This book was really helpful to me in changing how I speak with folks. I have not yet found a good way to recommend it in an effective way.

Or his book, &quot;Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life&quot;. It&#x27;s gotten me into NVC and it&#x27;s been a game-changer.

&gt; If one of them just doesn&#x27;t want to listen, just hear themselves talk, what can I do?There is no magic trick to make people do what you want them to do.&gt; me telling them that I&#x27;m not willing to talk to them if they&#x27;re not willing to listenWell, that attitude isn&#x27;t going to fix any of your problems. Review the fine article; Heading 1, &quot;Observations vs. evaluations&quot;. I might try ask them why what you are saying doesn&#x27;t seem to provoke much of a response, but honestly you aren&#x27;t going to get much joy out of an internet forum for solving communication problems.

Someones we all need a vent. If you hold someone the space to say what they need to — and truly know they&#x27;ve been heard, that opens up space for them to hear.Frustrating sometimes? Definitely. But it works.

&gt;If one of them just doesn&#x27;t want to listen, just hear themselves talk, what can I do?Have not tried it, but the NVC book says to keep empathizing (without agreeing) until they stop. I think it works for most people. But for the pathological folks who just ramble on and on and keep changing topics, the book actually has a phrase along the lines of &quot;I&#x27;m having trouble connecting with you in this conversation. Would you please ...?&quot; (I don&#x27;t remember the phrase, but the request is to explain the purpose of the conversation). I have not tried it.If your concern is they are not listening to you (i.e. you can talk but they don&#x27;t process it), that&#x27;s actually very normal. And the solution in the book is to empathize for a while, and then specifically point it out and request they reflect back what you have said to them. Now I can tell you from experience that this needs practice - most ways of saying it will trigger defenses.

In that case, let them talk and talk and talk. When they do so, listen.At the end (which will come eventually, especially if you only answer with yes and no, so there are no follow up possible) you suggest a great solution for some problem they mention, which you can do because a) you are detached and b) they talked a lot and you had ample time to figure things out...

I struggle a lot with communication, but have not found a panacea for the biggest issue I regularly face.Communication requires two people to be willing to talk. If one of them just doesn&#x27;t want to listen, just hear themselves talk, what can I do?This includes them not listening to me telling them that I&#x27;m not willing to talk to them if they&#x27;re not willing to listen (in more, or even fewer words than that).

Here is one of those videos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=l7TONauJGfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=l7TONauJGfc</a>

There are a fair few people in the world who would find a good video of Marshall Rosenberg life changing. His perspectives on how to use language are fundamentally superior to what people stumble into in everyday use.His framework is remarkable because it sets up a non-confrontational approach that lets you speak the truth without hurting or upsetting people. Being able to do that on demand is ... really quite a stunning skill. Certainly more useful than any technical trick I&#x27;ve ever learned.

You&#x27;re right, it is far from easy. I will definitely give it a try.

Often, the most concentrated the message, the higher the impact. Sometimes a single sentence followed by silence is more powerful than a 1-hour talk. Counter-intuitive (but who said communication was straightforward).

Very nice and concise writeup. For me it is always hard to deliver the feedback to the point (the 40 words rule), because i&#x27;m afraid it&#x27;ll simply go under in all the other information people take in during the day. That&#x27;s why i tend to keep pressing the matter. Has anyone some relevant experience to share on that?

Great article! Thanks for highlighting this often neglected aspect of communication!

That&#x27;s the key I think. Appreciated. By putting your universal needs on the same level (not your &quot;self&quot;), you are in effect appealing to principle, so there is likely a great deal of alignment between the methods as described. Looking forward to reading up more on this. Thank you.

&quot;I use NVC frequently to people with a lot more power than me ...&quot;Examples? I&#x27;m struggling to understand how one could &quot;frequently&quot; have to use NVC with &quot;people a lot more power&quot;.Having to do this frequently itself is a problem with the organization, right?

Great question.I use NVC frequently to people with a lot more power than me, and I&#x27;d actually suggest NVC is actually about putting yourself (and your needs) on the same level as those of the person your speaking with.The fundamental premise is that fundamental needs are shared by all humans... and the ideal strategy is one where all needs are met.So, you can avoid patronising someone by truly seeking to understand the other person&#x27;s feelings and needs without judgement and taking those needs seriously. Again, easy to say, hard to do.

Not denying responsibility is essential to NVC.It&#x27;s patronizing if you have made your mind and only involve others into discussions to get support or ease them into going along and accepting. &quot;I have to do X, I&#x27;m here to listen how you feel about X and empathize with you.&quot; is not real NVC. &quot;Have to&quot; is denying responsibility to outside conditions.NVC is best used when you have to do something and have a problem and are willing to communicate it to others as way to learn and find a solutions..

I think that is the main by-product of these things is forced empathy and introspection. It is too easy to get caught in one&#x27;s head and this forces things to get structured and analyzed so they can be externalized.

I think part of it is that the observation needs to be genuinely objective rather than veiled evaluation.For example, when I did tech support I would occasionally get chat messages from my supervisor along the lines of:&quot;Hey, I see that you closed out Ticket #XYZ without any resolution or response sent to the requester.&quot;(waits for response)(waits for response)(waits for response)...and it would make me furious, regardless of whatever the situation was.

At the same time, if it comes from a place of genuine concern, even unnatural communication can be empathetic.  I once asked for help on an online forum, and one person responded with something along the lines of &quot;I don&#x27;t know how you feel, but if that happened to me I&#x27;d feel terrible&quot;.  In the moment, it felt very carefully crafted, but the care with which the words were chosen really amplified their impact to me.

I&#x27;ve been in that scenario and NVC still worked. In that case the person I was talking to felt anxious when I practiced NVC in our conversations because they needed freedom: to think their own thoughts and make decisions etc.I asked if there was some way I could speak to them that would help them meet their need for freedom. Then we both laughed and the situation defused.

&quot;how you recognize when you are being patronizing&quot;That&#x27;s a good point. I&#x27;m fairly adept at recognizing when someone is trying to negotiate with me based on some kind of taught methodology. Because most of what&#x27;s taught is counter to how you would do it naturally...thus it stands out.Once you recognize it, the natural reaction is to feel like you&#x27;re being manipulated with some technique.

That&#x27;s always been one of my biggest questions about NVC, it seems to assume two parties with equal power. But that&#x27;s seldom precisely true, and in some cases _very_ not true. It&#x27;s not clear to me how that effects the method and how to account to for it. I wonder if people writing on NVC have written much on this.

I&#x27;m sorry, I don&#x27;t understand.  If someone says to me &quot;Three of the numbers in the report were inaccurate&quot; (an observation) that&#x27;s a lot more helpful to me than &quot;Your work is sloppy&quot; (an evaluation).  Did you have something else in mind?

Constantly relying on &quot;observations&quot; is incredibly patronizing and I&#x27;ve gotten away from it outside of very formal reporting &#x2F; performance improvement plans &#x2F; firing someone.In my current line of work (and previous one, finance), if you cite observations as the main way of communicating, the other person is just going to cut you off and tell you to hurry the fuck up and tell them what they did wrong.

It&#x27;s called &quot;active listening&quot; and it&#x27;s a powerful technique. There is no need though to sound dry or to avoid fillers when you are &quot;actively listening&quot;. It&#x27;s really not depersonal at all. Your mom was probably trying to comfort you but she failed to find the right tone.

Sounds like she was using it as a technique to calm you down&#x2F;try ad change how you feel (best intentions manipulation) vs a way to understand you and be close with you.The words by themselves can feel empty and patronizing.

Great point. Growing up my mom must have read some book about how to comfort kids. She would always say “It sounds like you ...”. For example: “I hate my teacher.” Would receive a response of “It sounds like you are upset with your teacher.”As soon as I was old enough to recognize the pattern it became an infuriatingly depersonal way to be talked to. Sometimes the lack of “umm, like, just, kind of, etc.” will reveal speech as inorganic and make the whole thing seem false. After awhile it’s hard to even relate to someone who speaks to you like that as a person.

NVC is often taught in a quite cerebral way which indeed may result in “proper nvc structure” conversations which are unfortunately emotionally disconnected and thus patronizing because they lack emotional alignment.When I teach NVC I focus on finding a sincere space of care which always starts with self empathy. I was taqught as a language practice but I find it most productive to teach it as a body&#x2F;emotional&#x2F;somatic&#x2F;language practice as the language becomes fake without full alignment.Empathy as defined by M.R. In his nvc work is “I know what’s alive in you and you know that I know.” That’s it. There’s no other outcome.Many business use fake empathy as manipulation. There’s no sincere interest in understanding, just a technique to try and make people less mad. South park’s skit on Comcast workers was spot on with this.

This is a valuable post. I have not taken an NVC course before, but I have done a lot of work in negotiations, writing, and was brought up to use this style of communication.One thing I would be interested in either from the OP or someone with experience with NVC, is how you recognize when you are being patronizing. Much of this communication style is the artifact of an implied power relationship, where the speaker already has the power, or is asserting power.In negotiations, there is the idea of appealing to shared principles and interests, and NVC can be a way to depersonalize the issue to focus on that. But the example of handling, &quot;No,&quot; with empathy is to directly personalize the issue and address feelings, vs. the negotiation view which would be to ask, &quot;if no, given we agree on X, let&#x27;s leave my perceived solution aside for a moment and find out how we get X.&quot;I think empathy in business can often be zero sum, where it is just an expression of sympathy for someones lack of power in the situation, that is both psychologically horrible, and destroys value. I call that approach of fabricated empathy &quot;seduce and smother,&quot; which is common in organizations today.This article provides an essential and valuable tool. However, this difference between empathy and principle, is that an accurate interpretation of the distinction?

NVC has been a game-changer for me, not only in terms of my relationship with my partner, but my relationship with myself. Not only does it allow someone to communicate more effectively, it allows someone to be way more conscious of what they need and that they are ultimately responsible for meeting those needs.It definitely requires actual practice though. It is a skill to be grown, not just knowledge to be acquired or memorized.

I fixed it. Great catch, thanks for letting me know :)

The video linked at the bottom of the article doesn&#x27;t work for me (&quot;the video is unavailable &lt;mock concern face&gt;&quot;). Is this a regional thing (I&#x27;m in the UK), or is it broken for everyone?

Expressing our feelings is powerful way to connect with people, by helping to create empathic attunement.Forming a connection is critical when communicating in a difficult situation. It might seem like &#x27;fluff&#x27;, but I believe it&#x27;s what separates the mediocre and great communicators. Sadly, logic is rarely enough.

What I always say is &quot;speak what you know&quot; in a confrontational situation. It is an authentic way of communicating that opens up conversations. For example, I can say that &quot;I feel frustrated when you show up to the meeting 10 minutes late.&quot; instead of &quot;You are so disorganized that you never show up to the meetings on time.&quot; The truth is what I know is my feelings and what I don&#x27;t know is what is going on in their world.

