Trainer Tip: It's impossible to value other people’s needs and remain compassionate if we simultaneously harbor judgments. If we're willing to shift this behavior we can translate our judgments into acknowledging how something affects us. Once I got into the habit of this, my judgments began to subside dramatically. It became easy to love people and feel compassion for them, and I experienced a freedom I had never known before.

Trainer Tip: We all see through our own filters. To disentangle what we hear from some is really saying, check using understanding requests at the level of detail you need. Course correct along the way. In a charged situation this can be critical to bringing in clarity, being heard and resolving differences amicably.

Trainer Tip: Where do you focus most of your life? Are there areas that you could reassess? Are you happy? Engage a new paradigm shift in your life.

Trainer Tip: When we love a child there's a contribution we can provide in helping them go their own way successfully, in big ways and small.

Listen to Mary tackle one of the greatest challenges of facilitating an NVC group: How do you deal with hecklers and people you don't like? Mary offers insightful tips and helpful guidance.

Listen in as Mary offers suggestions for leading practice groups: 1) how to build trust in a group setting; 2) clues that demonstrate a group’s lack of trust; and 3) signs that indicate a participants' need for trust isn't being met.

When asked to talk about Self-Empathy to a professional group with no NVC background, Mary devised a quick and easy new practice: Jackal vs Needs. It takes the basics of NVC and turns them into delightfully clear and straightforward questions! Excerpted from the 2017 NVC Telethon.

Be present to the life in your group even when it differs from the agenda! Learn how to pivot and meet the needs of the facilitator, of the individual, or the group – and learn how to live in the possibility that all needs can be valued, even though all needs may not always be met.

Want to expand your needs vocabulary, and build your capacity to identify needs — even when you’ve been triggered? Check out Mary’s powerful teaching on Self-Empathy.

How can we live up to our true potential, a life filled with relationships and experiences that truly meet our needs? In this article, Mary offers us a way to bring about inner transformation that can lead to seeing ourselves, others and life differently -- for greater agency, empowerment and choice.