The NVC Academy, the world’s first online school for Nonviolent Communication, is offering empathy related courses and resources in its NVC Multimedia library during the month of October.
Tomorrow, join relationship expert Kelly Bryson for a FREE teleourse entitled The Future of Love. Reimagine your perception of love so you can feel love more deeply, let love in and actually be love. Take this introductory session to determine if the full 6-week course is a good fit for you.
From David Elkind blogging at the Hufington Post (David Elkind is currently Professor emeritus of Child Development at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.):
Empathy is the earliest social disposition to appear in the course of human life cycle. Toddlers will try and comfort another child who is obviously unhappy or in pain. Young children are, however, not yet able to empathize with those who do not give any obvious signs of emotional distress. Preschoolers might, to illustrate, comment loudly on the size of stranger’s nose, or ears, totally unaware of the impact this might have on the other person. This is not cruel, it just represents the fact that young children do not yet understand what another person might be feeling if they have no visual clues to guide them.
It is only after the age of six or seven, with the attainment of the mental operations that Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget called concrete operations, that children are able to intellectually take the point of view of others when it is different than their own. It is at this age that they become aware that others may have non-visible feelings and intentions. In their moral judgments, for example, young children assign culpability according to the amount of damage done. They regard a child who breaks five dishes as more culpable than the child who breaks one. After they attain concrete operations, however, they say that child who breaks one dish doing something he is not supposed to, is more to blame than a child who breaks five trying to help his mother.
As a workplace veteran with decades of experience in the corporate workpspace, I admit I’ve often thought it nearly impossible to bring empathy and genuine cooperation into that environment, when the focus is always on getting the job done, seemingly, without consideration for how we feel about. Three certified trainers of nonviolent communication would like to show us how we can be more empathic and collaborative, and, get this: we can be more effective too!
A Telephone Course (Telecourse) with CNVC Certified Trainers Miki Kashtan from Oakland, California, Martha Lasley from Troy, Pennsylvania, USA, and François Beausoleil from Waterville, Quebec, Canada
In this 3-session telecourse you will learn to:
This telecourse is for you if you are a:
A Peaceful Living 4-Day Intermediate Retreat with Mary Mackenzie January 29 – February 1, 2010
Namaste Retreat Home, Laguna Beach, CA
Empathy As a Way of Being: An Intermediate Level Retreat designed to facilitate deep growth and transformation.
Mary Mackenzie, M.A., is the Executive Director, Flagstaff Center for Compassionate Communication, Co-founder NVC Academy, CNVC Certified Trainer, Mediator and Author.
By Karen Armstrong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Common Ground News Service
On Sept. 27 at the Vancouver Peace Summit, among some of the world’s most well-known peace-makers — including Nobel Prize winners and internationally acclaimed authors — we had the opportunity to invite people everywhere to rediscover the Golden Rule.
The Charter of Compassion comprises leading thinkers from many different faiths. It is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more important, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems.
Why is this so important?
Well, it’s your lucky day!
A 24-Hour Tele-Empathy Event with highly experienced empathy facilitators is underway.
Every hour on the hour a group will gather by phone to practice Empathy skills. This forum is a place to play, learn, and share about empathy. The line will be open until 12:00 AM PDT (Los Angeles time). It’s free and no registration is required.
Visit http://bit.ly/17ml3R for the call-in number, facilitator schedule and more information.
Empathy is but one component of fully communicating with others, albeit a crucial one. While empathy gives us a way to understand others, it doesn’t give us a way to directly express ourselves. The most effective and compassionate model for more complete communication I’ve found is called Nonviolent Communication, first proposed by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg.
Nonviolent Communication or NVC, offers practical, concrete skills for manifesting the purpose of creating connections of compassionate giving and receiving based in a consciousness of interdependence and power with others. These skills include:
These skills emphasize personal responsibility for our actions and the choices we make when we respond to others, as well as how to contribute to relationships based in cooperation and collaboration.
In the NVC context, empathy means being present to “what’s alive” in another person. So using the model above, we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, needed, and wanted, rather than on diagnosing and judging. In doing so, we discover the depth of our own compassion. So NVC and emapthy involves a quality of consciousness or presence, along with specific methods to focus our attention to listen beyond the words to the essence of the message we are receiving.
If this quality of communication sounds intriguing, the NVC Academy is currently offering a monthly subscription to learn the basics of NVC via convenient telecourse.
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