&gt;What&#x27;s the purpose of expressing the feeling? It seems like it&#x27;s there only to underline the urgency of the unmet needs.You answered the question. The NVC answer is that it&#x27;s just a pattern of human behavior. If you speak only to the feelings and not the needs, you get labeled as sensitive. If you speak only to the needs, you get labeled as needy. If you speak to both, you are connecting the dots. People are more likely to empathize and help.&gt;At the same time, it implies an emotional investment in the issue at hand, which I would see either as unnecessary or insincere in a work environment.An important point I read in a non-NVC communications book: If people are getting upset at work (raised voices, venting, whatever), emotions are very much at play. So why pretend they&#x27;re not there? If people will insist on putting a pretense of objectivity without putting the feelings on the table, usually problems will not get solved well.Also, avoiding talking about emotions leads to the annoying artefact where the person starts invoking all kinds of principles, appeals to authority, morality, etc to justify their stance. These are all less effective than simply expressing their feelings. They often devolve to arguments on which principles the team should follow, etc. It&#x27;s a lot easier to disagree to an objective standard than it is to tell someone their feelings are invalid (yes, yes, we all know someone who does it, but it is not the norm).It also leads to a lot of &quot;should&quot; phrases. &quot;An employee should...&quot; &quot;A manager should...&quot; &quot;It is the responsibility of a ... to ...&quot; &quot;The customer should ...&quot; &quot;A programmer should ...&quot;All of these statements have poor effectiveness. I&#x27;ve explained it in another comment, but on occasion I&#x27;ve told people that should is not in my vocabulary. They need to explain why they need something and not just hide behind &quot;shoulds&quot;.

The example starts from the point of &quot;let&#x27;s express an emotion&quot;, and shows two sentences, right and wrong. Without trying to say &quot;I feel&quot;, while following the other steps, there&#x27;s no opportunity to even make the mistake of choosing the &quot;wrong&quot; one. That&#x27;s why I asked why the article bothers describing step 2. at all.I agree that evaluating the actions of the other person is not useful for resolving the problem, but the article also doesn&#x27;t provide a justfication for sharing my own feelings (thank you BeetleB for shining some light).Personally, if someone from the management told me &quot;I feel X&quot;, I would completely discount it, because first, I don&#x27;t care, and second, they have an incentive to be dishonest if it reduces the trouble they have to deal with.

The article has the example:&gt;Thought: ‘I feel that you aren’t taking this seriously.’&gt;Emotion: ‘I feel frustrated.’I definitely agree that the &quot;emotional&quot; way of looking at this statement is better. The &quot;thought&quot; here is accusatory and puts the other person on the defensive. Moreover, like the article says, saying the person is not taking things seriously is just an evaluation of their actions; you don&#x27;t know that its true, you don&#x27;t know how the other person feels and its not good to tell them how they feel. That evaluation is based on how YOU feel, so its more honest to just share that than your own theory on how someone else feels.In other words, it helps get past your own assumptions about people and deal with what you actually know.

Well, essentially everybody has emotions unless you don&#x27;t really care about the outcome of a discussion. Expressing those emotions is often considered unprofessional. Nevertheless, most people act in conformance with their emotions (even if they don&#x27;t express them). So in fact, not talking about the emotional state would be insincere (as it exists and affects what everybody is doing).Articulating your own emotional state gives the other person a better chance to evaluate your perspective. Furthermore, even if it might look like you don&#x27;t really care about the topic as you act detached, you can show that you have rather strong feelings too, but keep them in control to stay constructive and professional.

What&#x27;s the purpose of expressing the feeling? It seems like it&#x27;s there only to underline the urgency of the unmet needs.At the same time, it implies an emotional investment in the issue at hand, which I would see either as unnecessary or insincere in a work environment.

These three examples:&gt;To a co-founder: ‘When you said, “I’m not happy with your work,” to me in front of the team, I felt embarrassed because it didn’t meet my need for trust and recognition. Please, could we set up a weekly one-on-one session to share feedback in private?’&gt;To an investor: ‘I haven’t received any responses from the last three monthly updates. I’m feeling concerned because I need input. Please, would you mind getting back to me with responses to my questions in the last update?’&gt;To a teammate: ‘You arrived 10 minutes late to the last three team meetings. I am frustrated because, as a team, we have a need for efficiency. Please, could you help me understand what’s happening?’I have two problems with them. They&#x27;re pretty passive aggressive and focus on feelings instead of consequences. Going one by one:&gt;To a co-founder: ‘When you said, “I’m not happy with your work,” to me in front of the team, I felt embarrassed because it didn’t meet my need for trust and recognition. Please, could we set up a weekly one-on-one session to share feedback in private?’It gets the problem wrong. It&#x27;s very unlikely the problem is a lack of opportunity for co-founders to provide one on one feedback. The solution is one that no one really wants and wouldn&#x27;t fix the issue. The problem is the co-founder poorly choosing words and poorly choosing the venue to deliver them. I also don&#x27;t think it focuses on the right negative consequence. The negative consequence is being undermined in front of subordinates. Not to mention the relationship dynamics. Co-founders should be equal and it&#x27;s not really the place of one to be &quot;not happy&quot; with the other&#x27;s work.I&#x27;d say something like:‘When you said, “I’m not happy with your work,” to me in front of the team, it undermines my authority and the way it&#x27;s phrased is inappropriate. I want us to be able to give each other feedback, but it&#x27;s important that it happens at the appropriate time and respectfully.&gt;To an investor: ‘I haven’t received any responses from the last three monthly updates. I’m feeling concerned because I need input. Please, would you mind getting back to me with responses to my questions in the last update?’This one is a bit odd because typically updates don&#x27;t require responses. That aside, if it&#x27;s something you need input on:&quot;Can you please weigh in on X? We can&#x27;t do Y without your go ahead and it&#x27;s causing Z problems. I understand that you have a lot on your plate, but this is important and we need an answer by next week.&quot;&gt;To a teammate: ‘You arrived 10 minutes late to the last three team meetings. I am frustrated because, as a team, we have a need for efficiency. Please, could you help me understand what’s happening?’This one is super passive aggressive. Your intention is to communicate a problem but instead of just doing that this is asking a question. I think this example shows the problem most clearly. These should be statements and not questions. I mean, do you really want or expect an honest answer to the question? Because it&#x27;s probably something along the lines of &quot;I think these meetings are a waste of my time&quot;.

I won&#x27;t lie... NVC is really, really hard to achieve. But sometimes it&#x27;s worth risking making mistakes to achieve your goal.

Which of them became good therapists?I know programmers how hated parts of school and are bad programmers. And some who are great programmers...

Is there something else her or her classmates recommend?

I imagine this is an awful lot like developers hating svn and telling people not to use it.Yes, there are better options, but most people are manually copy&#x2F;pasting files into backup folders before making big changes.

I supported my girlfriend throughout her grad studies to become a therapist. A huge part of her studies were in NVC. Even though I didn&#x27;t go to school with her, I spent a lot of time with her classmates.Nearly everyone&#x27;s conclusion, after 3 years of being deeply embedded in NVC, was that they hated it. And for the same reasons you describe.

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted, this is my reading, as well.People hate being called to task. In many ways it makes it harder for me, in my distress, when the person pointing out my flaws does so in a way that doesn’t leave a lot of room for me to blame others for my failures, or to blame others for my distress.So the actual experience of NVC (regardless of whether it’s wielded as a subtle tool of manipulation) is often very frustrating.The only way the recipient of an NVC confrontation will perceive the experience as positive is if the recipient legitimately cares about the person calling them to task, AND also cares about doing better next time.In the absence of these prerequisites, the recipient will just be annoyed that they weren’t able to get away with whatever they did.But the recipient’s annoyance doesn’t seem to me like an indictment of the conversational tactic. The point of NVC is to hold people’s feet to the fire; people complaining that having their feet held to the fire is uncomfortable doesn’t seem like a reasonable critique.

I suspect sampling bias. When you&#x27;re upset, direct confrontation can be upsetting too! NVC isn&#x27;t a perfect magic trick that always works, but that&#x27;s not enough reason to dismiss it.

The book “Never Split the Difference” was recommended on HN recently:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0062407805" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...</a>

I went to a course on how to negotiate with people delivered by a hostage negotiator for the (British) police that basically agreed with what you say.The key they said was to work out what the person&#x27;s motivation was and then adapt your communication to suit what was appropriate.The general rule was to (at least appear to) match the emotional intensity of the person you were talking to. If you&#x27;re negotiating with someone who&#x27;s ready to jump off a bridge, rational argument and NVC is not as likely to help as an emotional appeal to their underlying concerns.

&gt;...and not just that you&#x27;re caring about the emotions of other&#x27;s as a chore to get what you want.Which is also a tool used by narcissists, if I remember correctly.

You&#x27;re right about the tone. If someone has not sincerely committed to believing the NVC framing of the problem is accurate then the tone comes off as incredibly condescending. You have to believe that the emotional component of the issue is a real problem and not just that you&#x27;re caring about the emotions of other&#x27;s as a chore to get what you want.

That&#x27;s not how I see it. Yes, the employer (the organization) may be psychopath but I am not interacting with an organization while having a difficult conversation. I would be interacting with a manager or a colleague or someone who reports to me. These are human beings who are not psychopath. These are also not short-termist. Sure, we would all change jobs sooner or later but I would sure like to maintain good relationships with them and hopefully work with them again in future. So it makes a lot of sense that while talking to them I talk to them with some empathy which I think they deserve.

The artifice is absolutely transparent, especially when it comes to business relationships, particularly employer-employee relationships. They are short-termist, interchangeable, and besides, the employer is a psychopath. Everyone has internalized that fact, and then they insist you express your feelings! It doesn&#x27;t get more preposterous than that.

What I&#x27;ve found - in high emotion situations people need express that emotion before they start listening, and they need to know that emotion is being heard.This is tough. Sometimes people need a lot of prodding to start expressing a strong emotion because it invites judgement. It&#x27;s kind of the end of artifice - &#x27;this is who I am and what I&#x27;m really feeling&#x27;Also, I find it exhausting to deal with high emotion.But once that&#x27;s over with, folks are more open to hearing the &#x27;feeling statements&#x27; and observations.--------------------And can&#x27;t resist old NVC joke -Person 1 - &quot;I&#x27;m really mad! This is so unfair!&quot;Person 2 - &quot;I FEEL your anger&quot;Person 1 - &quot;Everything&#x27;s so chaotic, I don&#x27;t know what to do!&quot;Person 2 - &quot;I FEEL your confusion&quot;Person 1 - &quot;I&#x27;ve got a lot of shit going down in my life!&quot;Person 2 - &quot;I FEEL your shit going down!&quot;

More than anything, I&#x27;d say it feels threatening. I wonder what would happen if an employee said to the founder: &quot;I&#x27;ve noticed this and that. I feel frustrated. I request that you do something. Can you please recap what I just said so it&#x27;s clear you understood?&quot;

I honestly cannot connect the feel&#x2F;felt&#x2F;found with NVC.&gt;I absolutely despise the NVC communication pattern because very few people actually speak like this and when they do so it&#x27;s an obvious deviation from their status quo.After learning NVC, and then observing people who are effective at destressing others in the work place, I&#x27;ve found most speak like this. What&#x27;s more, while it felt artificial in the book, no one in real life even notices.

