Nonviolent Communication

Rosenberg's method treats most conflict as a failure of a particular kind. People state their positions as judgments about the other person, the other person hears an accusation and defends, and the actual need underneath never gets said. His alternative is a four-part discipline: observe what happened without evaluating it, say what you feel, identify the need behind the feeling, and make a specific request rather than a demand. Each step is designed to remove something that reliably provokes resistance, which is why he treats blame and diagnosis of other people's motives as the core problem rather than as an unfortunate tone. The book teaches through dialogues and examples across family life, work and political disagreement, and includes material on expressing anger fully rather than suppressing it, on empathy as an active skill, and in the later edition on applying the same approach to oneself. It is a practitioner's method, taught worldwide, with a devoted following and little controlled evidence.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.

People

• Marshall Rosenberg