3 Stoic Pillars For Calm Communication

Unlock skillful communication with 3 Stoic pillars to ease anxiety in relationships and foster gratitude. Based on ancient wisdom, practice active listening, thoughtful response, and honest expression. This session guides you through role-plays and reflections for real-life application, improving connections and inner calm. Keywords: Stoic communication, anxiety in relationships, gratitude building, morning practice, mindfulness talks. Ideal daily; pair with my toxic relationships guide.

Transcript

I'm gonna start this talk with a model.

This is a model that was mind blowing when I first discovered it.

It's the CIT model,

Cognitive interpersonal therapy.

So instead of cognitive behavioral therapy,

This is cognitive interpersonal therapy.

This framework was created by Dr.

David Burns.

He's a big innovator in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy.

He wrote books like Feeling Good,

Feeling Good Handbook,

Feeling Good Together,

And so on.

And for those who don't know,

Cognitive behavioral therapy was inspired by the Stoics,

By Stoic philosophy.

And the basic idea of it is that our twisted thoughts cause our emotional problems in life.

So it's not necessarily the feelings that we have that create the negative thoughts.

It's the thought loops and the way that we think about things and it's typically inaccurate,

A type of twisted thinking that causes pain.

So if you look at someone who has social anxiety,

And this is something that I used to struggle with a lot,

One of the distortions would be mind reading,

Right?

You might look at someone's facial expression and then you conclude that they don't like you.

And then you feel this kind of anxiety and aversion and you wanna run away from the situation.

And all of this is just because you concluded with a lot of certainty that you knew what the other person was thinking and you just didn't know.

And if you practice cognitive behavioral therapy,

You systematically go through those thoughts and then you untangle them and try and find the truth,

The true version or reframe them into something that is more accurate.

And what you'll find is the more accurate your thoughts,

The less suffering you have.

It's very difficult to be very depressed and very anxious if you're thinking about things very rationally without any types of twisted thinking.

So going back to CIT,

Cognitive interpersonal therapy,

It's based on three ideas.

And now these ideas could be a bit triggering and uncomfortable and what I would say is try and find the truth in them,

Take what is useful,

Discard what is not,

Right?

Just play with the ideas here,

Have an open mind.

So the first idea in CIT is that we all provoke and maintain the relationship problems that we like to complain about,

Right?

So instead of seeing ourselves as a victim,

An innocent victim,

We instead should start seeing ourselves more as an actual creator of some of the problems that we don't like,

Almost like we're enabling others to act in the ways that we don't like.

We don't realize that we're doing this.

It's often based on self-fulfilling prophecies and unconscious patterns.

And because of that,

We feel like we're victims and we tell ourselves that the relationship problems are all the other person's fault.

It's really difficult when we have relationship issues to look at our own role and say,

Yeah,

I did a lot of things there.

You know,

The way that I reacted,

The tone of my voice,

That created some of the issues that I'm complaining about.

So that's the first idea,

That's an uncomfortable one.

The second idea is that we deny our own role in any type of conflict because self-examination is way too painful for us.

We are in some sense secretly rewarded by the problem that we're complaining about.

So there's something in us that feels a sense of relief when we complain about other people,

Point to the blame at someone else and take no responsibility for our own role.

Okay,

So this is pretty negative.

So principle one of CIT,

Cognitive interpersonal therapy,

Is that we all provoke and maintain the relationship problems we complain about.

And principle two is that we don't admit this because self-examination is way too painful.

The third principle is a lot more positive and this is where things get interesting.

The third principle is that we all have way more power than we believe to transform our troubled relationships.

And it makes sense,

Right?

Because if you believe that all of your relationship problems are with the other person,

That puts you in a place of helplessness when it comes to changing them.

All you can do is just hope that the other person changes.

And many of us actually try to do that,

Right?

We just nag or complain or pester or demand that other people act differently.

And I think we all know how that goes.

Has anyone ever been able to actually change another person in a positive way by complaining and nagging and pointing out their flaws and criticizing them?

I personally don't change the best when someone does that to me.

And so the way that we change our relationships is by focusing ourselves.

And we can reverse years and years of bitterness,

Mistrust,

Intimacy problems very quickly when we do this.

So instead of seeing a relationship as a 50-50 thing,

So it's 50% us,

50% them,

A more useful way to think about it is 100% us and 100% them.

And we should focus on the 100% on our side because we can't control other people.

The Stoics recognized that a lot of us try to control the externals.

Mine includes other people,

Our health to some degree,

Material possessions.

