NVC is easy to teach but takes some time to learn. You can fit a description of NVC on an index card and yet it will still take you a while to put it into practice well. Theory is easy but praxis is hard.
I hear the criticism that stuff like NVC is “manipulative” and I think I get where the feeling comes from, but I also feel that systems like NVC are generally, on the balance, very helpful. The baseline for communication skills is shockingly low in most offices I’ve worked in. I like NVC because it focuses on things like communicating facts, communicating your personal feelings, and sharing your goals. A lot of people tend to skip out on basic stuff like communicating facts or sharing goals with people they work with, and what it ends up doing is sabotaging the ability of other people to give you what you want, or it moves too fast and puts people on the defensive.
> …where I feel like there's a reason these communication styles don't come naturally to us, and there is a bit of a manipulative aspect to them.
IMO people are naturally manipulative and it takes conscious effort to be honest with people. I don’t necessarily mean that we are consciously trying to manipulate people, just that we try different communication strategies and tend to keep using manipulative communication strategies if those strategies get us what we want. We send our children to school and church, we discipline them and tell them about right and wrong, all in the hope that they will grow up to be good people. Kids will lie their little mouths off from the day that they learn how to lie (usually around age 4-6) and then we have to teach them not to lie, which can be difficult.
The “natural” communication strategies include things like crying until you get what you want, or telling lies when you get caught doing things. Again, not trying to say human nature is evil, but that honesty is something you have to learn.
I hear the criticism that stuff like NVC is “manipulative” and I think I get where the feeling comes from, but I also feel that systems like NVC are generally, on the balance, very helpful. The baseline for communication skills is shockingly low in most offices I’ve worked in. I like NVC because it focuses on things like communicating facts, communicating your personal feelings, and sharing your goals. A lot of people tend to skip out on basic stuff like communicating facts or sharing goals with people they work with, and what it ends up doing is sabotaging the ability of other people to give you what you want, or it moves too fast and puts people on the defensive.
> …where I feel like there's a reason these communication styles don't come naturally to us, and there is a bit of a manipulative aspect to them.
IMO people are naturally manipulative and it takes conscious effort to be honest with people. I don’t necessarily mean that we are consciously trying to manipulate people, just that we try different communication strategies and tend to keep using manipulative communication strategies if those strategies get us what we want. We send our children to school and church, we discipline them and tell them about right and wrong, all in the hope that they will grow up to be good people. Kids will lie their little mouths off from the day that they learn how to lie (usually around age 4-6) and then we have to teach them not to lie, which can be difficult.
The “natural” communication strategies include things like crying until you get what you want, or telling lies when you get caught doing things. Again, not trying to say human nature is evil, but that honesty is something you have to learn.