03.17.2024

NVC without Sounding Weird

My friend asks to talk for 10 minutes and then keeps talking for half an hour without checking if that’s alright. I am judging that it’s not nice, inconsiderate, and unaware. I just listened for 30 minutes, and then on top of that experience, I add judgements: it’s not nice, inconsiderate. Instead of saying, “You’re inconsiderate, you can’t keep track of time, or you talk too much,” I can put on another layer called Nonviolent Communication (NVC), so I would say, “When you spoke longer than you had asked to, I felt uneasy and impatient because I was needing consideration and attention.”

I’ve translated my judgments into NVC so that it’s easier for my friend to hear, and it sounds funny. This is what we call baby giraffe, or classical NVC.
One of the main criticisms of Nonviolent Communication I have come across is that it can sound unnatural and strange. A person trying to do NVC starts speaking differently and it becomes more difficult to feel the authenticity of that person. Can I trust what he says, or is he speaking from an inner script to manipulate how I receive him? This kind of NVC experience is quite common for beginners (or rather for people beginners are talking to). Cultivating NVC consciousness takes time and a lot of unlearning. The founder, Marshall Rosenberg, came up with the symbol of the giraffe to represent this way of being and communicating, so we all start NVC as baby giraffes. I, and many other trainers, recommend beginners practice in NVC spaces for quite some time until your baby giraffe grows up to be a teenage giraffe, and then an adult giraffe which we also call street ready giraffe, before trying NVC with people close to them.

Street giraffe means staying with connecting, non-judgemental intentions while speaking in a way that the person listening to you will find easy to hear, normal, without activating the sense that you are using a particular kind of language or a particular mode of speaking. It sounds natural, so another way to say it is natural giraffe.
The opposite of giraffe is what we call jackal: judgments, criticisms, blaming, and so on. When we are in the jackal mindset, we have two layers of experience. One layer is what’s happening, the facts or observations of the situation, and then on top of that we put the layer of judgments about what’s happening.

Understanding the Layers

We are always in relationship with life, yet we can have a more or less direct connection with life as it happens. The intermediary that insulates us from that deeper connectedness is the mind. Let’s think of life or reality as the first layer, in NVC terms we say our observations, or in street giraffe, we can call it the facts of the case. Then the mind adds a layer of judgments, opinions, etc, one step removed from reality: the jackal layer. Positive judgments still belong in this layer because any judgement puts us in the separation of judge & judged relationship with reality. Then the mind can add the third layer, on top of the jackal, which is the baby giraffe layer. Now we are two steps removed from reality. No wonder it is so hard to sense or feel a person in baby giraffe using textbook NVC. The language can sound mechanical or robotic because it is out of touch with reality. Hence the criticism that Nonviolent Communication can be inauthentic, which is ironic, because the idea of NVC is to create more connection, authenticity, and shared reality.

Pathways to Natural Giraffe – Natural Language

There are two ways to transition from baby giraffe to street giraffe, or natural giraffe. One way is to use synonyms. So instead of saying “When I observe”, we can just talk about what happened: “if I get it right, what happened was”, “what I heard was”, “I saw”, and check for alignment: “did you also see it that way?”, “Is that what you said?”.
Instead of saying, “Because I need,” you could say, “Because what matters to me,” “What’s important,” “Because I care about,” “What’s really significant to me,” or different equivalent terms.

And instead of saying, “Are you willing to,” you can say, “Would you be open to,” “Would you like to,” “Is it also what you want?” There are lots of ways to just replace the terms and make them sound a little more natural.

Synonyms can be quite helpful for this naturalization. We can get into the habit of using terms that just feel more natural to us. I’m not concerned about how they’re going to be heard by the other person. If I’m concerned about how they’re heard by the other person, I would add the layer of “what will they think” on top of the layers I’ve already made, so I just want to focus on what sounds natural to me.

Speaking from the Heart

What NVC really wants to do for us is give us pathways back to our heart. The NVC process is to connect with our observations, reality as we see it, and then go into the heart space where we have feelings and longings. Street giraffe is just another way of saying speaking from the heart.
When we can actually have an embodied connection to our inner world, and speak connected with what is important to us, then we don’t need to think very much about what words to use. Then we are not removed from reality, rather we are in reality and the reality of our inner response to life. Instead of the pathway of the mind, we can take the direct pathway of the heart.

How to grow up your giraffe

The way to the heart is through the body. A baby giraffe has simply translated judgments into NVC with the mind by picking words. This is very often a good start because words are bridges, and language guides the consciousness. When we name our feelings and needs, it orients us inwards, and then we can also start to feel them more fully. Feelings and needs live in the body, feelings as motive force, and needs as a felt-sense of meaning. Accessing the embodied experience of our inner world, beyond the mind and description, is the key to growing our giraffes. At the embodied level, we are attuning to our own honest response to life. Putting our awareness there, can in itself shift something within and our response changes as we connect to it. It deepens and more of ourselves becomes available. This is how NVC can really increase our capacity for authenticity.

There are two key differentiations we make in NVC: Street giraffe vs. Classical giraffe and Being NVC vs. Doing NVC. For me, these are very connected. We all start as beginners, baby giraffes, with some classical NVC phrases in mind and we are doing some NVC as a communication tool or method. As we follow the invitation of the NVC process deeper, we understand it is an awareness process to connect with the heart in any given moment. Then we shift from ‘Doing NVC’ to ‘Being NVC’ and ‘Street giraffe’ comes naturally.