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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