Business

You may be feeling nervous & anxious about using NVC in the workplace.  How on earth will this “touchy feely” way of being fit into your corporate environment?” Have you ever heard your boss share with you how he or she feels, let alone your supervisor, and are you afraid of sharing how you are feeling & what you are needing within your work place incase your co-workers respond in a way that you might not enjoy?

The business environment is just like any other environment where there are people.  There is almost nothing a person can say or do that cannot be responded to with empathy or some kind of connected response or a mixture of the two.

Ike Lasater in his book ‘Words that Work in Business’ recommends that a powerful place to start in using NVC in business is through silent practice. The inner work of NVC can be done silently without anyone knowing. We can connect to ourselves asking the question, “How am I feeling right now, & what am I needing?” and we connect to what might be going on for another by asking ourselves, “What are they feeling? and what might they need?”  Just by doing this, we are creating a quality of connection that seems to shift situations.

If we are feeling confident in using NVC in the workplace, we might choose to tackle a difficult conversation that we might be having or need to have with co-worker. We might have built up enemy images (judging/blaming the other) of that person and it is useful to work with that first. Give yourself empathy and practice within yourself, giving empathy to the other. We can practice the conversation that we would like to have perhaps with another person in the form of a role play. This gives us room & freedom to experiment how we might say something, the effects not being as dramatic as they might be if we were having the conversation live.

Once we become more confident with using NVC in the workplace, we may well grow to understand that there is no differentiation between our family, our intimate relationship and our workplace when there are human beings with human needs involved.