&gt;You have to &quot;know your audience.&quot; This means you need to know your employees, bosses, or colleagues as people and work to understand what motivates them. This is challenging, risky, and requires an opening of the mind to not just understand different psychologies but to accept them as viable alternatives to your own.I agree, but the trick is how to get them to be open with you about what is going in their mind, and I think NVC is a good way to get that to happen. But I would also add some people are sociopaths (or are stuck in a situation where they have to act that way), and NVC won&#x27;t work there.I absolutely despise the NVC communication pattern because very few people actually speak like this and when they do so it&#x27;s an obvious deviation from their status quo. It feels fake because it is, and it feels fake because I know the pattern. It&#x27;s like when I get &quot;feel&#x2F;felt&#x2F;found&quot;[1] from a salesperson...I know what they&#x27;re doing and it&#x27;s not going to work.NVC is for when you genuinely want to respect both your own needs and those of the other person, which is not at all true for the salesman case.

Presenting this communication pattern as an effective &quot;one size fits all&quot; method is a pretty bad idea.You have to &quot;know your audience.&quot; This means you need to know your employees, bosses, or colleagues as people and work to understand what motivates them. This is challenging, risky, and requires an opening of the mind to not just understand different psychologies but to accept them as viable alternatives to your own.NVC communication will be very effective for some and thoroughly ineffective for others, and if you know your audience you&#x27;ll know which is which.I&#x27;m an example of the latter: I absolutely despise the NVC communication pattern because very few people actually speak like this and when they do so it&#x27;s an obvious deviation from their status quo. It feels fake because it is, and it feels fake because I know the pattern. It&#x27;s like when I get &quot;feel&#x2F;felt&#x2F;found&quot;[1] from a salesperson...I know what they&#x27;re doing and it&#x27;s not going to work.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomhopkins.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;the-feel-felt-found-strategy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomhopkins.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;the-feel-felt-fo...</a>

Meh, anything labelled &quot;non-violent&quot; is bound to be an ineffective waste of time.  Pass.

&gt; I can think of plenty of situations where I don&#x27;t care if someone tramples my emotions, but I&#x27;d be pretty distraught if they adopted a flawed idea, or couldn&#x27;t understand why one idea was superior and another was inferior.Could you share some examples?

&gt; I suppose all it does it remove unrestrained emotion and moral blame from the interaction.That&#x27;s not all it does, and is arguably opposed to something important it does. It keeps honest emotion in and displaces the injection of description of “thoughts” that are really rationalizations for emotional responses.OTOH, in formalized transactional relationships, the assumption of mutual concern for the emotional state of the other that it rests on is not given.

Programming can be done well, or poorly. Speaking English can be done well, or poorly.  Agile methodology can be done well, or poorly. Cooking can be done well, or poorly. The possibility that something can be done poorly is not a strong argumetn that the thing should never be done.

It&#x27;s possible to do NVC well, and it&#x27;s possible to do it poorly. It makes me wonder if this means that NVC is not inherently more useful. (ie, other methods may of communication may also be useful, and so NVC can&#x27;t be called an inherent good.)Someone using NVC can still be forceful and rude. I&#x27;m struggling with how to describe this. I suppose all it does it remove unrestrained emotion and moral blame from the interaction. Unrestrained emotion and moral blame are not a given. (ie, they may not be injected into a conversation, even if NVC is not implemented) And further, I suppose, it&#x27;s possible to push somebody around and refuse to listen to their concerns while employing NVC. For example, under the guise of empathy a boss may &quot;feel&quot; your perfectly valid concern, equivocate it to the concern of others in the room, and then simply ignore your recommendations. It&#x27;s possible that your recommendation was actually best, but instead of understanding the value of your idea, the boss has simply made sure not to trample your emotions.I can think of plenty of situations where I don&#x27;t care if someone tramples my emotions, but I&#x27;d be pretty distraught if they adopted a flawed idea, or couldn&#x27;t understand why one idea was superior and another was inferior.[edit]Just to clarify, I think I talked myself into a conclusion I feel comfortable with. Empathy is not inherently useful. An approach that focuses on the feelings a person might demean them (since their feelings are not actually so fragile) while also equivocating all the ideas in the room. (all ideas might not be created equal, but it is necessary to treat everyone -- and their feelings -- with the same respect.)

Glad to see someone else with the same issue. I&#x27;ve never thought about &quot;putting on&quot; a bit of stress as a way to calm her down. I suppose it&#x27;s because they feel like they&#x27;re in the wrong for being the only one who is expressing stress&#x2F;excitement?

Part of communicating is also building a relationship. I should know if you respond to blunt and direct and lean more in that direction when communicating with you.I have worked on remaining calm in high stress moments. In certain situations it drives my wife nuts that she is stressed&#x2F;excited and I&#x27;m calm looking for a solution. What I learned is to reflect back some of her excitement from a stressful situation, but not quite to her level. This then calms her down.Is it easy? No. Do I manage to do this 100%? I wish. Is is manipulation? I don&#x27;t think so. It&#x27;s building a relationship to better communicate. Too often people think about communication as what I say and not what do people hear and also say.

You know, I was about to write a retort that disagreed vehemently, but I re-read and I think you’ve changed my mind.In the presence of a power imbalance, combined with a lack of mutual respect, I think you’re absolutely right that NVC style observations are worse than a direct command. If there’s no explanation that would lead me, the more powerful person, to change my mind about the behavior, then offering conversational space for it is disingenuous.I personally try to avoid situations where my direct managers, or my direct reports, don’t feel mutual respect, so I don’t think a power-imbalance is enough in and of itself to invalidate observation-request style discussions.As it happens, if there’s no power imbalance, but also no mutual respect, I still tend to prefer NVC style communication; but I’ll admit that’s just a personal choice, it’s just a tool in the toolbox, and I tend to reach for it first, because I like the outcomes better. If my counterparty obviously hates it, “let’s get real” is next in the list.

I agree wholeheartedly. But, I feel it is sometimes extremely difficult to understand if the opposing party seriously cares or is just manipulative.

Thank you for this.I was taqught NVc as a quite cerebral language practice but I find it most productive to teach it as a body&#x2F;emotional&#x2F;somatic&#x2F;language practice as the language becomes fake without full alignment.Ultimately, use it as a tool to move the focus to what’s alive and what’s common in all participants. It is not a negotiation tool or a manipulation tool.

&gt; most likely, to avoid an ultimatum in a situation where the speaker isn&#x27;t seeking mutual understanding and accommodation but submissive compliance.THIS IS IT!This is exactly what the problem is with this bullshit; when it&#x27;s not actually constructive, it&#x27;s disingenuous. When you&#x27;re not trying to come to a better understanding, you&#x27;re trying to drag someone by the nose, it gives you a way to avoid the actual problem&#x2F;conversation.

&gt; I&#x27;m hardly dismissing NVC as a tactic,But...you should be. The entire problem you relate is about NVC as an insincere, indirect tactic (most likely, to avoid an ultimatum in a situation where the speaker isn&#x27;t seeking mutual understanding and accommodation but submissive compliance.) NVC as a tactic relied on an implicit lie about the relationship which forms the context of the communication.As a honest tool in a relationship where the parties actually care about each others feeling, NVC is a useful communication tool for addressing that mutual concern. As a tactic in relationships where that isn&#x27;t a mutual concern, and especially as a top-down tactic in a relationship where the speaker would not have the concern that is being called for in the listener, where it is a passive-aggressive way of framing commands, it&#x27;s obviously toxic and manipulative.

I agree with what the article says about needing a concise opener for a difficult conversation, and for that the madlibs-style script may be useful, but beyond that opener I think more natural language will come off as more genuine. I think the article may be in favor of this as well, as its kind of framed as NVC helping to get a hard conversation started instead of putting off forever.

I think some of that internal seething is because of previous experience where you might have ended up losing control or power and you are able to see through to what might happen if the other party is not truly empathetic (i.e. trying to get towards a common shared goal vs using this tactic as yet another way to get what they want). Unfortunately the conclusion is that it only will work if the other party then handles the subsequent resulting behavior nicely (whatever that &quot;nicely&quot; might mean -- you shouldn&#x27;t end up feeling having given up or lost something).

I think the one underlying thing that differentiates whether a person sees this as &quot;fake&quot; and ineffective or profound and valuable is one underlying attitude: whether you believe that the other person does or does not genuinely want to help you and whether you genuinely want to help them.I like to think of NVC a little differently than most people. It is not a tactic or a strategy, it is a reframing of the problem in your own mind. Instead of the thinking &quot;how can I get this person to do what I want&quot; you should instead be thinking &quot;I need something and can this person help me?&quot;. One is manipulative, the other is collaborative.What I have found is that the person you are enlisting for help may actually have a better idea than you on how to solve the problem than you do. But for this to work, you genuinely need to believe that the person on the other side of the table wants to be a good person. If you don&#x27;t believe that then you tend to see this as a way to manipulate them and it comes across in your words and actions.

this a great response to so many situations. avoiding sugar coating turds and fubaridness is key to being a good boss. Acknowledge the fubar situation - let the team chime in - then get back to facts and actions.

I&#x27;ve sort of used NVC, but I put a lampshade on it:&quot;Look, fuckery abounds, and it&#x27;s not time to pass judgement because I&#x27;m not ready to be hung, drawn and quartered myself. So for now, let&#x27;s deal with the facts and only the facts: ...&quot;

I&#x27;ve experienced that artifice too, and it&#x27;s unsettling. It&#x27;s as if the NVC is adding an additional layer of inauthenticity on top of regular old inauthenticity.The real skill, it seems to me, is to be able to know what one is feeling, stay connected to it, and take responsibility for it, especially in high-stress situations. If you can&#x27;t do that, techniques only make things worse. And if you can do that, maybe you don&#x27;t need so much technique.(Not to dismiss NVC though. NVC is very interesting. But I have found it much more interesting and compelling to watch how Rosenberg did it than in the limited cases where I&#x27;ve run across it in the wild.)

NVC isn&#x27;t a deescalation technique, so its&#x27; not that surprising that you&#x27;ve observed that. It is a communication technique, to make sure a message gets through without baggage attached.In a sense, someone using NVC for deescalation and resorting to the actual formula of Saw [x], felt [Y], request [Z] is likely to not be very good at NVC. People who are really good at that style of communications are going to separate it out so they tell you needs up front, well before you need to know about them, make requests at the moment they want something, and then observations as things become apparent. All 3 at once usually means a surprise has emerged.There is a pretty basic tell here - it isn&#x27;t at all obvious why you&#x27;d be seething if someone observed a fact, felt strong emotion about it and bought it to your attention, even in a high stress situation. So either you&#x27;ve misinterpreted something (possible) or they aren&#x27;t communicating - they are pressuring (pretty likely). It isn&#x27;t called Non-Violent Get People To Do What You Want and trying to use it that way isn&#x27;t going to work.

