Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships Author: Marshall B. Rosenberg | Language: English | ISBN:
B0019O6IWU | Format: PDF
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships Description
An enlightening look at how peaceful communication can create compassionate connections with family, friends, and other acquaintances, this book uses stories, examples, and sample dialogues to provide solutions to communication problems both at home and in the workplace. Guidance is provided on identifying and articulating feelings and needs, expressing anger fully, and exploring the power of empathy in order to speak honestly without creating hostility, break patterns of thinking that lead to anger and depression, and communicate compassionately. Practical nonviolent communication skills are partnered with a powerful consciousness and vocabulary that can be applied to personal, professional, and political differences. Included in the new edition is information on how to compassionately connect with oneself.
Do you hunger for skills to improve the quality of your relationships, to deepen your sense of personal empowerment or to simply communicate more effectively? Unfortunately, for centuries our culture has taught us to think and speak in ways that can actually perpetuate conflict, internal pain and even violence. Nonviolent Communication partners practical skills with a powerful consciousness and vocabulary to help you get what you want peacefully.
In this internationally acclaimed text, Marshall Rosenberg offers insightful stories, anecdotes, practical exercises and role-plays that will dramatically change your approach to communication for the better. Discover how the language you use can strengthen your relationships, build trust, prevent conflicts and heal pain. Revolutionary, yet simple, NVC offers you the most effective tools to reduce violence and create peace in your life—one interaction at a time.
Over 150,000 copies sold and now available in 20 languages around the world. More than 250,000 people each year from all walks of life are learning these life-changing skills.
- File Size: 1694 KB
- Print Length: 222 pages
- Publisher: Puddledancer Press; 2 edition (May 19, 2008)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0019O6IWU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,036 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships - #35
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling - #60
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help
- #21
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships - #35
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling - #60
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help
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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