Robert Gonzales Training Legacy

In this Life Hack, we take a closer look at 'values-based' feedback and give you 7 practical tips that will help you provide useful feedback.

Trainer Tip: Identify one goal and take one small step toward achieving it today. It doesn’t matter how much or how often. The reward is in taking the first step, and then the second and third until you’ve attained your goal.

With this exercise you'll choose an experience you had with someone where your needs were not met. You'll work with the related feelings, judgements, values, and feeling the fullness of the need even though it was not met, plus any sadness that may arise.

Use this exercise to stay in dialogue and connect to needs while facing a “no”. Identify a situation where you have low confidence that you'll get your needs met, and it'll be hard hearing a “no” to your request. Explore your response to the “no” by working with feelings, needs, request and alternate strategies. Thus you can work towards meeting your needs while also releasing the idea that your needs “have to” be met.

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.

Self responsibility is owning what's yours. It involves identifying your observations, evaluations, feelings, longings, and more. When we identify what's truly ours we are unlikely to mistake it as coming from outside of us. Self responsibility is not self blame. Without self responsibility, we project, blame and judge. Self-responsibility is central to clarity and full self-awareness. This exercise will guide you there.

Giving feedback can be a difficult task, sometimes we try to avoid getting to the point and instead end up spending a long time attempting to communicate. We find there are mostly two types of feedback. The first focuses on what is wrong with the person's behaviour and tends to feel more judgemental whereas the second is values-based feedback, focusing on the needs of the people involved.

Practice making requests for feedback, clarity, and action. Opportunities for making requests might be when you expected something different from what you got, were treated undesirably, and noticed inner constriction or reactivity. Identify observations, feelings, and values to support finding the request. Ensure your request states what you want, is specific, names the present-tense action, and that you're open to feedback.

Here's guidance on how to approach your inner experience when triggered or stuck in a distressing life experience. Self-Compassion in life can be experienced as: "There is room for life experience in me. There is an open space for ‘what is’ to be fully present in my inner experience". This exercise is more about tracing your felt experience than verbalizing it.

Here are 14 more key differentiations that are not, at time of publishing this, on the CNVC key differentiations list. They can be used to support people who are on the path of learning and integrating NVC in making sense of their own understanding of their journey and where they are within it. And it can be used to support people who share NVC with others in offering brief information in support of understanding and learning.