Marshall Rosenberg’s topics include: Gratitude exercises, the making of  giraffe fuel for life, components of gratitude, reward and punishment,  hearing people’s feelings and needs rather than their thoughts, what  stops us from celebrating life, and more.

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I sometimes do workshops just with the married couples or other people living together in a love relationship and what we do to begin the workshop. We identify the couple who has had a conflict, the longest outstanding conflict that could not be resolved. I make a prediction and it's right. My prediction has been accurate and it may be I'm sure at least 75% of the cases, but my prediction is this that we will resolve the conflict within 20 minutes, within 20 minutes. From the point at which both parties can tell me what the other party is needing.

(2:00:09) Okay. One time we found a couple married, 39 years had a conflict, had not been able to resolve this conflict. The wife said to me, Marshall, I can tell you right We're not going to be able to resolve this within 20 minutes, we have a good marriage. We communicate well. But this is just one of those things that we're different people. We just have a conflict here. I said, let me correct. One thing I didn't say we're going to resolve it within 20 minutes. I said within 20 minutes, from the point at which you can both tell me what the other party is needing. Oh, she said Marshall, when you've been married 39 years and you've talked about something almost every day, I can tell you we understand each other. The problem isn't that we're just two different people in this issue. Well, I said, I've been wrong before. I can sure be wrong this time, but let's see. We'll find out within 20 minutes. First tell me what his needs are in this situation.

(2:01:12) He doesn't want me to spend any money. He responds immediately. That's ridiculous. 39 years of communicati

on. First of all, doesn't want me to spend any money is not a need. Needs, and strategies need to be separated. They had been talking about how much mone tould spend and not spend, but the more important issue there was,,ae main, issue between them. See, but that's, I'm sayin

Int the couple to talk about the strategies or the solutions until the connection is there. When the connection is there, the conflicts usually resolve themselves. I pointed out to her, no, that's

not a need. Even if it was notice, he's saying that's not accurate. It, okay. Let me then tell you what his needs are.

(2:02:12) Marshall. You see t's just like his own father. They both have a depression mentality when it comes to money. ,Iato that, no, I'm not asking for an analysis of his personality. I'm saying, what are his needs? She didn't know,. After 39 years, she had no awareness consciou

Is. I said to him, okay, well she doesn't know why don't you tell her? Well, Marshall, let me tell you what her needs are. She's a lovely woman, wonderful mother, a wonderful wife. But when it comes to money, she's totally irresponsible. Here comes another 39 years. I asked her a need and he gives me a diagnosis. Of course she immediately says, that's unfair. I said, hold it. 

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How to make clear requests after we have expressed our unmet need.

A woman gave me a very good example of what happens when you say what you don't want, in a workshop. She said, you've really helped me understand what happened to recently, Marshall. I said to my husband, I don't want you spending so much time work. Then I got furious with him, when he signed up for a golf tournament.

A teacher gave me a similar example. She said just yesterday, Marshall, I said to this young boy, please, I don't want you tapping on your book while I'm talking. He started to tap on his desk.

Saying what we don't want, doesn't make clear what we do want. If we frame our objectives in getting rid of something, it leads to violence, very often. It makes violence seem attractive, when we try to get rid of something.

For example, I was working with some teachers in the school in Rockford, Illinois, their observable behavior they wanted to work on is, on the average every three months, 38 broken windows in the school.

We got down to the request. I said, what do you want different from the students?

It's obvious. We don't want them breaking windows.

You're saying you don't want the children breaking windows. Yes.

What should we do? Kill them?

Research has demonstrated dead children break no windows.

Almost any time we think of what we want to get rid of. It makes violence look attractive. As stupid as that example was, I just gave, you look in the newspaper on any given day and see how many world leaders are saying, we're going to teach them not to. We're going to get them to stop. They think the violence is going to, see this always makes violence seem attractive.

It's only as I said earlier, when we get to questions clear, what do we want people to do? What do we want their reasons to be for doing it? Then I think we'll see violence never works.

We want to say what we want to say in the positive. What do we want the other person to do? What do we want them to start doing differently? Second that it needs to be clear action language.

(1:07:27) We can't do what this one wife did with her husband who came to a workshop with him.

She said, I want you to listen to me when I talk.

He said, I do listen.

No you don't.

Yes I do.

No you don't.

They told me they'd had this same conversation for 11 years. The problem is with the word. Listen, I see what does that. We can use the word, listen as a need. I have a need to be listened to.

But when we moved to requests, we need to speak action language. What specific action do we want this person to take?

We can't use the verb to be. I want you to be more friendly, not doable. We can't use feeling language. I want you to feel confidence in yourself. That's not doable. We need to be able to make very concrete requests, try it out with the behavior you've been writing about, in relation to what the other person did and your feelings and needs in relation to the action.

Imagine you're talking directly to the person and express a request using this form.

I would like you to, what do you want the person to do to meet your needs?

