Nonviolent Communication is my new favorite communication book; Crucial Conversations, my previous favorite, is now a close second. The late Marshall Rosenberg discusses a lot of stuff that I’ve read elsewhere; I liked that because repetition helps me remember to practice what I’ve learned. There’s also some things that were new to me and others that I’ve believed all my life but hadn’t seen many people discuss. Here are some of the highlights.
Rosenberg describes nonviolent communication as a language based on listening for the needs of others and expressing your own needs in a compassionate way. When asked how they feel, many people either instead say what they’re thinking or give a general response (“good”, “bad”, etc). Nonviolent communication aims to change this by making you aware of what’s going on in your emotions and in your body (for example: “I’m feeling frustrated, my stomach is in knots, and my throat is tight”). When listening to someone, it’s helpful to state what you observe about the situation, identify how the other person appears to be feeling, guess which of their needs are being unmet, and ask what will help meet those needs if they haven’t already made a request. Once you’ve done this, you can use the same approach to express your own feelings, needs, and requests; at that point, the other person will be much more receptive to you since you were receptive to them earlier.
Rosenberg acknowledges that it can be difficult to stay calm and give a measured response when someone is communicating violently. Something he finds helpful is listening for how they’re feeling and what needs of theirs aren’t being met instead of focusing on what they’re saying. This makes it much easier to notice their pain, have compassion for them, and avoid seeing them as a bad person. He gives several examples of this, including some situations that either contained some violence before the communication or which could easily have become violent. Additionally, Rosenberg says that sometimes communication alone won’t stop a person intent on causing harm to others. In those situations, he advocates protective force to protect potential victims and restrain the violent person while seeking to avoid escalating the situation with even more violence.
One of my favorite things about Nonviolent Communication is that it filled in a gap left by the other communication books I’ve read. Those focus mostly on listening to and empathizing with other people and don’t include much about speaking. This book gave me some ideas on how to share my thoughts and feelings with others more effectively. That way I can contribute more to conversations than simply listening to what others have to say and also have less fear of either coming across as a bully or being ignored. The first step involves being more in touch with my emotions and my body. That’s something I’ve learned a lot about the past few years and this book was an excellent reminder of its importance.
In addition to overlapping quite a bit with Crucial Conversations and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Nonviolent Communication has quite a bit in common with Radical Honesty. I read the two of them back to back and was surprised at how much they overlap. Both advocate being in tune with your body, honestly sharing your feelings, and giving others space to do the same. However, where Radical Honesty advises you to speak your mind without concern for hurting anyone’s feelings, Nonviolent Communication is all about having compassion for everyone involved by speaking without blame or accusations. As such, I consider Nonviolent Communication to be the nice version of Radical Honesty. I recommend reading all of the above books as they each have something valuable to say about communication. For now, though, Nonviolent Communication remains my favorite. It’s given me both the clearest motivation to communicate compassionately and the best tools to do so. I look forward to continuing to practice what it’s taught me and seeing how it makes life better for me and those around me.