Do you have an example of a specific situation in which it felt artificial?Perhaps I&#x27;m missing something, because I&#x27;m not familiar with NVC. After reading the article, it seems that having empathy and curiosity are necessary for NVC to work, and if someone doesn&#x27;t approach it that way, then they aren&#x27;t really engaging in NVC.In these comments, there seems to be many people who dislike it, and I&#x27;m wondering why. If someone in a powerful position, like my boss, sought me out to discuss something and expressed empathy and wanted to find out why I did something the way I did, I would feel impressed and appreciated.

It&#x27;s funny because few things make me seethe like someone talking to me in this way during a high stress moment. The artifice is transparent and if the conversation is tense the tone is quite easy to read as condescension. I&#x27;m hardly dismissing NVC as a tactic, just that when done poorly it&#x27;s worse than simply being direct.

I must strongly disagree. NVC stressed the importance of specific observations — genuinely, I can&#x27;t see how you can be more direct than that.Most people never get to specifics and stop at generalities. That would be my definition of indirect.

Memory suggests NVC has some pretty nasty things to say about people who &quot;suggest&quot; things and they later turn out to be orders. Heading 4 of the fine article is the relevant one, bit it actually gets Requests vs. Demands wrong based on the telling of it I heard.My understanding based on a YouTube video I watched many years ago is that a request is either fulfilled or not fulfilled, and that is the end of it. A demand is backed up by some sort of threat, like threat of a negative reaction. The key was that to distinguish a request from a demand was impossible based on the language used. It was only detectable by the reaction if you don&#x27;t act on it.So, ironically &quot;Go get me a beer&quot; can be a request but &quot;do you think it is a good idea to open the window?&quot; might be a demand, depending on what happens on a flat &quot;No&quot;.Nothing in NVC says you have to be nice, and I&#x27;m not sure it takes a position on direct or indirect. But a negative response from not following a suggestion is exactly the sort of violence that NVC is trying to avoid.

I definitely prefer the direct style when it comes to features, tasks, and deadlines. If someone is too indirect then they are more likely to bury the lede, not mention the deadline or a critical dependency, etc.

I&#x27;m curious, if NVC goes for indirect instead of direct conversation.I was working in an American company (I&#x27;m German) and had to learn to adapt to the style of being too nice (in my opinion). E.g. an &quot;it might be better to do it like this&quot;, wasn&#x27;t really meant as a weak suggestion, but a strong one. Something completely counterintuitive to my German mindset. I took it as a &quot;might&quot; and was met with negativity that I didn&#x27;t exactly follow the &quot;suggestion&quot;.I much prefer language being direct at work. Treat the subjunctive as what it is: expressing uncertainty, not politeness.I know however that many people, especially outside of Germany, prefer the indirect language, even though they learned to understand it with the same meaning as the direct speech.

Yes - definitely something I have to improve on. I got the blog going with jekyll and kept focusing on content.Send me an email and I&#x27;ll send a list of links and&#x2F;or PDFs for you:andrew_at_redgreenrepeat.com

I like your blog but it is very hard to find the chapter 2 review. I noticed other interesting articles but I have to go one by one using <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redgreenrepeat.com&#x2F;pageXXX&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redgreenrepeat.com&#x2F;pageXXX&#x2F;</a>
I would consider having better way to navigate through all your posts.

I learned about Non-Violent Communication at a programming conference when the speaker said: &quot;If you want to be a better programmer, read this book&quot;Such a game changer in my pull request comments and life.Non-violent Communication is not easy, it takes continuous practice.I even blogged on each chapter: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redgreenrepeat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;nonviolent-communication-chapter-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redgreenrepeat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;12&#x2F;nonviolent-communicatio...</a> and still feel I can improve my communication, especially when I get emotional.

Great article and very timely as I need to have a difficult conversation with a co-worker today! :)

Great article, thanks for the concise and actionable NVC intro!Non-Medium reformatting: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.nova.anticlack.com&#x2F;nvc.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.nova.anticlack.com&#x2F;nvc.txt</a>

It&#x27;s interesting, because I believe as a child we learned a simplistic version of this in elementary school. The basic construct was the &quot;I feel ______, when ______.&quot; Obviously, this was for child-level conflict resolution, so unlike the guidance provided in NVC it most likely left it open to making accusations (&quot;I feel hurt when you pull my hair&quot;). But it&#x27;s possible that children might do better with that sort of directness compared to adults in more complicated situations.But I have continued to use that approach as a manager and had never heard of NVC before I saw this article. I really appreciated the expanded guidance and a better way to plan the conversation. I also found the section on Consequences to be helpful as well. When you are in an authority position, I believe it is important to help people understand that there might be consequences to their actions or continued in-action.

I highly recommend Celeste Headlee’s We Need To Talk. A good audiobook as well.

My answer to that would be &quot;I don&#x27;t give a shit what you do, as long as you take out the garbage&quot; and I would _still_ be mad at you (plus annoyed that you asked me for a solution to something that shouldn&#x27;t be my problem in the first place).

&gt;I learnt about I-messages about 10 years ago in a seminar on conflict resolution and have tried to use them eversince. My personal impression is that they have really helped me - in solving conflicts, but also in growing as a person. Because, again purely subjective, my impression is that once you give others your I-messages, they are more likely to also respond with I-messages. Which again helps me to understand others and their needs better.I&#x27;ve also found the pattern:You have [Problem]. Lots of people feel [how you feel] about [Problem]. If I did [X] would it solve [Problem]?To be helpful in every relationship:&quot;I get that you&#x27;re mad that I didn&#x27;t take out the garbage. The kitchen stinks now and everyone hates that. Do you think it&#x27;d help if I added a reminder to my phone?&quot;

If you read the book you&#x27;ll notice that I-messages are a rough approximation of the tools.  Sometimes I think this summary does more harm than good by presenting it without the richness of the book

There seems to be quite some overlap between NVC and I-messages [0], which are constructed in a similar manner:1. I feel... (Insert feeling word)
2. when... (tell what caused the feeling).
3. I would like... (tell what you want to happen instead). (from [0])I learnt about I-messages about 10 years ago in a seminar on conflict resolution and have tried to use them eversince. My personal impression is that they have really helped me - in solving conflicts, but also in growing as a person. Because, again purely subjective, my impression is that once you give others your I-messages, they are more likely to also respond with I-messages. Which again helps me to understand others and their needs better.That said, NVC looks like a great addition, by making things more explicit with those four distinctions (observations vs. evaluations, etc.).[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I-message" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I-message</a>

I read the Nonviolent Communication (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Marshall-Rosenberg&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1892005034" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Mar...</a>) book at the recommendation of a counselor a decade or so back and it really changed my life and how I interact with people.I think as a programmer I am not atypical in that I sometimes struggle with empathy or how people reacted to things I said, but NVC gave me a framework to communicate in a healthier way. This wasn&#x27;t just something that helped at work, it had an enormous effect on my personal life as well and I credit it to having strong relationships now.I think the only frustrating piece is sometimes dealing with other who have not read (or do not subscribe) to the same philosophies. It can be very trying to respond to attacks with empathy but in the end that&#x27;s still always the best strategy.Highly recommended and not just if you are a manager, if you deal with other human beings at all, read it.

I got the same thing...immediately exited.Surprised there isn&#x27;t more of a brouhaha about it in the comments.

Yeah same for me. Forced to open in incognito mode. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised that the writer has no clue his content is being paywalled.

That showed up for me as well but there was an X icon on the top right to close the pop-up and continue to the article.

Is this article paywalled? Medium presents me with a box saying:You read a lot. We like that.
You’ve reached the end of your free member preview for this month. Become a member now for $5&#x2F;month to read this story and get unlimited access to all of the best stories on Medium.

Read them all.  The ROI is so high you may as well

I&#x27;ve also heard good things about &quot;The Art of Hard Conversations: Biblical Tools for the Tough Talks That Matter&quot; [0] and &quot;Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most&quot; [1].Can anyone comment on the relative merits of these articles&#x27; &#x2F; books&#x27; approaches?[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Art-Hard-Conversations-Biblical-Matter&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0825445558" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Art-Hard-Conversations-Biblical-Matte...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;0143118447&#x2F;ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;0143118447&#x2F;ref=oh_aui_sear...</a>

It all really depends though. This speaks to concepts like the 5 love languages (time, words, acts, touch, gifts) but words mean nothing to me personally. Words are easy, show me instead. But each person has their own needs and bias.

Ah, useful to know. So I guess what my post was about, was preffering to scale the rewards between positive and negative ends of the spectrum, instead of punishment.

I know I&#x27;m being pedantic here, but in psychology, negative motivation is when you take away something averse as a reward for a certain behavior. Negative here relates to the fact you&#x27;re negating or removing something to act as motivation, whereas if something is positive, you&#x27;re adding something (like a treat for a dog). What a lot of people refer to as &quot;negative motivation&quot; is actually positive punishment because you are adding something aversive (like a spanking) in response to a behavior you want to decrease.It&#x27;s important to keep this in mind when looking at scientific literature so that you know exactly what they&#x27;re talking about.

Interesting... Yeah, I didn&#x27;t mean &quot;manipulate&quot;, more to observe the behaviour that we would do naturally (e.g. things like praise, expressing anger, ignoring someone when we&#x27;re dissatisfied with their behaviour, promotions, etc.) and shifting most of the &quot;punishment&quot;-type responses into &quot;reward&quot;-type responses.Can that (i.e. non-manipulative rewarding behaviour) still backfire? Probably, although I&#x27;m then not sure what the solution is... to influence reality and your own well-being, you have act, and even the most fail-safe behaviour (like not spending time with a person anymore) is described by the above framework (i.e. it&#x27;s a type of punishment), and furthermore it&#x27;s not always possible (e.g. with children, or if you want a job and a relationship, most people seem to).

Rewards can also backfire. I&#x27;m currently reading &quot;Punished by Rewards&quot;, by Alfie Kohn, which spells out all the ways in which rewards are counterproductive. Interestingly enough, I found this book via Marshall Rosenberg&#x27;s book on non-violent communication, in which Marshall urges us not to use rewards as a means to manipulate others (and not to use punishments for that purpose either of course).

