Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life Author: Visit Amazon's Marshall B. Rosenberg Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1892005034 | Format: EPUB
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life Description
Review
"A masterwork. Nationally, we talk peace. This book goes far beyond mere talk...It shows us how to TEACH peace." —James E. Shaw, PhD, author, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill
"A powerful tool for peace and partnership...shows us how to listen empathically and...communicate our authentic feelings and needs." —Riane Eisler, author, The Chalice and the Blade, Tomorrow's Children, and The Power of Partnership
"A simple yet powerful methodology for communicating...one of the most useful books you will ever read." —William Ury, coauthor, Getting to Yes, and author, The Third Side
About the Author
Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D. is the founder and educational director of the Center for Nonviolent Communication. Deemed international peacemaker, mediator and healer, he spends more than 250 days each year teaching these remarkably effective communication and conflict resolution skills in local communities, at national conferences and in some of the most impoverished, war-torn areas of the world. He is based in Wasserfallenhof, Switzerland.
- Paperback: 222 pages
- Publisher: Puddledancer Press; 2nd edition (September 1, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1892005034
- ISBN-13: 978-1892005038
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I borrowed this book from the local library after it caught my eye, sitting on the "new books" display. It's a pretty good book, although I do have some reservations about it.
/Nonviolent Communication/ is a rather easy read. This is both good and bad - good, because you're not slogging through lots of academia-speak and technical jargon; but also bad because you might breeze through the book too quickly to truly absorb the rather useful and insightful information it is offering.
The idea behind the NVC process is rather simple - it's mostly about learning to be more precise in expressing your feelings, their cause(s), and what you would like done to resolve them. Rather than saying "you never clean the !@#$ kitchen," the NVC approach would be to say something along the lines of: "When you do not take out the trash in the kitchen, I feel __________." And so on. NVC also encourages you to be receptive to what other people are saying and feeling, even if (or perhaps especially if) they do not word things with as much precision and care.
The approach is very sound, but I have reservations about the way the book presents it. Most of the example conversations are so unbelievably robotic, at times I just wanted to laugh out loud at how absurd they were. My initial thought was that I was being unreasonable - after all, they're just words on a page, and perhaps they would seem less laughable in person with real emotion behind them. And then I realized that was the key that was missing - the conversations were little other than the facts of the situation, and the exact words the people said. There was no emotional context, no insight into the feelings that were being expressed. I found this to be extremely ironic.
First, the basics. Before I read this book, I had no idea that there were learnable techniques for enhancing your performance of empathy. For that matter, I didn't even know that empathy is something that you do; I thought that it was just something that you feel. Well, it turns out that empathy is really an activity with techniques, and this book teaches them.
Now for some context. In the last year, I've read about twenty books on emotional intelligence (EQ) and related topics. (If you're unfamiliar with the term, just think of EQ as "socio-emotional fitness". It can be roughly divided into self-awareness, self-direction, social perception and relationship management.) Good intellectual frameworks for understanding EQ have been easy for me to find; practical instructions for increasing your EQ seem rather more rare. (By "practical instructions" I mean pragmatic action plans with specific things to DO, not just project proposals with goals to accomplish. It's a shame how often the latter is presented when the former is needed.) In my reading experience, "Nonviolent Communication" is THE premiere how-to guide for improving your performance at doing empathy, which is one of the fundamental competencies of EQ.
Third, a caution in the form of a metaphor. The author is proffering you a diamond while demonstrating an oddly formal way of holding it. Just take the diamond and ignore the formalities. That is to say, other reviewers have pointed out that he uses some rather stilted language at times, and that's true; but, the phrasing is NOT the point. The remarkable insights are what matter.
Fourth, an idiosyncratic recommendation. One of most amazing ways that this book helped me was by teaching me how to empathize with my OWN needs.
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