Welcome to episode 181 of the The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. I am out of town for ten days at a family reunion. We have been celebrating family reunions just about every other year since 1997. My mom, who lives with us, is now 99. She has sisters who are 97 and 95, and we all get together every other year for a week of fun and to celebrate who we are as a family. This year we're expecting about 70 people spanning five generations, and I'm guessing there's going to be some tension surrounding togetherness, pressure and a bit of anxiety, but in general we have lots of fun. But if I have any stories or case studies to share, I will certainly do that. While I'm away, I'm going to be rebroadcasting a two-part series on nonviolent communication, which was developed by Marshall Rosenberg and which I find to be extremely helpful in being a non-anxious presence. So, without further ado, here is episode 181, Family Systems Take on Nonviolent or Compassionate Communication.

In today's episode, I'm going to take a look at Non-Violent communication, also known as Compassionate Communication, which was developed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s. According to a post in Wikipedia, NVC, as it's known, is designed to support change on three interconnected levels: within yourself, between others, and within groups and social systems.

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There is an immediate family systems take on this. Within self is all about taking responsibility for yourself. As we dig deeper, you will see that this aspect is consistent with self-differentiation. Between others is about how you communicate with others. It is also consistent with self-differentiation because this aspect provides practical ways to avoid blaming reactivity, adaptivity and defining others instead of self. Because family systems theory predicts that if we can self-differentiated and function as a non-anxious presence in the face of anxiety, we can help systems to move toward a healthier place, that would certainly be considered positive change in groups and social systems.

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Before getting into the four components of Non-Violent Communication, it's important to understand four things in communication that block compassion. The first of those is moralistic judgments. In family systems terms, these are things that focus on others and their wrongness. They are about defining others and specifically avoiding defining self. It's important to distinguish between moralistic judgments and value judgments. Value judgments are about what we believe, about the principles that give us purpose in life. And this is different than defining others through moralistic judgments. Value judgments are about defining self.

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A second form of communication that blocks compassionate communication is the making of a demand. When we make demands, we are explicitly or implicitly threatening others with blame or punishment if they fail to comply. This is all about the failure to take responsibility for yourself. It's basing our own well-being on the behavior of others instead of taking responsibility for our own behavior and owning it.

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The third form of communication that blocks compassion is the denial of responsibility. I shouldn't need to say more about this. If you have listened to many episodes of this podcast, denial of responsibility is another form of blaming, especially when succumbing to surrounding togetherness pressure.

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One example of this is the phrase that begins, "I had to..." or "I have to..." When we say, "I had to do that...," even though I thought it was wrong because my boss told me to, or "I have to go to my parents house for Christmas because they expect me there," those are statements that put the responsibility on someone else instead of taking responsibility for self.

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Just because the boss tells us to do something doesn't mean that we have to do it. If it's wrong, we can take a non-anxious emotional stand and say why we don't believe we should do it. Or if our parents are saying that we need to come for Christmas, but we have other plans or we feel that we need to be somewhere else, than taking a non-anxious emotional stand to state that is all about self-differentiation. It's all about taking responsibility for self.

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Finally, there is an assumption that we can make that can block compassion and compassionate communication, and this is the idea of "deserving." When we believe that some actions should be rewarded and others should be punished, then that gets in the way of feeling compassion for self and feeling compassion for others.

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This leads to an important point that I think non-violent or compassionate communication helps us to understand, and that is oftentimes we do not have self compassion and that makes it hard to be compassionate to others. The Bible tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Many of us know that it is hard to love others when we have a hard time loving self. So these four forms of communication are four assumptions that we make about communication, that make it difficult to have compassionate communication, to engage in what Marshall Rosenberg calls non-violent communication.

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As I think I've laid out, when we work on self-differentiation, when we work on owning who we are and taking responsibility for self, when we work on being able to effectively articulate our own goals and values while staying connected to others in healthy ways, this helps us to avoid forms of communication that block compassion. It enables us, as Rosenberg says, to communicate more effectively, to understand what we need and to understand what other people need. I believe this is self-differentiation.

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In developing compassionate communication, Rosenberg came up with a formula that has four components: observation, feelings, needs and a request. The fill in the blank version is, "When _____ (that's your observation), I feel _____ (your feelings), because I am needing _____ (your need or needs). Therefore I would now like _____ (a request)."