Another interesting idea: apparently, positive motivation (reward) works much better than negative motivation (punishment). Allegedly it&#x27;s &quot;scientifically proven&quot; (for some definition of &quot;scientifically&quot;) which I haven&#x27;t yet taken the time to research, but I plan to.I&#x27;ve been thinking about how to apply this in two of the most important areas of interpersonal interaction in our lives, in our careers and in interpersonal relationships. We often discuss on HN why it&#x27;s difficult in careers (conflicting interests, hard to measure results, under-specified goals, etc.). In relationships, I think the main difficulty is that we enter relationships with so many expectations (i.e. &quot;my partner should love me and spend time with me and give me gifts&quot; or similar) that these can&#x27;t really be used for positive motivation, instead we interpret the absence of them as negative motivation. One idea I had, though, is to explicitly verbalise rewarding in addition to the actual reward (i.e. instead of just spending time with them, say &quot;I really liked that you did X yesterday&quot; and spend time with them).

I prefer the actual title of the article (How to Deliver Constructive Feedback rather than A guide to difficult conversations); a difficult conversation could be about anything and the object of the article seems very vague, whereas delivering feedback is something most of us would have to do and so is something of interest (and is more precise). I nearly didn&#x27;t read the article because of this, which would have been a shame since it was an interesting read.

I have a feeling people will read this blog post and implement it by stating some of those observations are going to come across really passive aggressive.

He does exactly that further down in the article, although those examples further down are a little better than the one I highlighted.

I don&#x27;t think that the &quot;observations vs evaluations&quot; section was literally suggesting replacing the evaluation line with its corresponding observation line.

OK, but that&#x27;s not a problem with NVC. &quot;You are sloppy&quot; is an evaluation. An observation would be &quot;the reports you produce consistently have errors&quot; or something like that.

Isn’t that the point tho?  It’s very confrontational and generalizing to say “your numbers are always wrong”.  Instead, even if it’s a recurring pattern, stick to hard facts and actual examples you can point to.  If there has been a history of issues, the person will identify that pattern themselves, unless they’re a complete idiot.  And if they fail to identify that, the next hard conversation to have is “you aren’t excelling here and it’s time for a change”.

Is it possible you’re misreading that section?The point is to deliver the observation, not the evaluation.You seem to be saying that those evaluation statements are lazy&#x2F;unhelpful. And NVC advocates agree! That’s why they recommend observations, not evaluations!

I think the point is to never communicate in evaluations. Observations are not codes for evaluations. Observations force discussion of concrete actions, which have a bunch of benefits over evaluations.Let&#x27;s say X and Z are coworkers. Z messed up some report numbers.X could say &quot;Z, you are sloppy.&quot; 
Z could easily respond &quot;No I am not, how could you say that?&quot;By focusing on a concrete example, X and Z can both discuss the actual problem (inaccurate report numbers) instead of bickering about whether or not Z is sloppy.NVC is also a check on the person initiating the communication.It&#x27;s possible X&#x27;s view of Z as a slob is not based in reality. If X can&#x27;t find a specific thing, but just thinks Z is a slob, NVC makes it hard for X to say anything until they can point to a specific event&#x2F;action. It&#x27;s not perfect (X can just look for the first example that proves their belief) but it does prevent totally baseless claims of &quot;you are a slob.&quot;

Some of the things in there are incredibly condescending and foster ambiguity. For example, the observation &quot;three of the numbers in your report were inaccurate&quot; is an observation of a mistake made, which people do. It only means &quot;you are sloppy&quot; if it&#x27;s a regular occurrence without signs of improvement. Using that as a stand in for &quot;you are sloppy&quot; is itself sloppy, and also lazy and unhelpful.

Depends on culture and formality of the relationship. I noticed some key differences working with people in the US, Scandinavia, Netherlands, India, Germany, Russia, and other places.In the US, people will insist everything is awesome and great right until they get fired. Reason, they can be on the street in under 15 minutes and that kind of puts some filters in place. It also means that you need to follow up with some questions to get a real feel for what is going on. A peculiar thing with Indians I&#x27;ve worked with (superiors even) is that they seem reluctant to say no even when they mean to. So if you ask a direct question and you get an evasive answer, more questions are needed.

It&#x27;s funny, his very first paragraph hints at what I&#x27;ve found to be the most effective way to handle difficult conversations:&quot;All my biggest regrets as a founder are around not having difficult conversations sooner. I could have helped team members improve faster, fired people with the wrong fit earlier, had so many more productive meetings. I could have created a more open company culture.&quot;&quot;Sooner&quot;. Give difficult information out in small bit immediately. Waiting and letting things bottle up only makes it harder. You also build a relationship with the person receiving the bad news of honesty and openness from the get go.If I&#x27;m managing a report that did something wrong, I address it immediately. They get used to me being honest and prompt with my feedback. Addressing a single issue immediately also mean things don&#x27;t build up and you&#x27;re not forced to &quot;bundle&quot; bad news together.Of course you should also do this with positive feedback but I think you&#x27;ll find that when you regularly and openly address negative issues, it becomes much easier on all parties involved.

So, a tutorial on &quot;how to be a greedy, hypocritical, toxic asshole without sounding like one&quot; :)

I agree. I think talking about code is a critical skill, but not everyone has a strong practice of doing it. When I was first learning to code I never had anyone to talk to about my code, so I didn&#x27;t get to learn the vocabulary until later.

It&#x27;s an anti-pattern to call abrasiveness an &quot;engineering&quot; habit. It&#x27;s an orthogonal axis. &quot;saying things are &#x27;unreadable&#x27; or &#x27;bad&#x27;&quot; is not efficiten -- that&#x27;s not actional feedback. Skip the &quot;this code is bad&quot;, and the unsupported univeral claims of &quot;unreadable&quot; (obviously the author and the compiler could both read it, and get directly to the point of your concern with the code -- this code has a logic bug, or is inneficient, or you can&#x27;t follow the changing state or don&#x27;t know what this variable refers to, or what have tou.

But Satya Nadella is a big NCV fan he has really turned Microsoft around in recent years. Maybe that style worked for a while, but it became very dysfunctional. I recall a famous cartoon with the organizational structures of Apple, Oracle, and MS, and the MS one had everyone pointing guns at each other.

Microsoft of the 90s&#x2F;early 2000s was a much different place then it is now. The closest example today would be a trading floor (but not quite as aggressive). It took a certain type of person to do well there - but if you survived your first few months the open communication was amazing. You were allowed to express negative emotions instead of pretending everything is great all the time. If you thought a decision was bad you could say so.There&#x27;s nothing quite like seeing someone who rarely gets angry say, &quot;If we don&#x27;t fix this we might as well not fix another F&#x27;ing bug ever again&quot; to make you reconsider your triage decision.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft for a few years now, has changed the company culture and his interest in Nonviolent Communication has been a part of that.

I strongly disagree.Sales, Marketing, and CS people are perfectly capable of handling direct conversation, if it’s done with genuine respect and a desire for mutual benefit. Your approach, based on some of your examples, sounds outright dismissive and disrespectful.I’ve spent time around lots of engineering leaders and lots of their CS, Sales and Marketing teams. The good engineering leaders recognize that those people excel in many ways they never will, and have genuine respect for that, and ask more questions about their approach. The bad ones think they know everything, treat complex issues like a code review, and carelessly dismiss their work when it’s not what they would’ve done.I think using one of these strategies probably changed you as much as it changed them.

The formative years of my career were spent as a software engineer at Microsoft where communication was direct and sometimes harsh. Code reviews could be particularly harsh with comments like &quot;this code is bad because...&quot; or &quot;this is unreadable.&quot; At first it was really hard, but eventually my skin got pretty think. I even came to love the efficiency of direct communication in programming.When I became a founder, the communication style I had developed as an engineer DID NOT work for communicating with other disciplines like sales, marketing or customer success. At first I thought it was the people I hired just being overly sensitive. After some time I realized that it wasn&#x27;t them, it was me. I needed to unlearn many of my engineering communication habits and adopt a different style.

Reading your post, I feel that you don&#x27;t understand the article. I come to HN for substantive commentary that engages and expands upon the source material. Would you be able to read it again with a fresh perspective, and share your criticism in a less sarcastic and more informative way?

There are several sentences in the piece dedicated to explaining that treating the [emotion] section as a synonym for [attack that happens to be prefixed with the word feel] is a corruption of the practice.There’s also a section explaining the difference between requests and demands.But your formulation does tend to highlight why people get incensed at amateurish imitations of NVC.

&quot;you&#x27;re acting like a dickhead&quot; is not an observation, it is a characterisation.&quot;the urge to punch you&quot; could be phrased as &quot;angry&quot; perhaps?&quot;fking professionalism&quot; isn&#x27;t what you need, it is a trait you want the other person to show. What is it that you need?

So if I understand the article, one should use the communication pattern:When ____[observation], I feel ____[emotion] because I’m needing some ____[universal needs]. Would you be able to ____[request]?For instance:When [you&#x27;re acting like a dickhead], I feel [the urge to punch you] because I&#x27;m needing some [fking professionalism]. Would you be able to [stop acting like a dickhead]?

Thank you for the link. I will check it out!

I&#x27;m sorry to hear about your situation, that sounds particularly challenging.I&#x27;ve found this book very helpful at facilitating communication and it might be of help: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Say-What-You-Mean-Communication&#x2F;dp&#x2F;161180583X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Say-What-You-Mean-Communication&#x2F;dp&#x2F;16...</a>

I&#x27;m sorry to hear that, must be a really difficult for time for all of you. I doubt there&#x27;s anything you could have done differently to get a better outcome. When people are in such weird situations, there&#x27;s no &quot;guaranteed method&quot; to help. They&#x27;re having a shit time, and they want to take it out on people - and you were there.

Death, sickness, and financial windfalls each bring out the worst in most of us.Don&#x27;t take it personally, the failure here isn&#x27;t yours.

I can not figure how to buy it :( :(Only one website seems to have it, but shipping only to Australia :(Any ideas how to get it??

You can find a lot of Marshall Rosenberg lectures and even full workshops on YouTube.An important part of the nvc practice is to give up attachment to outcome. Making a true request means that there will be no negative consequences if the answer is “No”. It is possible that your wife’s brother was triggered partly because you insisted (if you did), maybe he needed autonomy, solitude, to feel that he matters, to grieve, to rest.I teach NVC and often use a small yellow book called Communication Fundamentals by Jean Morrison.

Of course we tried that first. My wife tried, their uncle tried, their cousins tried. I was the last resort.I agree that it’s best now to back off. There’s nothing else I can do. It hurts me to see my wife in additional pain because she’s not allowed to talk to the medical staff herself. She has medical training and is likely to understand the medical “Mumbo Jumbo” better than anyone else in the family.

There may be deep-seated and long-standing resentments playing out here, due to insecurities and perceived differences in status. It&#x27;s possible your brother-in-law has also never held a position of power or authority. No amount of conversation on your part may fix it as a large portion of the problem is the source (i.e. you). It may be best to back off and let your wife handle it. He&#x27;s her brother after all. Work through her to get your message across.

Thank you for the recommendation. I did use Why questions and probably should’ve avoided those. I’ll check out this book.