And the simple fact is,

No matter how much you try to control another person,

You just can't,

You just can't do it.

And even if you try to be as healthy as you can,

You can't control your own heartbeat or the way that your liver functions.

Anything could happen.

You could get struck by lightning,

You just can't control it.

And you could acquire a lot of wealth and it could get stolen,

Right?

So it's not that we shouldn't pursue good things in life,

But we should just recognize that they're outside of our control and instead focus mostly on the things that are within our control,

Which is us.

Our thoughts,

Intentions,

Actions are considered opinions about things.

So this is the starting point for CIT and this is how we change relationships.

Now I will say that this does not apply to toxic relationships.

I don't know if you've ever been in a relationship with someone who is a dangerous person,

Very,

Very dangerous emotionally,

Abusive,

Controlling,

Manipulative,

Maybe they have some kind of cluster B personality disorder.

My general advice if you're entangled with someone like this is to take a more extreme type of self-defense measure where you try to end the relationship,

Leave the relationship and focus more on protecting yourself.

It's very difficult to fix a truly toxic relationship unless the toxic individual really wants to do the work and really wants to spend time getting therapy and doing all that is required to improve their personality traits.

It's not like you as a partner are gonna be able to rewire someone's brain and years,

Or if not decades of trauma and lying and manipulation and lack of empathy and anger issues.

It's very difficult for you to do that in a relationship.

So what I'm talking about here is how to improve your general relationships that you wouldn't consider to be highly dangerous or even life-threatening.

Let's start this by taking a look in the mirror and asking ourselves instead of what are other people doing that is annoying or isn't a good form of communication,

I'll start looking at how do we communicate with other people?

So I have a list of communication errors here that I'm gonna read out very quickly and I want you to listen to them and tell me if you do any of these things in your relationships.

So the first one is you claim to know the ultimate truth about a situation.

You insist that you are right and the other person is wrong and it's felt with a sense of certainty and matter of fact,

Almost as if you have access to ultimate knowledge.

Another one is diversion.

So you change the subject when you're in the middle of a discussion or you list past problems.

So if you get accused of something,

Instead of dealing with that and reflecting it back and discussing it,

You'll bring up something that happened six months ago.

You blame the other person,

You blame yourself and you think,

Why would I blame myself?

Well,

If you blame yourself and say something like,

I'm a terrible person,

I never do anything right,

It actually prevents the other person from being able to give you proper feedback.

The moment that you make a mistake,

For example,

And the other person sits down to talk with you and you say,

Oh,

I know I don't do anything right,

I'm terrible,

I'm worthless,

How do you put up with me?

It's a form of diversion,

You're not actually going,

Let me hear what you have to say.

Defensiveness,

This is a big one.

You just refuse to admit any shortcomings or flaws.

This is a big one actually among people who pursue the path of self-development and spirituality because we spend so much time trying to become better people.

When someone points out something like that we don't wanna look at,

We can become very defensive and feel righteous about it.

And obviously this is the opposite of what we wanna do,

We wanna collect feedback.

Hopelessness,

So you act as if you've tried everything and you can't fix it.

Martyrdom,

So you act as if you're the innocent victim of the other person's tyranny.

Have you ever acted that way?

Like you're innocent,

You haven't done anything wrong.

This other person in the relationship is the evil one,

The oppressive tyrant.

Demandingness,

Complain about the other person should be a certain way or isn't the way that you'd like them to be and you compare them to other people.

Simply put put downs,

Someone cooks you a meal and you criticize it,

Someone cleans the house,

But you mentioned the one thing that they didn't clean,

That can be very,

Very difficult to deal with.

Things like that actually can destroy relationships.

I actually knew one of my good friends from school,

He got married,

Got divorced within a year and he would do everything like walk the dogs,

Clean the house,

Cook the food and his partner would come home and the first thing she would do is point out where he hadn't cleaned and he spent like hours cleaning every day,

It was just really difficult to hear.

Denial,

So you just deny any role in the issues.

Labeling,

This is when you simplify another person down to a single label like jerk,

Loser,

Something like that.

Another big one for us that we should note is helping and problem solving.

So someone comes to us with an issue and instead of listening with empathy and hearing what they have to say,

We just try to help.

It's like we've tried to fix the situation.

Someone comes to us and maybe they're having a relationship problem and we just say,

Well,

What you should do is this,

Instead of actually going on,

This person's my friend and I should try and see where they're coming from and support them and this actually stops them from being heard.

Sarcasm is another one.

