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NVC Resources on Feelings

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Living In Joy

Trainer Tip To be successful, the first thing to do is fall in love with your work. —Sister Mary Lauretta We all have daily activities that don’t seem fun. Mine are cooking, lighting a fire, and cleaning the cat box. For years I grumbled about these things and I could find no joy in them at all, until I started to connect to the needs I was trying to meet with each activity. Each morning for...
Living Peacefully

Trainer Tip People who fight with fire usually end up with ashes. —Abigail Van Buren As scary as it can be sometimes, put down your fists. Stop fighting. Give up your urge to be right and to win. Instead, approach any charged situations you find yourself in with a sincere desire to be honest, to value everyone’s needs, and to meet your own need for fairness. When we match might with might, we...
Enriching Life

Trainer Tip What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart. —Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D. In Compassionate Communication, we believe that enriching life is the most satisfying motivation for our actions. If you are motivated by fear, guilt, blame or shame, your actions will usually be motivated by avoiding pain. The best way to...
Separating Observations And Evaluations

Trainer Tip I’ve never seen a stupid kid; I’ve seen a kid who sometimes did things I didn’t understand Or things in ways, I hadn’t planned; I’ve seen a kid who hadn’t seen the same places where I had been, But he was not a stupid kid. Before you call him stupid, think, was he a stupid kid or did he just know different things than you did? —Ruth Bebermeyer Oftentimes we blend an observation—the...
Living Autonomously

Trainer Tip The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust Many people consider autonomy, or free choice, to be a need. That is, they believe that we all need it to live happily. I see autonomy more as something we already have, as a way of living. Let’s imagine that a friend of yours works for someone who wants her to start her...
A Hunger For Appreciation

Trainer Tip We are here to help each other through life, this is why we are in partnership. —Hugh Prather Despite our difficulty in receiving appreciation, or maybe partially because of it, many of us long for it. This is a quandary because many of us have not found a comfortable way to ask that our need for appreciation be met, so our longing becomes even more pronounced. If you are in this...
Beyond The Tyranny Of Hard Work

The other day I was going through my calendar in the past ten years, searching for some things, and the more I browsed through it, the more shocked I felt, with memories rushing in. Namely, I used to work so much. I would give four to five training-days per week, with squeezing all the meetings, preparations, mediations, writing articles and handouts into the remaining time. I basically did not...
Inspired By Meeting A Greek God

Sometimes life provides inspiring moments that are better than what I could come up with in my fantasy. For example, several years ago I landed, together with my then-wife on Crete, to start our one-week vacation. As it had been agreed beforehand, there was somebody waiting for us in the arrival hall, with our names on a piece of paper, to hand us the car we rented for that week. And, it was...
The Lonely Trainer

Even before I turned twenty, I became a member of a spiritual cult group. There was an incredible amount of deep spiritual companionship present, belonging, love, beauty, and loads of spiritual experiences, expansions. And, at the same time, there was lack of transparency, lack of honesty, manipulation, strong hierarchy, abuse of power, sex and money, primarily by the spiritual leader himself…...
Liberty and Justice for All?

This past weekend was the 4th of July, Independence Day holiday in the U.S. It is meant to be a celebration of liberty, equality, and opportunity. But instead of celebration I feel deep mourning and pain. The American mythology is that liberty, equality, and opportunity are for everyone. Yet from the formation of this country and to this day it seems, these needs have been for some at the...