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First let me begin by clarifying the purpose of Nonviolent Communication. Its purpose is to help you to do what you already know how to do. Why do we need to learn something today that you already know how to do? Because sometimes we forget to do this. We forget because we’ve been educated to forget.

Now what is it that i’m talking about that we already know how to do? The purpose of this process is to help us to connect in a way that makes natural giving possible.

01:01

I never feel more given to

And you know my giving isn’t done

To receive with grace

When you give to me,

You all know that giving, you know how to do it, and that’s what i’m interested in. Remembering to stay with that quality of giving, moment by moment, in any connection. But we also all know that it’s easy to lose that connection, so that instead of enjoying that quality of giving which is possible every moment in every contact we have. In spite of how precious that is we forget.

Instead of playing the game that song is about which i call making life wonderful for us, it’s the most fun game i’ve ever heard. Instead, much of the time we play another game called who’s right? have you ever played that game? It’s a game where everybody loses. Isn’t this amazing? We all know about this quality of giving that this song is about, it’s possible every moment, we find that the richest thing to do.

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In this session, I'll be talking about the role that sincere gratitude plays in helping us to remember what nonviolent communication is intended to serve. And to help us to maintain the energy that it takes to stay compassionate in a world that often makes that quite challenging. In an earlier session, I described the spirituality that nonviolent communication was designed to serve this process, nonviolent communication has great power to enrich our lives, when it is our intention to create the connections necessary for compassionate giving to take place. It's a great tool to support our being conscious of what's alive than others, and to hear what's alive and others in a way that makes giving enjoyable It's a process that helps us to share that information with others, how to be honest and share what's alive in us in a way that enables others to enjoy compassionately giving to us.

A very important component in keeping this consciousness alive in us is the process of expressing gratitude to one another in a way that can be trusted, that it is a celebration of life, and not a form of communication that's designed to manipulate us to do things that others want.

To clarify this, I'd like to make a difference between sincere gratitude and praise and compliments, very clear. Praise and compliments are given for the purpose of rewarding Parents, teachers, managers and industry that I have worked with, have told me that they have been in programs that have taught them that if you praise and compliment people daily, they work harder. So parents use praise and compliments, to reward their children to do things around the house that they want them to do.

Teachers have been educated to use praise and compliments to get students to work harder. managers and industry tell me that they have been through similar programs. I point out to all of these groups, and if they look at the research, that is based on people using praise and compliments as rewards, they'll see that it isn't even that effective when used as a reward. It's only effective for a short time until the people see that the praise and the compliments are really not sincere expressions of gratitude. But they are at attempt to manipulate them to behave in ways that others want them to behave. And research shows that when people see that they sense that the praise and compliments are given out of that energy, they lose their desire to work harder and to contribute to what the authorities want them to do.

So from the very beginning, I'd like to make it clear that the way of expressing gratitude that we'll be talking about in this session, the intent is to celebrate life, not to reward people for doing what we want them to do. And by celebrating life, I mean that we let people know how our needs have been fulfilled and how our life has been enriched by something they have done. And then our only intention is to celebrate that, and not in any way to put them under pressure to continue doing that which we would like them to do.

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In this session, I'll be focusing on how nonviolent communication can support our social change efforts. In previous sessions, I've shown how social change can be used to communicate with ourselves. We've also looked at how it can be used to communicate with others and our family relationships and our work relationships.

Now, let's take a look at social change, which for me, to a large extent, shows how to use nonviolent communication when we are communicating with gangs. Now some gangs call themselves gangs, street gangs. I'm not so worried about these gangs and the damage that they might be doing. But I am concerned about some other gangs. These other gangs, don't call themselves gangs, these other gangs that I'm worried about. Some of them call themselves governments. Some of the gangs that I'm worried about, call themselves corporations. What I mean by these gangs that I'm worried about our organizations of people that have a big impact over our lives, and who are doing some things that I think contribute to great violence on the planet and great suffering.

So how can each of us develop our own power, become conscious of our power and use it to transform these structures, these organizations so that they serve life rather than threatened life. Now, this can be quite a challenge because the spirituality, language and means of influence that these gangs that I'm worried about, perpetuate, make it very hard for us to become conscious of our power and to use it.

The gangs that I'm worried about control through punishment and reward and try to get their own interest met at the cost sometimes of the environment, sometimes through exploitive labor practices, sometimes through the use of violence, to get employees to do as they would like. The organizations that are doing the most damage on our planet can be quite a task for us to think of how we as individuals, can change them. We are often overwhelmed just with our own personal lives, and trying to get our needs of our family met. And it seems beyond what we can do to try to deal with these organizations that are creating a lot of pain on our planet.

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I'll be showing the power that empathy has in three functions, healing, mediation, and reconciliation. In the previous session, we looked at the dynamics of empathy. We saw how it requires our full presence to another person, and full presence on what's alive in them, what they're feeling and needing. In this session, I will show just how powerful that process can be.

In healing past wounds, mediating conflicts between people, and reconciling groups that are at war with each other, to see how they can live in peace and harmony, the power of empathy.