Counterattacking,

So someone comes to you like,

Hey,

I've noticed something about you that I'd like to call you out on and if your first thing is well,

You do this thing as well,

Now it's a counterattack and there's no actual conversation happening.

Passive aggressions or like silent treatment,

Pouting,

Slamming doors,

Not replying to texts and things because this can happen over text as well or phone calls now in the age of social media.

Scapegoating,

So you imply that the other person is fundamentally defective.

So if you know that the person you're in a relationship with or like this could be a friend or family member as well,

If you know that they've had three failed relationships in their past,

You could just say,

Well,

Of course you can't have a good relationship,

You have three failed relationships.

You use that as the way to explain any issue you're having now in the present rather than actually look at the present situation.

And mind reading,

This is something that we've already looked at.

You expect the other person to know what you are thinking and you get upset if they don't understand and vice versa,

You claim to know what the other person's thinking when you don't.

So the one before labeling was denial.

And yeah,

This is when you just deny your own role in the relationship and you insist that you don't feel upset when you really do.

Do any of these ring a bell for you?

Do you feel like you do any of these type of problematic communication patterns?

Has anyone told you that you do?

And if you do know anyone who does these a lot,

Which of those do they do?

We all do these.

It's very difficult to not do them unless you actually make it a practice because where have we ever trained to not do these?

Have we ever learned this in school?

Like we learned English and math and science,

But did anyone teach you how to communicate well with other people?

Yeah,

They should have trauma healing and relationship classes in school,

But they don't.

Don't think of it like,

Oh,

I'm communicating bad.

That's not a helpful way to think about it.

Instead think there is some habit that I've picked up,

A communication habit.

Don't internalize the habit.

It's just a pattern,

A mental pattern.

You can change it.

Like you can change any skill.

You know,

Like if you're learning piano,

It's not helpful to say like,

I suck at this chord that I'm learning.

It's like,

Of course you do,

But you won't always.

You just gotta practice it like a skill.

And my approach to stoicism is skills first.

We can learn all the knowledge in the world.

I can tell you this list and you can go,

Oh,

That makes sense,

But then never do it,

Right?

Never improve on those communication errors.

So first we need knowledge and understanding and then we need to build the skill.

And also we do this to ourselves too.

That's the crazy thing.

We do this exact thing to ourselves.

You know,

We say we go for a job interview.

They come away saying like,

Great interview.

Like we really like you.

And then you just,

All you can think about is that one thing that you said that they kind of made a wrinkled up nose expression to,

You know,

It's like this negativity bias,

Zoning in on the faults.

And that does not feel good.

So what do we do with this list,

Right?

Do we systematically go through each one and try to improve it?

Well,

What I would say is the ones that stand out to you most to just think about more,

You know,

And try and catch yourself,

Bring mindfulness to it when you're interacting with people.

Like someone comes to you and they point something out to you and you feel yourself getting defensive,

Just go,

Ah,

Defensiveness,

I can see that.

Okay,

What I'm gonna try and do now is not be defensive.

And you're gonna lean into the other way and just say,

Look,

I feel defensive right now,

But I wanna practice overcoming my defensiveness.

So please just tell me everything and I will listen to you.

Okay,

So mindfulness is a superpower because it allows you to see thoughts as thoughts.

And you can catch yourself when you're being passive aggressive,

Or,

You know,

Depending on the situation,

If you're really triggered,

Then it's gonna be difficult.

But as much as you can try to note the things that you do the most and try to improve those.

So yes,

I think we should look at some of the key communication areas we make and try to improve those.

But let's try to shift our attention now to more of a positive focus.

So instead of focusing on what we shouldn't do,

Let's instead look at what we can do differently.

And this is what I call the EAR method.

So it spells EAR,

So E-A-R.

If you communicate with this acronym,

I'm gonna explain it in a second in mind,

You will almost never do any of these communication errors.

All right,

So that's why this is really good.

It's a simple concept that cuts through everything and the Stoics were big fan of maxims.

And also sports coaches are also big fan of maxims and kind of one liners because when you're in a stressful situation and things are tough and you feel overwhelmed,

Sometimes a single sentence is the only thing that you can anchor yourself to.

And if that sentence is helpful enough,

And is what you need to be hearing at the time,

That can act as like a life raft that can pull you out of the chaos.

And so the EAR method means empathy,

Assertiveness and respect.

If you can speak with empathy,

Assertiveness and respect,

You will almost never fall prey to these communication errors.

It's very simple,

But not necessarily simple to employ.

