who taught over 12,000 students and parents, and now has developed curriculum materials for use with children from kindergarten through high school.

We now have more than 180 CNVC-certified trainers throughout the world and estimate that, in each of the past two years, over 250,000 people have received training in NVC in a multitude of countries, cultures, and languages. Many thousands more people have informally shared what they have learned, thus enhancing the lives of their families, workplaces, and communities. Because NVC is such a practical and do-able process, the old adage truly applies, “Each one teach one.”

Nonviolent communication is . . . ?

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is sometimes referred to as compassionate communication. It’s purpose is to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and hear others by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting.

We are trained to make careful observations free of evaluation, and to specify behaviors and conditions that are affecting us. We learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others, and to identify and clearly articulate what we are wanting in a given moment. When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, and needed, rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion. Through its emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others—NVC fosters respect, attentiveness and empathy, and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart. The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative.

While it is taught through the use of a concrete [model], and is referred to as “a process of communication” or a “language of compassion,” Nonviolent Communication is more than a process or a language. As our cultural conditioning often leads our attention in directions unlikely to get us what we want, NVC serves as an ongoing reminder to focus our attention on places that have the potential to yield what we are seeking—a flow between ourselves and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.

Founded on language and communication skills that enable us to remain human, even under trying conditions, Nonviolent Communication contains nothing new: all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries. The intent is to remind us about what we already know—about how we humans were meant to relate to one another—and to assist us in living in a way that concretely manifests this knowledge.

The use of NVC does not require that the persons with whom we are communicating be literate in NVC or even motivated to relate to us compassionately. If we stay with the principles of NVC, with the sole intention to give and receive compassionately, and do everything we can to let others know this is our only motive, they will join us in the process and eventually we will be able to respond compassionately to one another. While this may not happen quickly, it is our experience that compassion inevitably blossoms when we stay true to the principles and process of Nonviolent Communication.

Adapted from Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D. Published by PuddleDancer Press, [available from CNVC]

See also: The Spiritual Basis of Nonviolent Communication [English] or Las Bases Espirituales de la Comunicación No Violenta [español]

As the name implies, this approach to communication emphasizes compassion as the motivation for action rather than fear, guilt, shame, blame, coercion, threat or justification for punishment. In other words, it is about getting what you want for reasons you will not regret later. These techniques allow you to make conscious choices about how you will respond whether you get what you want, or not. It is definitely NOT about guilt and tricking people into giving you what you want.

The skills are built on Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg's application of Nonviolent Communication. The process of NVC encourages us to focus on what we and others are observing, how and why we are each feeling as we do, what our underlying needs are, and what each of us would like to have happen. These skills emphasize personal responsibility for our actions and the choices we make when we respond to others.

Nonviolent Communication skills will assist you in dealing with major blocks to communication such as demands, diagnoses and blaming. In CNVC trainings you will learn to express your feelings without attacking. This will help minimize the likelihood of facing defensive reactions in others. The skills will help you make clear requests. They will help you receive critical and hostile messages without taking them personally, giving in, or losing self-esteem. These skills will be useful with your family, friends, students, subordinates, supervisors, co-workers and clients. These skills will be useful with your own internal dialogues.

NVC is a clear and effective [model] for communicating in a way that is cooperative, conscious, and compassionate.

http://www.cnvc.org

Children are real human beings, not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge and skills. They have thoughts and dreams, and real emotions. Education is not simply about teachers covering a curriculum; it is a dance of relationships among the people of the class: children and adults. When those relationships are based on a sense of comfort, safety, partnership, trust, and mutual respect, children are capable of amazing things.

In the Compassionate Classroom, Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson present both the case for teaching compassionately, and a wide range of practical things to do and say with children that will help to create and sustain a culture of meaningful intellectual work.