First, let's look at how empathy supports healing. The word healing has some aspects that I get concerned about, because when it's applied to people's emotional pain, we use this term mental illness, and then we think of trying to heal the illness.

I have some deep concerns about the concept of mental illness. My concerns about this concept began when I receive some precious gifts from a professor I had at the university just before I was ready to graduate with my doctor's degree in clinical psychology.

This professor showed me the scientific limitations of the concept of mental illness, and the political dangers of this concept. He helped me to see that there was almost no reliability about how professionals use these terms because it was an real scientific basis for all of the different problems that were defined in the basic manual used by psychiatrists and psychologists to make diagnoses.

So what one professional might call a bipolar disease, another might call something else. And research shows that there's very little reliability of a scientific nature about how all of these terms in the manual are used. But what's more important to me is the political dangers he pointed out to this. He pointed out to me that we live under political and economic structures that require a certain education that contributes to great pain on the part of large numbers of people.

He helped me to see how the concept of mental illness takes the focus away from what might be causing the problems, the structures and the education they require. And by making it look like it's something that's wrong within individuals, we take away from what's really creating the problem. And we do it in a way that isn't really helpful and helping the people because we talk as though they have an illness. When it isn't an illness they have, it's an educational problem that they have. They've been educated in a way that might make them depressed, or educated in a way that might make them insensitive to other people's needs and preoccupied only getting their own needs met regardless of how it affects other people.

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In this session, I'll be talking about authority, both how we exercise authority, and how we experience it, and how certain institutions are set up to give us certain qualities of authority. nonviolent communication suggest that we get certain things clear when we're in a position of authority or when we're dealing with people in positions of authority. 

Some very important differentiations. One of these is the difference between respect for authority and fear of authority. Getting these mixed up creates a great deal of pain for people is I would use these terms. respect for authority involves three ingredients.

When we're in a position of authority, we get respect for our authority. When one we know some things or can do some things that the people we're working with, or living with, do not have. Second things people see these things that we know or can do. They see them as valuable. They see how these things will enrich their lives. And third, they see us as offering these things which we know that are valuable. We offer we don't impose them.

Respect for authority as I use the term is manifest when we know things that people don't know, or can do things that they don't know how to do. They see that these things are very valuable and they see that these things are being offered to them and not imposed upon them, then they would have what I call respect for authority.

Now, fear of authority is quite a different thing that is usually built into the structure of either the family, the school, the business, the government. This structure gives us the right to impose things on people that we can reward or punish, to get people to do what we want. So respect for authority needs to be earned. We need to clearly communicate with people so they can see the value of what we're offering.

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In this session, I'll be talking about how nonviolent communication can support us in deepening our intimate relationships. And let's start with a dialogue that is likely to be heard in almost any intimate relationship, at least variations of it.

One person says to the other, do you love me?

And the other person said, Oh, yes, of course. 

And the first person said, but I want you to be really sincere about this.

And the other person seriously contemplates this and waits and thinks and then finally said, Yes, I really do.

The first person said, then why did it take you so long to respond?

This question is very important, you know, do you love me And it's very hard to answer because we very often don't get clear in intimate relationships what we really mean by that word love.

In an earlier session, I mentioned how some people use the word love as a feeling and emotion. And if they do that, it's pretty hard to know how to answer that question without reference to a specific time and place because feelings change every few seconds.

In nonviolent communication, we use the word love as a need, and a very important need. What's very important that is to know how to manifest this need, what to do to contribute to that need being met, in people that we care for, and that we have intimate relationships with. I have found in working with couples for many years, that the best way that we can really meet people's need for love is to do two things.

First of all, express those needs within us those messages within us that are the hardest to express the most scary to express. Because when we have that ability to share that which is not easy to express, we get a chance to get these needs fulfilled. But if we are so frightened of expressing these needs that we don't say anything that creates barriers in the relationship. Yet it's very difficult for many reasons for people to express these needs that need to be expressed in intimate relationships and when they do express the need Very often it's done with an energy that provokes the very opposite of what we would really like.

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I relate empathy to surfboard riding. Imagine yourself getting up on a surfboard, this requires getting in touch with a certain energy. If you don't get on exactly, you can get knocked off. To me, empathy is somewhat like that. Empathy is getting in touch with a life energy that's coming through another person. Now, as I have expressed in other sessions, the life energy that's coming through people at each moment, I have learned can best be described in words by referring to what that person is feeling and needing. The empathic connection that I am interested in sustaining is one in which I can stay connected to the life energy coming through another person. That's what makes it like surfboard riding.

It's a challenge because many people, they don't know how to directly express what's alive in them. So they use a rather choppy language, they often tell you what's alive in them with reference to what's wrong with you. When people need empathy the most, they're often expressing it in a pretty violent way. In that sense, it's very much like surfboard riding. How to get in touch with this energy and flow with it. The energy coming through people is, for me, a very beautiful divine energy. So when I can really stay connected with it, I feel like I'm riding in a very precious flow of energy.

Session #4 The Dynamics of Empathy 

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