A practical and welcoming introduction to Compassionate Communication, based on Marshall Rosenberg's Non-violent Communication (NVC) model.
Trainer: Milly Carmichael is a trained and experienced facilitator, and perpetual student of permaculture. She has also undergone training in solution-focused practice and compassionate communication and seeks to deepen and extend her skills and practice in both. She has a background in nursing and youth work, with most of her clinical experience focused on sexual health, substance use and associated mental health and wellbeing.
She currently works in the Public Health sphere and holds a Masters degree in Public Health. Milly has also studied horticulture and has worked as a gardener. She draws on the myriad ways that soil, growing, weather and land management offer us analogy, metaphor and direct comparison to inform our personal and organisational growth and development.
Format: Zoom online
Who is the programme for?
Anyone who would like to develop their communication skills to be more effective, less combative, more joyful, and more confident to make yourself compassionately heard and understood.
These skills can enhance your relationships:
- with a partner
- with children
- with parents
- with friends
- with work colleagues/teams
- with employees
- with members of our community or voluntary groups
- they can also help your experience of social media be less polarising and more nourishing
As we face the realities of climate and ecological crises, and multiple challenges from our finances to geopolitics, we need skills like these to help us move to a more life-enhancing way of being.
Commitment:
Participants are asked to commit to attending all five sessions because they are sequential and build on each other. We will also be working together and getting to know each other as a group and continuity helps that process greatly.
Come prepared to attend all sessions and to join in with the group activities. You will be practicing the techniques during the sessions. Your learning will be enhanced by taking some time for self-reflection and practice between the sessions too.
What is compassionate communication, non-violent communication (NVC)?
With NVC we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others. Through its emphasis on deep listening, this approach helps us discover the depth of our own compassion. This language shows us that all human beings are simply trying to honor our shared universal values and needs, every minute, every day.
NVC is a practice that helps us see our common humanity, using our power in a way that honors everyone's needs, with a dependable set of skills which help us create life-serving relationships and interactions.
The form is simple, yet powerful.
Through the practice of NVC, we learn to observe with clarity, and identify what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We no longer need to use language of blame, judgment or domination. We can experience the deep joy of contributing to each others' well being.
NVC creates a path for healing and reconciliation in its many applications, ranging from intimate relationships, work settings, health care, social services, police, prison staff and inmates, to governments, schools and social change organizations.
"All that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries about consciousness, language, communication skills, and use of power that enable us to maintain a perspective of empathy for ourselves and others, even under trying conditions."
-- Marshall B. Rosenberg, Phd
Nonviolent Communication contains nothing new. It is based on historical principles of nonviolence - the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart. NVC reminds us what we already instinctively know about how good it feels to authentically connect to another human being.
(image Photo by Thomas Keller on Unsplash) In the first session the reason for the giraffe will become clear :-)