[kleer001]

Ah , non-violent communication, a great tool.

I've copied an excellent summary by @BeetleB

To add to the above:

1. Observations should be specific, not generic ("you are lazy" vs "you have not accomplished any of the tasks you've been assigned"). They should also be objective - third party witnesses should have consensus. We can agree that you've not accomplished your tasks for the week. We will likely disagree on whether that means you're lazy.

2. Feelings are internal and should not involve someone else. "I feel cheated" is really just saying "I believe I've been cheated" - it's accurately portraying your inner narrative (which may be OK), but it is not portraying your feelings. Instead, you may feel sad, depressed, upset, nervous, whatever. Another way to think of it: Feelings are always legitimate - they are never wrong. The narrative in your head, though, may well be wrong. If someone can reasonably dispute it (assuming he/she is not a jerk), then it probably was a narrative and not a feeling.

3. Needs: This, in my experience, is easy for tech people to state. If you think someone cheated you out of money, you probably need things like integrity, honesty, security, etc. If your report at work seems unreliable to you, you probably need consistency, peace of mind, etc.

4. This is making a request. A request is not a demand or a command (so yes, NVC is not appropriate/relevant in contexts where orders make sense). If the person declines your request and you're upset a fair amount by it, you probably were not sincere in making the requests. And finally, your request should also be precise. Not "Could you rephrase that in a respectful manner", but "Could you rephrase that and address me as Mister instead of Dude?"

A few other tidbits from the book (also in Crucial Conversations): You are not responsible for other's feelings. Relieve yourself of that burden/guilt. However, if you want to take things to the next step and have better relations with people around you, do care about their feelings and use techniques to have them feel better - but out of empathy and not out of responsibility or guilt.

In general, the book is about realizing that you have a choice in most things - even things like whether you want to earn money to feed your kids. Likewise, it's about eliminating the language of obligation from your internal dialogues. This may be offputting to people who have a strong sense of obligation.

The above is likely about 90% of the book. The rest of the book are specific, concrete strategies related to the above.

----

Personally I've been studying this stuff for years yet still haven't been able to use it in real life. Not for want of trying or of opportunities. It's damn hard when the other person isn't playing along or interested in being understood or heard, when they just want to vent at you about you.

[baxtr]

> However, if you want to take things to the next step and have better relations with people around you, do care about their feelings and use techniques to have them feel better - but out of empathy and not out of responsibility or guilt.

This might be a very stupid question… Aren’t responsibility and guilt and empathy somehow very intertwined? At least you’re probably empathetic if you feel guilt or responsibility, right?

[pmichaud]

It's not a stupid question.

One thing to say here is that empathy is basically putting yourself in another person's shoes. Often when you do that you also find room in your heart to forgive them, ie. when you see the way their behavior makes sense from the inside, most of the time there's less blame and more "that makes sense, if I look at it that way."

And I guess you're right that by having a policy of caring about people's feelings and acting on that care, you're "taking responsibility" in a broad sense. But there is a difference between acting out of obligation or coersion vs acting out intrinsic care or even out of even-handed consequentialist reasoning (ie. "what communication will cause the outcome I want?").

There's a lot to say about what that difference is, but--just in terms of outcome--"empathizing" out of obligation almost never works. It's because that obligation is kind of lurking within our motivations and comes through in various ways that disrupt the process of actually, really, understanding what's going on with the other person. Plus it disrupts communicating that understanding in a way that comes through to them.

If there's unspoken blame and contempt in the interaction, it'll almost always come through and make the communication fraught.

[burnished]

Have you ever righted a fallen bicycle? It wasn't your responsibility, you probably didn't feel bad or guilty, maybe you just wanted things to be right/nice. I think that might be the emotional tenor under discussion. Being in an emotional state where you take action because you have some investment in the outcome and not because you are trying to soothe a negative emotion.

[BeetleB]

They are somewhat orthogonal. You can have guilt with or without empathy. You definitely can have empathy without guilt.

If I give charity to a beggar, it is not because I feel guilty. I just want the help out the guy and I hope his condition improves. If I don't give charity to him, I don't feel guilty.

Guilt and responsibility often arise from cultural constructs, and indeed they partly exist to compel people who are not having empathy to act. Often it's a case of "You are a bad person for not giving money to that beggar" and so I give money to avoid being a "bad" person. NVC eschews the notion of "good" person and "bad" person, and encourages you to remove it from your internal dialogue. Give the guy money because you want to, not because of how others may perceive it.

[soared]

The only times I've actually been able to use this kind of stuff is when explicitly telling a person I work with, "Hey, I want to start improving myself and our processes. Can we set up some time for talking about feedback?"

And then like once a month you do a feedback meeting, but the first one is talking about nvc/radical candor/etc and how the future meetings should go.

This has only ever worked for me with people at the same level as me but on a different team (account managers, where I'm their technical AM) and literally never has worked with a superior. I think my managers don't like someone else suggesting a management/feedback style for them.

[_y5hn]

Your intent and persistence is enough. A team-game's outcome is dependent on the entire team. In a team-game, you alone can't do the change alone. Expect real change to take about a decade, and mostly driven by other people than yourself.

Focus on what is in your control and on the longer plays.