So easy to get the knowledge,

You can hear that and go,

Yeah,

It makes sense.

But the skill of doing it is something that takes practice.

So let's talk a little bit about empathy.

So what does empathy mean?

Empathy means empathy for someone's feelings and empathy for someone's thoughts.

Thought empathy and feeling empathy.

So feeling empathy is like someone just comes to you and they're sad.

We don't need to try and change them.

We don't need to try and fix them.

We don't need to problem solve.

We just feel empathy.

Doesn't mean we have to feel sad too.

It just means like,

Oh,

Like I see that you feel sad.

That's okay.

Being sad is a feeling.

All feelings are fine.

I'm here.

That's all you have to do.

It's like what a good parent would do to a child.

Child is crying.

No feeling is wrong.

Feelings are feelings.

Feelings are normal.

I understand you feel that way and I'm here.

I won't leave you because you feel this way.

All right,

So you have empathy.

Thought empathy is when you try to find the truth in what someone is saying.

We all know individuals who think in kind of irrational ways.

They have ideas that we don't agree with,

Values that we don't agree with.

They have claims about reality that we just don't agree with that we just don't think it makes sense.

In such situations,

It's difficult to find the truth in what they're saying,

But there always is something you can find that is true,

Right?

There's always some angle you can find.

You know,

If someone is telling you that the weather is the worst weather in the universe and it's making them feel super depressed and it's just awful,

The temptation is to go,

Well,

You know,

Weather is weather,

Changes,

It shouldn't affect how you feel.

You can say that.

Or you can kind of really like empathize and go,

This person wanted to do things today,

You know?

And that weather is stopping them from doing those things and they're hurting about that.

And in that sense,

Like I can empathize with you.

Yes,

The weather is a problem for you.

And I understand that and I can see where you're coming from you know,

Doesn't mean that we need to believe the exact thoughts that they're having.

We just make an effort to try and find out what their thought process is,

What their patterns of thoughts are and try and find something that we can find true in it.

So we have to do.

There's this concept called cognitive dissonance.

I don't know if you're familiar with it.

The idea is that we have a certain kind of schema about reality and then there's reality itself.

And if our schema or map of reality clashes with reality,

We really don't like that feeling.

It's called cognitive dissonance because it makes us feel uncertain about everything.

Even if you're anxious or depressed,

You can feel certain about certain things.

And we would rather feel depressed sometimes than to feel wrong.

You know that feeling of being wrong about something?

That can really hurt,

You know?

And you'll often find angry,

Irritated,

Moody people would rather be right about the things that make them moody than wrong.

Because if you don't trust your map of reality,

You can't trust anything.

You can't trust life.

You can't trust people.

And in some sense you wouldn't be able to survive.

So we need this sense of certainty to survive in life.

And what happens is,

Is when we speak to other people and they say things that we don't agree with,

It can challenge us.

All right,

And we don't like that dissonance.

And so we might dismiss it or push it away.

One of the favorite things I like to do with people,

Just for fun,

When we're talking about politics and things like that,

Is let's say someone is voting for a particular kind of politician.

And they're telling me that this person's great in every way.

I will go,

Oh,

That's awesome.

What don't you like about them?

All right,

And just see what they say.

It's kind of funny.

And you get to see cognitive dissonance in real time.

Or if someone is saying that they hated a particular movie,

You know,

The soundtrack sucked,

The acting was awful,

The storyline was terrible,

The ending,

Oh my God,

I would say,

Oh,

Was it really that bad?

What was done well in the movie?

And you see them and they don't want to go there because of the cognitive dissonance.

And the truth is most things are kind of a mix of good and bad and things are not black and white,

As they say.

But usually when we make an opinion about something,

We tend to paint it all with a particular kind of shade.

There's actually been some research done with military people.

And I think someone high up in the military was asked to rate his subordinates and he could only categorize them into really good or really bad.

And this makes sense.

You know,

It was hard for him to go really good in like five areas,

Not so good in those two and mediocre in that one,

Right?

Like he had to kind of make things black and white.

Don't we do this a lot?

We all do it.

So going back to the EAR method,

The second part of the EAR method is assertiveness.

And you can also call this honesty.

If we have unlimited empathy,

But we never speak our truth,

Then you could say that we are falling prey to niceness,

You know,

The kind of negative version of niceness where we're kind of losing ourselves.

We're becoming a pushover.

We're sacrificing our own wellbeing.

We're not showing compassion to ourselves.

We're just supplicating,

Like living for another person.