I wouldn&#x27;t be so hard on yourself. The family is in a very difficult spot right now and people all cope and behave differently.I&#x27;d recommend the book Never Split the Difference which was written by a former hostage negotiator. From what I learned from that book, anchoring his emotions and asking How questions might have helped you. Why questions are accusatory and put people on the defensive, often leading to escalation.

Thanks for the link. I will check it out.

I found this book very helpful in several difficult conversations over the years - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-Matters&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0143118447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...</a>It has quite practical advice as well as a framework helping one navigate.

Unfortunately they’re both terrible to each other. Always have been, likely always will be. Even in relatively stressless situations they end up at each other’s throats in seconds.The family (not my wife) asked me to talk to my brother-in-law about this because nobody else could get through to him.I totally agree I’m not the right person to get in the middle. There’s just nobody else willing or able to.

&gt;I&#x27;ve often seen families get particularly hostile when an in-law involves him or herself with the death or illness of a parent.Definitely. The husband of my sister trying to insert himself - it felt so wrong at the gut&#x2F;instinct level. I just felt at the gut&#x2F;instinct level that he has no voice - no &quot;standing&quot; - in that situation. While it was expected and predictable feeling, its actual strength was a bit surprising. Note that in general I have nothing against the guy, and we&#x27;re good with the sister.GP&gt; I spent over 2 hours with him trying to talk it through.You just wouldn&#x27;t get it with me. I&#x27;d just have no reason to waste all that time and energy with somebody who have &quot;no standing&quot; in the situation.GP&gt; I never insulted or condescended him. My goal of the conversation was to allow his sister (both are the patients children) to participate in conversations with the medical staff.did you really think that your supposedly nice conversational skills would be more powerful and effective than a lifelong relationship, whatever complicated it may be, between the brother and the sister? Talking about insult and condescension ...

I&#x27;ve often seen families get particularly hostile when an in-law involves him or herself with the death or illness of a parent. It doesn&#x27;t matter whether you&#x27;re right or what approach you use. They&#x27;re likely in one of the worst times of their life, and they&#x27;re not going to be receptive to negotiation tactics.Why is your wife not having this conversation?

Indeed we are an odd species at times. Thank you for taking the time. I will be sure to let him know that we’re here for him, regardless of anything else.

Instead of making space, what are your thoughts on OP leveraging these perceptions to find common ground? E.g., &quot;We understand that we need you to be the man of the family, and appreciate that you have stepped up to be strong for all of us. We would like to support you in doing so and feel that our greatest assistance would be in helping to facilitate communications for you. Is this something you&#x27;re able to allow?&quot;Such a communication should probably come from someone other than OP since he&#x27;s on bad terms following the assault. Thoughts?

Don&#x27;t give up on your brother-in-law. He&#x27;s making seemingly irrational decisions but look at it from is point of view. His father may be dying. Regardless of his relationship with his father, this is a very difficult thing to go through. And then he suddenly has a lot of responsibility placed on him. He&#x27;s having to answer questions he&#x27;s never been asked before much less having given much thought to. He&#x27;s being told things that he may not understand well or at all (medical and legal). His power trip probably stems from feeling like he needs to be &quot;the man of the family&quot; and be strong for everyone else to the detriment of himself. He likely feels like he&#x27;d be perceived as weak if he reached out and asked for help, when that&#x27;s actually the number one thing he needs to be doing right now.My recommendation would be make some space for the way he&#x27;s acting and let him know you and his sister love him regardless, know how difficult this must be, and are there for anything he needs and then, don&#x27;t say anything else. Don&#x27;t provoke him. Let him come to you. He may not and if he doesn&#x27;t, then accept that there is nothing else you can do that won&#x27;t make the situation worse. But it&#x27;s just as possible that simply listening to him if and when he talks, almost playing into his power trip, may actually open him up to sharing more information with you.We humans are such strangely paradoxical creatures sometimes. :) Good luck and I wish you and your family the best.

I agree in principle and I hate being put in the middle of this. I responded to some other similar comments on this sub-thread but the short of it is that I was asked to do this by the family (not my wife) because nobody else can get through to him.

This is a family issue so it would have been your wife’s job to deal with this. As an in-law you are often an outsider when it comes to these issues.

It&#x27;s easier for care teams in this situation to speak to one person. I suppose your wife (if she felt up to the task) could have asked if your brother needed relief, but 21 hours in an emergency is a very long time and being the only one on deck for 21 hours is a very stressful circumstance.

My friend had recommended to me a book called Difficult Conversations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-Matters&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0143118447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...</a>

The questions that should follow now that the rest of the family is now available are &quot;Who had the authority to grant this to him, do they have the authority to revoke it, has the rest of the family spoken with this outside authority, and what else can be done?&quot;There has to be some sort of provision for dealing with situations like this, because this is far from the worst possible outcome. (e.g. &quot;Great, $social_worker, you&#x27;ve now granted power of attorney to the person who lives with dad because dad was the only person able to get him to remain in treatment and on his medications, but who hates the rest of the family.&quot;)

Sage words. I’m sorry that you’ve also been through these family disconnects. It’s heartbreaking.I will work on myself to forgive and hopefully we can be a family again in the future.Thank you for taking the time.

That is such a sad situation. I can tell from the language you used that you and your wife must be quite upset with your brother-in-law. And he is clearly very upset and expressing it in a way that&#x27;s making a difficult time even more difficult. He also had to take on a terrible responsibility when he was the only person available.It might be that there&#x27;s nothing you can do right now to get him to see things through your eyes. Maybe all you can do at the moment is work on self-kindness, forgiveness and patience on your own and prepare for how to mend the relationship in the future. I have seen these rifts in my own family never heal, so I hope that they will in your family.

I was present for the last few days of my grandmother’s life, as were all of my aunts and uncles.Under severe stress, several of them reverted to basically their childhood personalities and relationships with each-other. It surfaced a bunch of half-century-old petty resentments and roles, which was quite surprising for me as an observer who was born 25+ years after their childhood.Try to cut your brother in law some slack. He’s having a hard time.

&gt; some asshole that&#x27;s fucking his sisterYou mean his brother-in-law and family right? Can we stop framing sex between loving couples as violence or somehow unrelated to family.

His father is dying and you&#x27;re some asshole that&#x27;s fucking his sister who&#x27;s trying to intrude on the situation.Clearly I don&#x27;t actually believe that, but it&#x27;s helpful to start understanding the dynamic by internalizing the other guy&#x27;s point of view.In this situation the right approach is to walk away, you can&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t try to get between someone and their father in a moment of crisis. His sister has standing, you don&#x27;t. She has to step up and deal with it, or not, at her discretion.

Death and illness in the family is particularly stressful and there is no amount of NVC tactics that are up to the task. Your brother in laws protective instincts have kicked in and you will not be able to talk to him rationally until he feels out of danger. Just relax until the limbic system dies down, let your bother in law know you want to help, and then have a calm NVC conversation with your brother in law.

&quot;Because we were unavailable, my younger brother-in-law was given Power of Attorney.&quot;I don&#x27;t understand this. IANAL, but recently had to figure some of this stuff out. PoA is granted per the wishes of the grantor. If your FIL is incapacitated, who granted the PoA?I think your wife is certainly within her rights to see the actual PoA.I am not advocating lawyering up or pushing hard for clarity.I am saying that it might be worthwhile to figure out what&#x27;s what, explore options. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Like who and how decides about DNR, end-of-life, etc.Further, it&#x27;s good practice. Talk to your kids, next-of-kin, whoever. Figure this stuff out ahead of time. For everyone&#x27;s peace of mind.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Power_of_attorney" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Power_of_attorney</a>My family has a long tradition of planning ahead for this stuff. Even so, we recently scrambled to update my mom&#x27;s paperwork to better reflect the current situation. Just in case. Having that clarity helped. Prevented a bad situation from getting worse and got us all back to rowing together.For comparison, my SIL&#x27;s family hasn&#x27;t done anything, won&#x27;t talk about it, and last year was a total shitshow. Also, my sweetie&#x27;s family hasn&#x27;t done anything, won&#x27;t talk about it, the inevitable happened, and now it&#x27;s a shitshow.--Ask about any available resources, social workers, counseling. They can help navigate this stuff.

&gt; Too bad you didn&#x27;t let him assault you: that would have made it much easier. Simply charge him with assault and use it as evidence in the POA hearing.Sometimes its best not to further aggravate family arguments. This situation is currently recoverable, filing charges will forever change the relationship.

leeslaminen says:&quot;Because we were unavailable, my younger brother-in-law was given Power of Attorney.&quot;If what you say is true, then get a lawyer and request that the court transfer POA to you or your wife, whomever was specified in his papers or in the law by default. Now that you _are_ available, the court may transfer POA to you.Let this be a reminder to those reading that, when you assign POA you might also wish to designate whom you DO NOT wish to be assigned POA, in case the first-listed assignees are not available, resign, or later removed somehow.Too bad you didn&#x27;t let him assault you: that would have made it much easier. You could have charged him with assault and used it as evidence in the POA hearing or simply as leverage to force him to yield.Alternatively, if you can find grounds, you can question the original POA document and have it nullified.All in all it sounds as if, in addition to having irritable in-laws (who doesn&#x27;t?), you simply didn&#x27;t get your way and are angry about it. So either lawyer up or learn how to deal with &quot;No.&quot;.

I have no idea about what happens in the moment but it is best determined long before a situation like this arises. My mom is an RN and has seen first hand the need to have this set up prior to a serious situation happening. I have health care power of attorney for her instead of my dad or sister because she believes I&#x27;m more likely to follow her wishes around extreme measures being taken or being put on life support. I hope I&#x27;m never put in that situation but if it happens the whole family has already talked about what she wants and I&#x27;m the person with HCPOA.It&#x27;s a hard conversation that most people desperately try to avoid but if you haven&#x27;t already set it up (especially if you&#x27;re married or have kids) you should set a goal to do that this year. There are lots of simple guides online to help you put something in place or you can hire a professional to guide you if you have a more complicated personal situation.

As someone with many brothers and sisters, how is Power of Attorney determined? Just curious.

Yeah, the book is really good. But also only useful in really exceptional situations. (Speaking about workplaces, only in a toxic workplace there is use for it.)

Sorry to hear.Check out Crucial Conversations (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-Second&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1469266822" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-...</a>). It&#x27;s a framework that I&#x27;ve found immensely helpful.If interested, I do recommend you read the book, but you can still get something out of this video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EFaXx3pgaxM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EFaXx3pgaxM</a> (it&#x27;s a summary masquerading as a review).

Propagators of those techniques also tell you that sometimes there is no help. I.e. completely irrational positions or mindsets, as well arguments that are already set with hostility.

The book <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Just-Listen-Discover-Getting-Absolutely&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0814436471" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Just-Listen-Discover-Getting-Absolute...</a> may help you.It is written by a psychiatrist who trains FBI hostage negotiators. Which is about as targeted as you can for hard conversations under difficult circumstances.