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The best way to illustrate this is to use a sentence that is not compassionate communication. If you say to your church council president, "You are constantly ambushing me with surprises during church council meetings," think about all of the ways that we are blocking compassionate communication. "They're constantly ambushing..." is reading into the motivation or intent that somehow the church council president is trying to surprise you.

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It comes across as defining the other and not defining self. The compassionate communication form of this would be, "When I hear something for the first time at a church council meeting," that's the observation. Notice there is no evaluation. It's only when I hear something for the first time.

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"I feel frustrated," that's the feeling. "Because I am needing to understand before I can respond," so the need is the need to understand. And finally, "Therefore, I would now like you to share any new ideas you have before we meet as a church council." Notice that the request is asking the other person to be willing to share. They could be free to say no. And that's what creates that emotional space to avoid the kind of pushback that happens in a conflict of wills.

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If the other person is reactive, that doesn't mean that they aren't going to push back. But as I said, there are ways then to engage, to try to get to what their unmet need is; to try to really stay emotionally connected in a healthy way. If they're very reactive and not very self-differentiated, it may be difficult to get to that unmet need and therefore we may have to fall back on other things that we know from family systems theory.

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But I believe over time, if we are able to stay connected to them, give them emotional space and are able to self-differentiate with compassionate communication, I believe that we will ultimately be able to connect with them in a way that helps them to express their unmet needs.

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Now that I've given you an example, let's go through those four components, one by one. The first observation is distinguished from any sort of evaluation. Remember, in the example I gave, I talked about the church council president ambushing me, that's certainly an evaluation. Whereas saying when I hear something for the first time, which is merely an observation of what is going on.

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When we go beyond making observations and include some sort of evaluation, which can come across as a moralistic judgment, then it is often heard as criticism. That's when we are going to get pushback.

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The second component is what we are feeling. This can be whether our needs are being met or unmet, because we can have good feelings about our needs being met, so we can be happy or we can be delighted or glad. But oftentimes when we are trying to express how we are feeling, there is an unmet need. And this is about defining self. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable, to say, like in our example, that I feel frustrated.

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Also, it is essential to avoid interpretations of feelings. So for example, when we say, "I feel disrespected" or "I feel ignored" or "I feel undervalued," we're really making a statement about the attitude of the other person. And that is much different than expressing what we are feeling.

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In these cases, a feeling might be that we are angry, we are frustrated, we are impatient, we are lonely, and that is defining self, not defining the other. Marshall Rosenberg founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication and on their website they have a listing of feelings and a listing of needs. .I will post links to those pages.

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Which leads us to the third component, which is the need. This is the met or unmet need that is underlying the feeling. Some needs that can be met or unmet are safety, companionship, purpose, belonging. And as I mentioned, there are a whole list of needs that you can find at the Center for Non-violent Communication website. In the case of our example, the need that I might express to the church council president is this need to understand. Rather than making a judgment about the president's intent, I express my own need after I've said I'm frustrated (my feeling), which is my need is to understand.

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And then finally the request. This is asking for a specific action in response to our unmet need. The use of a request intentionally distinguishes this from a demand, which not only blocks compassionate communication, but is likely to result in pushback from the other when making a request. We want to be clear that the other is free to say no. This creates emotional space through self-differentiation by giving the other the freedom to say no. We are only taking responsibility for self, not trying to define the actions or motives of the other.

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This gives the other person the best chance to think through whether they are willing to respond to our request positively. In next week's episode, I'll look at what we can do if we receive a no, as well as how we can help others to express their own unmet needs. The bottom line for me here is that compassionate communication and self-differentiation are two sides of the same coin. They are different approaches to how we can function in the healthiest way possible.

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Whereas family systems theory helps us to understand our own family of origin, helps us to understand the unwritten rules and surrounding togetherness pressure that make it difficult to self-differentiate, once we understand that and we are working on taking responsibility for self, non-violent or compassionate communication is another set of tools to do that in the best way possible. Both family systems theory and compassionate communication help us to be more effective as non-anxious leaders.

That's it for Part One on this family systems take on nonviolent communication. Next week will be part two, where I'll look at how to put nonviolent communication into practice and how it relates to family systems theory. And don't forget to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com. I would love to hear from you, whether it's a question, a comment, or a suggestion for a podcast episode. You can email me at jack@christianleaders.com. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.