Trainer Tip: With empathy, ponder one area of your life that you are unhappy with today. Consider whether you can take action to change the experience and meet your needs.

Trainer Tip: "I often hear people say that someone did something because of a need for control. Control is actually a strategy that is often confused with a need."

With the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roxy Manning, Francois Beausoleil and the Nonviolent Leadership for Social Justice training team explore how we can bring a needs-based consciousness, together with a critical awareness of systemic/structural inequities, to embody a new and transformative way forward.

There are various ways to be known. Learn how to engage and make clear requests accordingly. This includes getting clear in yourself about what exactly you want known; communicating how important it is to you; sharing examples in your life of being known; requesting and negotiating from the energy of the met need; letting the other person know whether or not the relationship is really sustainable for you if the need goes unmet long-term; and checking the other person's capacity.

What can we do to bring vitality and resourcefulness back into our lives when we are feeling overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, or frustrated? Read on for a nine step process.

Creating a trusting connection and keeping the line of communication open are the primary prerequsites for giving feedback as a supervisor. Listen to Miki work with a course participant to ready herself for an upcoming feedback session.

Want things to change in your community, but feel frustrated or don’t know what to do? Miki’s intriguing overview of how to apply the principles of NVC to social change movements may have the exact blend of inspiration and ideas you’re seeking!

The human brain is a conservative organ that comprises different systems with varying degrees of conscious awareness, which evolved in three basic stages of human history (the lizard-squirrel-monkey brain.) In my understanding, we could say, the brain has strong needs for understanding, order, predictability and meaning. In fact, one of its key functions is to process experiences, and predict what the world is like, in order to maximize survival.  CNVC Certified Trainer Stephanie Bachmann Mattei explores the biological basis of our inner jackal voices.

Often when someone else does something we don't like, it's easy to blame the other person. After all, we have all been trained to focus on fault when needs are not met. What can we do to shift that pattern?

We can trick ourselves into keeping the status quo, feeling unworthy, and blocking access to critical awareness necessary that allows for new creative solutions to emerge -- when we think in terms of who has "earned" or “deserved” what.