You mentioned being unable to get any information from hospital staff. Did your brother-in-law explicitly instruct them for some reason not to provide any information to other family members?How exactly was he granted power of attorney? Was your father-in-law capable of signing a power of attorney when he was initially hospitalized, or had he signed a POA or healthcare proxy beforehand? If the latter, did it assign multiple agents and specify any restrictions on how they make decisions? For example, was the brother-in-law listed a successor to someone else in the agreement or are they co-agents? Getting a copy of the agreement will take very little billable time for any attorney. Given that time is probably a factor, and from how entrenched the attitude you&#x27;ve described is by now, it&#x27;s unlikely that you or the family will be able to talk your brother-in-law into backing down in any reasonable timeframe. Your first step is to get a copy of the power of attorney agreement and go from there.Speaking to an attorney might seem like an aggressive step in such a precarious situation, with the potential for long-term consequences for the family dynamic. On the other hand, as difficult as it might be to hear, you&#x27;re probably already at that point. Were your father-in-law to pass away without the rest of the family even being able to hear what&#x27;s happening from a medical standpoint, painful as it may be to contemplate, it&#x27;s highly unlikely that anyone in the family is going to be willing to forgive your brother-in-law for it. Appearing to go around him to get a copy of the agreement might be seen as a betrayal, but it&#x27;s probably going to be less problematic in the long run than the status quo.I&#x27;ve seen families that have been permanently torn apart during end-of-life decision-making. Be that as it may, some manage to heal. Eventually. I hope that yours will be one of the ones that does so.

Firstly, in my experience with the medical system, which is sadly a great deal more than I hoped for my life, it&#x27;s hard having multiple people communicating with medical experts. Information gets lost, doesn&#x27;t get recorded, gets misinterpreted, misfiled, forgotten. Having multiple people asking questions at different times means someone never has the full picture of what&#x27;s going on or is getting relayed or potentially misinterpreted information. It is absolutely better if one person is always present for conversations with doctors and nurses, even if his sister or you are also present. This way someone is guaranteed to have all the information and nothing gets lost or forgotten. You can all make decisions together, but only if you all understand all of the information at hand.In my experience with grieving people, which is also extensive, don&#x27;t try and take over, often people try to manage their grief by managing the situation. Taking that away from him takes away his coping mechanism. I don&#x27;t know your family and I can&#x27;t speak for your situation, but if it were me, I wouldn&#x27;t try and inject myself. I would keep this absolutely as simple as possible:&quot;Hey, we&#x27;re here for you. Thank you for stepping up and managing all this, I know it&#x27;s almost impossible to keep track of what&#x27;s going on with doctors coming and going constantly. What can we do to help?&quot;

I have been in almost the same situation for the last two years. It&#x27;s my mother that nearly died, her husband who now has power of attorney and uses this as an excuse to prevent us from even trivial medical information. It&#x27;s far worse than just that actually. Worst battle I&#x27;ve ever gone through. Through careful emotional chess I now have won the peace, but he still won&#x27;t tell us what medicines she is prescribed. It&#x27;s an emotional trigger for him, a challenge to his leadership. You can&#x27;t win against people like this because when they experience loss it makes them even harder to deal with.

As somebody that has this specific discussion regularly, I find that framing it as a group has helped in circumstances similar to yours. Framing it this way to your family and the health care team may help.“This decision is so difficult, let us share this burden with you. If we have to make a decision to remove life support, you shouldn’t have to make that decision alone. If we decide the massive costs of long term life support which may drain the estate, we should make that decision together.Dad would trust that we as a family would come together and make these tough decisions together.”People go through various stages of mourning so sometime just time helps.Remember that the family’s job is to be your Dad’s voice. What would he want?Events like this bring out the worst in everybody. These are just a few strategies that have worked for me in the past. Good luck.

Why was it you having the conversation and not your wife?

I&#x27;m really sorry to hear about your father-in-law.Obviously, time is short, but there are two &quot;trunk&quot; books to be read when you&#x27;re able: Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone and Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury, both of the Harvard Negotiation School. They are the gold standard and most other books on the topic are pale imitations. I used to believe that I was great at communication and bad at negotiation, but the opposite was true; DC has literally changed my life more than any other non-fiction book because the most important outcomes in our lives are the result of the most difficult conversations.Your brother-in-law will eventually need to be forgiven for acting like a maniac, and you should anticipate that he will quickly transition into doubling down on the insanity because it seems less humiliating than admitting that he was acting like a tool.Before the healing, however, you do have a problem to solve (or possibly, not). The first question is for you: is your brother-in-law making good decisions unilaterally? Is it possible that he&#x27;s trying to protect his father from your wife? Don&#x27;t be mad at me for asking. It could be possible that you should let him continue, as things are already stressful and perhaps having one person in charge is okay.But let&#x27;s assume that he&#x27;s not making great decisions. What you need to figure out pronto is that when someone is upset, it&#x27;s almost never what they say they are upset about. If your wife is pissed at you for missing dinner again, chances are that (unless you have an eating disorder) she&#x27;s not worried that you&#x27;re hungry. She feels disrespected, lonely and insecure about her marriage. So, if your brother-in-law says he&#x27;s upset about X, the single most productive thing you can do is engage in creative empathy and figure out what he&#x27;s most likely upset about. He&#x27;s likely terrified of being abandoned by his dad, or perhaps is having a crisis of unresolved things that could never be said. He could be feeling powerless. The fact that he&#x27;s the youngest might be manifesting as insecurity. (After all, why did you mention his age as relevant?) Perhaps he is terrified of death and seeing his father in this state is forcing him to confront his own death. I don&#x27;t know what his deal is; just that it&#x27;s almost certainly not what it seems to be.As for the negotiation, here are some helpful suggestions straight from Getting to Yes: first, be prepared. It doesn&#x27;t hurt to write down some of the following and maybe even practice it. Second, start every negotiation with a negotiation about the negotiation; &quot;do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about what&#x27;s happening&quot;. Third, be aware of what you want and what he wants, but also be mindful of what he is willing to accept as a compromise in combination with what you are willing to accept as a compromise. Fourth, you will both win better outcomes if you negotiation from your interests rather than a position. Why do you want what you think you want and is there another way we could possibly satisfy both of our interests?It&#x27;s critical to convey that someone does not have to lose in order for you both to win. (See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vdA2wecb4k0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vdA2wecb4k0</a> for a further summary.)A power move is to bring in a trusted but removed third-party expert to help with a difficult negotiation. It&#x27;s important that this person is impartial and not arguing for either side or else the brother-in-law will rightfully feel attacked.Finally, don&#x27;t be so hard on yourself. I am proud of you for attempting to be productive using whatever techniques you have in a time of stress. Best of luck.

People go full retard in hospitals and hospice. You&#x27;re probably just facing more emotional intensity than you&#x27;re used to.

I don’t know your brother in law, but what I can say is that the alternative isn’t better. I went through almost the same thing last year where my father suffered a heart attack and ultimately ended up in a vegetative state. Me, my sister, and my mother had different schedules, and we asked the same questions all the time. The doctors and social workers lost their patience all the time repeating themselves. In hindsight, it would’ve saved a lot of heartache and arguments with staff had we assigned 1 person to be this arbiter of information.Just my 2c

I’m sorry you went through this. Are you okay?I’m encouraged to hear you’ve used NVC, since I have learned it, too, but it’s also educational to see in certain situations even that can have its limits.

If I were to start a conversation with him, I would initially focus on two things: I would recognize his value and dedication and I would get to know him better. I don&#x27;t know his name, but I&#x27;ll call him Ben. I would probably start like this:&quot;Ben, I know this whole thing is very hard on you, but let me say I think you&#x27;re doing a great job. No matter what anyone says, you&#x27;re here for your father. That means a lot and I am sure your father would be proud of you for that. Not only that, but when the hospital asked you to step up and take on an important responsibility (power of attorney), you did it without hesitation. You&#x27;re a loyal son and a gentleman.&quot;How are you getting along? Have you ever experienced something like this before? [Wait for the answer and talk about it. Let him talk about his experiences for a while and choose to go in more depth about a particular experience.] What was it like to go through that? Did everyone turn out OK?&quot;Listen, Ben, I&#x27;m here for you. I want you to keep the power of attorney because you&#x27;ve demonstrated your loyalty. Can we work together to figure out what it means to have power of attorney? I&#x27;m not too experienced with it, but I know attorneys in general have certain responsibilities to communicate with their clients and I&#x27;m sure something like that applies here. You&#x27;ve taken on a responsibility to communicate what&#x27;s going on and I want to help you fulfill that responsibility.&quot;I know your family has been hard on you, Ben, so I want to help you by communicating with them for you so you can focus on the more important things. Again, I&#x27;m with you every step of the way, so let&#x27;s figure this out together. We&#x27;re going to get through this.&quot;As you work with him, always be on his team. Never his superior nor subordinate, but always his peer. Navigate together.

I think you may like the book &quot;Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It&quot; by Chris Voss. There are pretty insightful tricks there for dealing with extreme situations (the guy used to be a hostage negotiator for FBI).

My younger brother became irrational and physically hostile after our father&#x27;s death, to the point where I had to leave the house for a couple days.My understanding is that it is somewhat normative for children of the recently deceased to get into confrontations.

First you need to digg deep to see things from his perspective and acknowledge to him that it is how he is feeling, then the conversation will open up more.  (Empathy), next try and restart the conversation by apologizing and ask a question that gets him to say no, so he feels he is in control.  Then follow it up with an open ended question like “what is your sister supposed to do?”  because he felt some sense of control from the previous question, he may concede something on his own.  Make sure you prepare the questions and not wing it.

I think there&#x27;s an idea that you can heroically &#x27;push through&#x27; in situations like that, but in my experience that&#x27;s simply not how people change their ideas&#x2F;behavior.People change slowly.You set forth the idea, you make your case quickly (e.g. the &#x27;40 word&#x27; guideline in this article) and you don&#x27;t apply pressure. You can make clear the gravity of the situation if needed, but coercion, rhetoric, etc. will just work against you when people feel defensive. If you need someone to come closer to your point of view, you need to make room for them to do so.Giving space like this is hard, and it often seems like nothing is changing, but this approach is a lot more powerful than you might think.Obviously you don&#x27;t have the luxury of time, but the reality is that you can&#x27;t force the issue. 2 hours sounds miserable, for both of you, and it&#x27;s only adding to his agitation. He may very well be making terrible mistakes, but they&#x27;re his to make.I&#x27;ll tell you this: there&#x27;s a reason he doesn&#x27;t want your wife there. I bet you he feels undermined, antagonized, or otherwise unsupported by her (justified or otherwise), and wants to focus on the difficult decisions ahead.

