Fear of corporal punishment obscures children's awareness of the compassion underlying the parent's demands.
Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.
Social change involves helping people see new options for making life wonderful that are less costly to get needs met.
Staying with empathy we allow speakers to touch deeper levels of themselves.
Remember that whatever anyone does, it is an effort to meet a need.
Needs are the expression of life through us.
NVC gives us tools and understanding to create a more peaceful state of mind.
Peace requires something far more difficult than revenge or merely turning the other cheek; it requires empathizing with the fears and unmet needs that provide the impetus for people to attack each other. Being aware of these feelings and needs, people lose their desire to attack back because they can see the human ignorance leading to these attacks; instead, their goal becomes providing the empathic connection and education that will enable them to transcend their violence and engage in cooperative relationships.
What all the basic religions are saying is this: Don't do anything that isn't play.
Fix-it jackals can't wait to fix it, because they don't know how to enjoy pain. And until you learn how to enjoy pain, you can't enjoy intimacy.
When people hear needs, it provokes compassion. When people hear diagnoses, it provokes defensiveness and attack.
Miracles can happen when we can keep our consciousness away from analyzing and classifying one another.
NVC is interested in learning that is motivated by reverence for life, by a desire to learn skills, to contribute better to our own well-being and the well-being of others.
Once you can clearly describe what you are reacting to, free of your interpretation or evaluation of it, other people are less likely to be defensive when they hear it.
With empathy we don't direct, we follow. Don't just do something, be there.
Enemy images are the main reason conflicts don't get resolved.
Every moment each human being is doing the best we know at that moment to meet our needs. We never do anything that is not in the service of a need, there is no conflict on our planet at the level of needs. We all have the same needs. The problem is in strategies for meeting the needs.
We are designed for Giving
A difficult message to hear is an opportunity to enrich someone's life.
Always listen to what people need rather than what they are thinking about us.