PNTV - Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Non Violent Communication, A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg. Nonviolent communication. Great book. As the COVID Sundays. More than 1 million copies sold for a simple reason. It works. I've been wanting to read this book for a while. Just got into it after reading Brene Brown and Kristin Neff and their books about self compassion and the book is phenomenal. So let's jump straight in. We're going to look at a little Philosopher's Notes here which has a little more than what we'll talk about today, but five big ideas. We're going to start with the four components. So what is non violent communication? Marshall B. Rosenberg uses nonviolence the same way that Gandhi used it. And he brings that to communication. Obviously nvc Non violent communication. It's also known as compassionate communication. And I like to think of it as effective communication. As I get into it and I'm just getting into it, but just see the power of it and really applying all the ideas that we talk about in these episodes and in Philosopher's Notes and optimal living in into communication in really compelling ways. It's actually remarkably powerful. So there are four components to NVC nonviolent communication. Here are our four components. Number one, we have observations. Observations. We'll talk more about that. Two, we have feelings.

Got it.

Three, we have needs. And four, we have requests. Alright, observations, feelings, needs and requests. This is the basic framework that Marshall presents to us. First thing, observations. So observations are simply that observations with one important thing, they are not judgments. So we observe what someone is doing that we may or may not like without judging it. So if we want to be violent, we judge what someone is doing right. We make a. We'll talk more about this when we talk about what gets in the way. We make moralistic judgments. You shouldn't do that. That is wrong. That's not observing or observations, that's judging. So first step is observations without judgment. The second thing is to notice our feelings. So we're also going to talk about the fact that we need to take responsibility. We need to know how we're feeling about anything that someone else is doing rather than make it about them. We want to recognize, well how do I feel about this? It's a really cool idea he goes off on in the book. And the fact is most of us don't have a clear sense of our Feelings. We're not attuned to that. We're not taught how to do that, but it's huge. Then we have our needs. Well, what unmet need present in the dynamic right now? Huge. We'll talk more about that. And then we make a request. So we observe what's happening, we notice our feelings, we recognize an unmet need, and then we make a request. I'll give you an example. I'm walking across the street last night or two nights ago now with Alexandra and Emerson, and someone cuts us off. We have our little nighttime routine and someone. We're in the crosswalk, only like a quarter of the way in, but someone drives through the other side of the crosswalk. It wasn't even really that close, but it was one of the things that kind of annoys me. Right. I like it when people slow down and they pay attention and they notice when a family is crossing the street. So I had this internal dialogue kick up where I immediately started judging the individual things, like, what an idiot. Can you not see? Like, do you not pay attention? What are you doing? Right. All those pleasant things. And I saw that I was getting into this kind of violent, the opposite of non violent communication. I just studied this stuff. So I'm like, well, let me see, what would Marshall do? What would non violent communication look like in this dynamic? So I went through this little model. I made an observation without a judgment. The observation was, this guy just drove or an individual just drove a car through the crosswalk while we were about a quarter of the way through it. That's an observation. It's neutral. It's not emotional, it's not judging. Simple observation. How did that make me feel? Well, I thought about that and I realized I felt scared, I felt threatened. Well, that's interesting. Okay, so I felt scared and threatened that my family's life was in danger. That was the feeling sense I had. Wasn't really reasonable, but that was kind of the spark of it that became a little bit bigger. Not that it wasn't reasonable, but you get the idea. And then what are my needs? So all this really comes down to my needs. What. What was the unmet need that was being poked at when this individual drove through the crosswalk? Oh, interesting. It's my need to keep my family safe. That's a powerful distinction. Then what would my request be? If I could speak to the driver either out loud or in my head, what would my request be? My request would be that they maintain a speed that's below the speed limit and they are Aware of individuals who are in the crosswalk. They strive to be aware of that. That's a request. So we have an observation, a feeling.

A need, and a request.

