Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Non-violent communication (NVC) is a framework for expressing feelings and listening empathetically during hard conversations. From the speaker’s side, it can be used to convey difficult emotions: anger, frustration, and the such in a way that doesn’t provoke defensiveness in the listener. On the listener’s, it can be used to defuse emotionally charged conversations, by the listener focusing on the feelings and needs of the speaker instead of taking criticisms or judgments personally. The book walks through the four components of speaking through NVC: communicating the speaker’s observations, feelings, needs, and requests. It also includes very helpful guidelines on how to listen to someone who might not be using NVC and still have a conversation that satisfies both parties. This has become one of the most important books I’ve read due to how easy it is to apply it to everyday, and along with Cialdini’s Influence it is among the most useful pieces of psychology I’ve ever learned.

Speaking through the NVC framework is relatively straightforward given some time and preparation, but listening through it is challenging. Often the other party is angry, using accusations, judgments, criticisms, and generally laying blame – this is how most people are conditioned to communicate, and as these are attacks, it provokes defensiveness on the part of the listener. The listener responds with “That’s wrong”, “No, I didn’t do that”, or more innocuous, “I didn’t mean that”, none of which address the speaker’s core need and leads to more useless attacking, defending, and meaningless rebuttals. NVC aims to listen to what the speaker’s feeling, and what their core needs are: on the listener’s side, it involves the difficult task of responding to accusations like “you’re so annoying, you always try to correct me on every little thing I say!” with “are you feeling exasperated because you’re needing freedom to speak your mind?” The listening to feelings and needs really helped me get through some tough conversations and at the core, it’s a super simple framework for conveying both empathy and conveying that the speaker was heard – and as far as I’ve seen most arguments don’t require much more than those two conditions to resolve soon after.