No conversation technique will enable you to always get what you want. I mean, if such a technique existed the other part could also use it, right? The guide is not about how to win a conversation, just about how to have it.Your state that &quot;the power went to his head&quot; and he is &quot;irrational&quot;. That is pretty judgemental! But looking at your story from the outside, he is the son with the dying father and you are an in-law trying to wrestle control of the situation and get access to medical information and perhaps influence critical decisions.No amount of conversation skill is going to make you closer related than the son.

Its heartbreaking when these things happen.All I can say, is for anyone reading this, if you do not have a will, medical power of attorney, and medical advance directive set up - do it now. Spare your loved ones this kind of confusion and hurt.After you create these, make sure to tell your loved ones what your expectations are. You need to pick someone to have medical power of attorney who will defend your wishes. You also need to file your directive with your local hospitals and care providers.This may be a difficult conversation, but not having it can cause many more problems.

&gt;&gt; It&#x27;s incredibly hard to convince people to give up power...When I read that I thought the word power was important. The OPs brother-in-law is probably feeling a lot of things, one of which may well be &quot;powerless&quot; in the face of what is happening with his father. I&#x27;m not sure what involving the court is going to do in this case - for the patient or the interpersonal issues.

Sometimes you have to realize that there is no way to solve such a situation. I think the best situation in this case is to resolve it through the court system.
It&#x27;s incredibly hard to convince people to give up power on their own unless they have a certain disposition, there&#x27;s no disincentive in doing it, or there&#x27;s no consequence to them when keeping it. They need to be given a clear consequence if they don&#x27;t.

I find this scenario strange. Why is your wife not interfacing directly with her brother? Why are you even involved in these discussions during this obviously challenging situation? It might be better to step back and support your wife and not insinuate yourself into the higher level aspects of the situation. You&#x27;re only increasing the conflict. &quot;Blood is thicker than water&quot; is very true. And you just received a good lesson on that from your brother in law. Put your wife before everything else. If things get even worse you&#x27;ll be the scapegoat at the end. Guaranteed.

This is awful. But in the end, it takes two, and you can only control your side of the conversation.I had a similar experience in my last divorce, doing every possible thing to make the negotiations non-confrontational, win&#x2F;win, etc. My wife&#x27;s stance was &quot;I get everything&quot;, and no amount of kindness, reasoning, or patience could move her. (As you might imagine, the result was a trail of destruction, for me and her both.)I take some solace in this Buster Scruggs quote: &quot;Misanthrope? I don’t hate my fellow man, even when he’s tiresome and surly and tries to cheat at poker. I figure that’s just a human material, and him that finds in it cause for anger and dismay is just a fool for expecting better.&quot;

I’m generally a good conversation participant, but this week has made me second guess myself.My father-in-law is currently hospitalized after his heart stopped this weekend. He’s currently in an induced coma. Brain damage is a foregone conclusion at this point and they’re unsure if he will ever regain consciousness.My wife and I happened to be on vacation in Costa Rica when this happened. We hopped on the next available flight and were at the hospital 21 hours later.Because we were unavailable, my younger brother-in-law was given Power of Attorney. This “power” went to his head within minutes. He’s now decided that he is the sole arbiter of information. Nobody but him is allowed to talk to the doctors or ask questions.I spent over 2 hours with him trying to talk it through. I never insulted or condescended him. My goal of the conversation was to allow his sister (both are the patients children) to participate in conversations with the medical staff.At the end of the 2 hours, he attempted to assault me so I left. I felt like a failure. I’ve never not been able to talk someone down from an irrational position before.I think I subconsciously used some of these NVC tactics, but failed miserably.Is there an online course one can take on having these difficult conversations? I need to up my skills.

Standing on the shoulders of giants...I&#x27;ve found most &quot;new&quot; teachings are based on past geniuses, with a modern-day twist to compensate for slang or technology...I took a 10-day meditation course, originally developed by Buddha, and many of the guidelines run through to today&#x27;s principles... Such as &quot;Observe sensations, without judging, without reacting, without getting excited. Observe.&quot;

True about the rarity of Krishnamurti. Not sure how Krishnamurti would feel about Rosenberg, though, since he seems to be offering template solutions.What comes to your asterisk issue, the help says: &quot;Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized, if the character after the first asterisk isn&#x27;t whitespace.&quot;

&gt; edit: how the hell do I escape an asterisk?It&#x27;s best not to try; use numbers[0] for notes.[0] like this.

I was shocked when I saw that Krishnamurti quote.J Krishnamurti&#x27;s talks are some of the most insightful and clear-headed that I&#x27;ve ever encountered. And yet it&#x27;s very rare to encounter references to him in the wild.Sounds trite to say but some of &quot;his&quot; teachings (he hated that phrasing) got me through some very difficult times in my life. There was a time when I realized that my relationship with my parents was twisted; that they were hurting me by being oppressive&#x2F;overbearing&#x2F;controlling. Hearing his thoughts on love and the relationship between perception and action (namely, that perceiving a problem without running away from it _is_ the act of fixing the problem) gave me the insight and clarity I needed to cut my parents off [ASTERISK], pay my way through college and build a life that I was happy with.[ASTERISK] This sounds weird or callous when you have to say it &quot;out loud&quot;, but to be clear, I had very good reasons to do so. I did it to protect myself, not to hurt them.edit: how the hell do I escape an asterisk? I tried single asterisk, triple asterisk, backslash asterisk before giving up and just putting [ASTERISK]

It seems his teachings are based on the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. There are some good audio books by him on Youtube, like Freedom from the Known.
On a slightly related note, Jonathan Blow also has a talk called Techniques for dealing with lack of motivation, malaise, depression (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i7kh8pNRWOo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i7kh8pNRWOo</a>), where he also talks about the importance of observational skills as a means of understanding &#x2F; &quot;putting out&quot; your (negative) emotions and thoughts.

&gt; It sounds like you expect people to give you the benefit of the doubt all the time, without needing to expend any effort communicating.I am saying there should be a culture of trust. What do you lose by trusting that your peer coworker did not intend to be late? If you don&#x27;t trust your peers, you will create a hostile environment where everyone is on the defensive.I trust that my former coworker did not intend to raise tensions by interrogating his peers and I trust that he really thought he was helping and creating a culture of radical transparency.I agree that arriving late thrice is a fact. Calling it out can be done in a fair and neutral way.Where I disagree is that as peers we have the expectation for a full explanation for banal coworkers actions. I have seen this exact scenario play out with my former coworker.&gt; &quot;can you help me understand why you were late?&quot; 
&gt; the cross team sync ran 10 minutes late and I needed to present - i notified slack) 
&gt; &quot;could you have left the meeting early?&quot;
&gt; No, i needed to present and I was at the end. 
&gt; &quot;could you have reordered the meeting?&quot;
&gt; No, other people also needed to present and were late to meetings. 
. . .What a pointless conversation. Nothing of value is gained!Instead, we can trust our coworkers - ask to diagnose the problem and help work towards a solution.&quot;hey, _____, you have been late to the last three meetings, and we need to have you present. I am frustrated that we have lost 30 minutes of the team&#x27;s time. Can we sync up after to adjust our timings so this works better for everyone?&quot;Here, we make clear that we are going to do a blameless postmortem to find a solution. I don&#x27;t need to know exactly why my coworker is late, all I want to understand is if there are process inefficiencies that we can fix.I trust my coworker, first.

I don&#x27;t get it. What part of that question is aggressive? Arriving late is a fact. The author requests helping him understand what&#x27;s happening -- not an unreasonable request, unless you think that author magically understanding the situation without any communication counts as reasonable. The author feels an emotion -- again, not unreasonable because emotions are private and are not a choice. The author does not give an evaluation, so it sounds like you think having the emotion is the evaluation.It sounds like you expect people to give you the benefit of the doubt all the time, without needing to expend any effort communicating.

And I think it’s so easily improved by just not sounding like a robot manager: “Hey, is 1pm not a good time for the team meeting? We had to wait for you the last few.”The formal-speak sets off most people’s “I am being disciplined” alert right away.

As someone who has never heard of NVC, I recall echos of such tactics in the language a former teammate employed at work. However, nobody found him sincere or honest. Instead, he cam across as mechanical even though it was clear that he was trying to foster a transparent and open environment. There was always a disconnect between this noble goal and the hostility he made everybody feel when he talked with them.I think this proposed quote from the article represents it well:&gt;To a teammate: ‘You arrived 10 minutes late to the last three team meetings. 
&gt;I am frustrated because, as a team, we have a need for efficiency. 
&gt;Please, could you help me understand what’s happening?’This comes across as very aggressive. First off - they are peers. The author makes a power grab by immediately painting the coworker in a negative light. I don&#x27;t put a lot of stake in hierarchies, but I am sensitive to power dynamics. If I were witnessing this, I would immediately see that author conquered the high ground. This puts the coworker on the defensive from the get go.Second - it&#x27;s fair to assume the coworker simply had back-to-back meetings. But now the coworker has to explain this in the author&#x27;s terms.The conversation feels hostile and I don&#x27;t believe the author has his peer&#x27;s interests in mind.Instead the author should trust that peer has a good reason for being 10 minutes late and talk through a strategy that can help the peer arrive on time. But the author needs to give something away.

NVC perhaps is often employed in situations that don&#x27;t quite require that degree of formulation, but when parties have been bickering so much that even simple &quot;Hello&quot; courtesies get interpreted as passive aggression, the structure of NVC allows the building of communication.Anything that gets and keeps both parties talking in these situations, even by marginal degrees, is worth everything.

Emotional manipulation is absolutely violence. Often language which is itself not explicitly violent is backed by implicit threats of violence. Labeling and judgment feed both emotional and physical violence, not only among individuals but also more systematically.The most brilliant book I know about this is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which explores in great depth the myriad ways in which language is violent and perpetuates violence, while being narrated by a completely dispassionate narrator who sticks to pure observation.&gt; [...] can cause a physical reaction akin to that experienced by victims of physical violence, those cases are extremely rareIf by “extremely rare” you mean experienced by nearly everyone occasionally throughout their lives (and by many on a daily basis), then sure.An attack doesn’t need to leave someone hospitalized to be “violent”.

In general I&#x27;m also not a fan of changing definitions of words for the extra pathos and marketability. I also would be surprised if Rosenberg has any sort of malicious intent here in his choice of wording.Violence is, by definition, physical, and claiming that &quot;speech is violence&quot; seems like a trivialization of actual physical violence.While there is evidence that certain types of psychological abuse can cause a physical reaction akin to that experienced by victims of physical violence, those cases are extremely rare and shouldn&#x27;t be used as justification for this sort of rebranding.

Calling it &quot;nonviolent communication&quot; is a brilliant marketing move, as it implies that not conversing in this manner is violent.I&#x27;ve seen this style many times in my career, and it always comes off as patronizing. It also tends to be used far more often than recommended. Instead of being deployed in difficult conversations, it gets used in every one-on-one.My guess is that NVC ends up like power posing[1]: pop-psych that fails to replicate and continues to be espoused long after it has been shown not to work.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Power_posing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Power_posing</a>