Non Violent Communication is a communication process with 4 key elements
1. Observations: What can we sense? Without judgement, we start by describing what we see, hear, or understand to have happened. Just the facts.
2. Feelings: Identify our emotional response. Given what happened, how do we feel?
3. Needs: What are the underlying needs we want addressed?
4. Requests: What would we like to happen next to address those needs?
How do we take the war out of our words? Sharon Strand Ellison's Powerful Non-Defensive Communication approach highlights our natural defensive reaction to feeling unsure, anxious or attacked when communicating with others.
She outlines these six different defensive reactions:
I gave a talk a couple of years ago called Tools for Talking.
I'm preparing a new talk, which, in some ways, is a sequel to this one. As part of that prep, I thought it might be useful to write some short summaries of each of the tools outlined here, with links to resources on them.