Request thrown into that, which is non violent versus the unconscious version of me would have made a judgment. Ah, this guy's an idiot. I would have said to Alexander, gosh, I can't believe people just don't pay attention. And then we would have cascaded into this unnecessary, unhealthy criticism, blaming, etc. Right. And then the irony to the whole thing is that two days before that, I was the guy who drove in front of a family that was crossing the crosswalk. I felt terrible. My heart skipped a beat. I apologize. The dad said, hey, no worries. And it was all good. So kind of funny. But that's the basic idea of nonviolent communication. Obviously there's a lot to unpack there. We could talk about this for weeks, but there you go. Four components. Hopefully some of that landed. We'll come back through this and other things in the future. But for now, let's move on. What gets in the way what gets in the way of nonviolent communication? Well, Marshall describes it as life alienating communication. Life alienating communication. He outlines a number of different things that we can do that are alienating things, like moral judgments. If I had said that that guy was an idiot, what an idiot. He's just a bad person that he drove through the crosswalk, that's not helpful. That gets in the way. That's a moral judgment. Now, I could also make demands of someone. If I say, you have to do this, I start coercing them. That's a demand, that's violent. Someone may do what I ask them to do, but then they're doing it out of a sense of guilt or shame or obligation, not a heartfelt sense of wanting to do something autonomously. Huge distinction. Other things that get in the way are not taking responsibility, which we'll talk about, and comparisons. He has a really funny passage in the book where he talks about the violence of comparisons either to other people, to one another, or ourselves, to standards. And he says, look, you want to have some violent communication with yourself, look at a supermodel on the COVID of a magazine and compare yourself to them. And then look at what Mozart did by the time he was 12 years old. The guy spoke like, I don't know how many languages. He'd written all these concertos by the time he was 12. Compare your life to him. That's one way to get yourself alienated. From yourself and from your heart. Pretty funny. So that's some of the stuff that gets in the way. Life alienating, communication. And then he has this great, great idea on taking responsibility and I just love it. He has a whole chapter on it and he talks about the fact that what someone does may be a stimulus for our response, but it is never the cause of our response. Stimulus versus cause. This is a theme we come back to all the time. This idea of taking 100% responsibility, that something can happen to us, but it's not the thing that creates our response, it's our response. How we choose to respond to it that creates our emotional well being or our emotional frustration. It's not the thing outside of us, it's us. So someone may be a stimulus to our frustration, but they are not the cause of it. This is huge. Taking responsibility is a hallmark of a healthy human being and of nonviolent communication. Again, we can talk about that for a while longer, but we'll leave it at that. Next big idea. What do you want? So we talked about the really important thing that underlying any frustration we may have is an unmet need. We need to identify that unmet need rather than blame someone else. We need to ask ourselves, what do I want in this situation? What do I want? David Emerald, one of my favorite teachers who wrote a book called the Power of Ted, which we have an episode on. I'll link to that below. He talks about the difference between a victim and a creator. A victim lives in what he calls a dreaded drama triangle. Ddt. Constantly complaining and being rescued and all this stuff. We don't want to live there. Victim orientation. Then you have a creator orientation where you're being challenged by life, you're being supportive, but you're going for it. You're creating what you want to see, right? The difference between the two and the way to bridge the gap. If you're in a victim mentality, you're complaining, criticizing, blaming, gossiping, etc. He says, look, you get from victim to creator by asking yourself one very simple question. What do I want? What do I want? Right now Marshall would say, what's your unmet need? Observe what the person is doing, notice your feelings and notice what your unmet need is. And then make a cool positive request. Very, very big idea. The final one, connecting with ourselves. So nonviolent communication. He talks about how we communicate to other people, how we receive their communication, but then also looking at how we're communicating with ourselves. And we just did a video on self compassion by Kristin Neff we're going to do a lot more on mindfulness in loving kindness and unpacking these ideas, but we want to observe how we're talking about ourselves to ourselves. And unfortunately, as harsh as we can be to other people, we're way harsher with ourselves. So we want to shine the light of awareness, as Marshall says, on our internal dialogue and notice the inner critic who rather than just simply observing what's going on and honoring the feelings involved in, is judging constantly. So notice that and bring some of that self compassion non violent communication to yourself. Big Idea. There you go. Super quick look at non violent communication. So much to unpack here, but I hope you got some big nuggets, at least something that you can take into your life today that will have a meaningful impact. Four Components Observations Feelings Needs Requests Think of me walking across the crosswalk. There's a violent way to interact with that individual or a non violent way. We want to choose non violent. What gets in the way? Life Alienating communication Judgments not taking responsibility Making demands comparisons. We need to take responsibility. Big Idea. This is one of my favorite big ideas. I talk about it a lot in the note Stimulus versus Cause. Someone else may stimulate stimulate a response, but it didn't cause it huge to take 100% responsibility. What do you want? Move from victim to creator. Identify your unmet need and then connect with ourselves. Let's bring this nonviolent communication self compassion into our own lives in our inner dialogue and go out and rock it. Well, there you go. What was your favorite big idea? How can you bring it into your life more today? Think about that. Get on it. Have fun. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See ya.

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