Browse the NVC Library

Our "felt-sense" can provide crucial information about our experience and our lives. It can also help us integrate and retain information. This can also bring greater access to internal resources, choice, open heartedness, collaboration and creative solutions. From there, profound insight and transformation can follow. Here's how we can harness that...

This 6-session telecourse recording focuses on supporting people who work with children (e.g. parents, teachers, ministers, etc.) in applying the skills of NVC mediation in conflict situations that involve children.

Trainer Tip: In our effort to be heard, we often forget to listen. In fact, your need to be heard will not be met completely until you have heard how what you said affects the other person. If we want to ensure that we're heard we can ask the other person to reflect what they heard us say. And we can hear what's going on with them. It is important to remember that a dialogue is not complete until both people have been heard.

Trainer Tip: Making a request is critical because it can greatly lessen any tension in the situation. Plus, it can clarify for you and the people in your life what it would take to meet your need. Make at least one specific and doable request to someone today.

What's really going on underneath the surface when we bring or encounter blame, judgements, pain -- and thereby the inability to empathize, be present, attuned, or responsive?  Why does this happen even if one or more people in a relationship dynamic is working hard at bringing in an NVC response? This article addresses these and more questions from the perspective of how our brains are affected in our relationships.

To tell the difference between empathy and investigation, watch for distinctions along four different dimensions: energy, subject, intention and trust. These distinctions can help us engage awareness and skill to meet your needs and respond to others’ needs in more direct ways. The more you meet your needs in conscious and direct ways, the more present you can be for others. Read on for more about how to do this.

Notice situations where you're attending to another and giving up on your needs with resentment or a sense of submitting. You can also watch for “shoulds,” obligation, and black-and-white thinking around the support you offer. Is there a sense that if you don't carry out a particular action something bad will happen? If so, identify the needs at hand and brainstorm a variety of strategies to meet them.

Much like other asymmetric relationships (such as therapist and client), there are complications related to power dynamics that can arise with any NVC trainer having sex with a participant. For one, there's (counter)transference. And there's potential for things that may not move outside this asymmetric relationship -- such as projections where the participant, and/or the trainer, is guided by un-healed pain of their "inner child".

Most of us believe we are powerless at work – even if we’re the one “in charge.” This course offers you the opportunity to learn how to consciously change this mindset, and have a positive impact on workplace culture and attitudes along the way. Most of us believe we are powerless at work – even if we’re the one “in charge.” This course offers you the opportunity to learn how to consciously change this mindset, and have a positive impact on workplace culture and attitudes along the way.

This exercise brings forth presence, awareness, and witnessing regarding what you observe. And also the inner form of experiencing: thinking, feeling, sensing, longing, and noticing any inner resistance. This exercise is designed to allow self-compassion to clear the inner space, and to help you feel it as a flow of energy, presence to the other, and bring in a more relaxed experience and more availability to vulnerability.