The Buddhists called this idiot compassion or foolish compassion.

Compassion has to start with you.

If you show unlimited empathy to everyone and they keep coming to you with problems and you become subsumed with those problems,

You stop caring for yourself.

Diane says enabling.

Yes,

Exactly,

Enabling.

You lose touch with yourself and that actually prevents you from being able to help people in the long run.

If you're a carer,

Sometimes carers can become very ill themselves because they just burn themselves out caring for other people,

You know,

And there has to be that healthy limit between caring for other people but looking after ourselves because when you get burned out,

Suddenly you can't care for other people,

Right?

So you have to find that balance.

And so honesty and assertiveness is that you empathize fully,

But you also explain like,

This is how I see things.

And you're not trying to win.

You're not saying,

I get what you're saying,

But it's not like that.

It's more like really empathizing with someone,

Really trying to see things earnestly,

Sincerely from their point of view and also expressing your opinion,

Your feelings about the situation.

And then the R is respect,

Okay?

If you showed video footage of your last few tense relationship moments to other people and you just said like,

Can you tell me if I was speaking in a respectful way?

You'd want them to say yes.

You know,

That's what we're looking for.

And it's so easy to slip into slightly disrespectful tone of voice.

You know,

We've kind of become impatient or cutting.

We can roll our eyes.

We can interrupt.

You know,

There's this kind of disrespectful energy that we can bring.

And we can say to ourselves like,

But I was speaking to you tidy.

I was speaking to you properly,

Decently.

And it's like you kind of were,

But you weren't,

You know?

There wasn't that actual,

Like I respect you as a human being right now.

There might've been,

I'm speaking to you properly,

But I still wanna win.

I'm speaking to you properly,

But I still don't empathize with you.

And so we wanna have that respect.

And so going back to those communication errors,

If you speak with empathy,

Assertiveness and respect,

Suddenly you're not using passive aggression.

You're not using defensiveness.

You're not being demanding or putting people down or using sarcasm or claiming you have access to ultimate truth or going on a counter attack or using labeling.

All of those things just dissolve just by following this process.

And the way that I practiced this was I just made a,

I used a habit tracker and I just put E-A-R in the habit tracker.

And every day I would just try and speak this way,

No matter what.

Even if I wasn't being spoken to nicely,

Even if I was struggling with it,

I would try to speak with empathy,

Assertiveness and respect.

And it was wild what happened.

It was insane how the relationship shifted dramatically in days,

A matter of days.

However,

There were certain moments where I felt pulled back into the previous way of speaking.

And guess what?

Whenever I kind of lapsed back into lacking empathy or not asserting myself properly or not showing respect,

The relationship went back to the previous method.

So this is a skill,

It's not easy to do,

But the payoff is incredible.

What you can actually achieve by doing this is wild,

It's truly transformational.

And you can take this method and speak to yourself like that.

You have creators block,

Empathy,

Assertiveness,

Respect,

Speak to yourself with those things.

You do a public talk or you put yourself out there and it doesn't go well.

It's like,

Okay,

How do I feel?

Okay,

What do I think about the situation?

Can I talk to myself about that respectfully?

You can use that type of tone of voice and that way of communicating with yourself,

With everyone.

So what I would say is the kind of three layers that we're going for is like layer one,

Be aware of the CIT model that very often you are the one creating the problems that you like to complain about in relationships and that we should focus more on changing ourselves to improve our relationships.

And this does not include toxic,

Dangerous relationships,

Talking about just sort of normal misaligned relationships or troubled relationships,

Toxic relationships is a different thing.

So we have the three layers,

The CIT and the noting of the relationship problems.

Those are big ones.

The second level is the EAR method,

Empathy,

Assertiveness and respect.

So we wanna practice that and make that a baseline.

Then the third level is what do we do when we're able to speak with empathy,

Assertiveness and respect,

But we're not able to resolve certain issues that we're having.

I have family members with children and they have great relationships but there's always this tension that might pop up.

Like I want to go to the gym,

Someone has to look after the baby and you also wanna do this other thing.

And so what do we do?

We can have empathy,

Assertiveness and respect,

But how do we resolve this?

How do we manage this?

And this can come up in business arrangements,

Negotiations and things like that.

And for this,

I really like the nonviolent communication model of communication.

Sometimes it's called compassionate communication.

And this is a framework for communicating.

If you speak with a nonviolent or NVC,

Nonviolent communication model,

You naturally speak with empathy,

Assertiveness and respect,

But it's a slightly more structured approach to communicating.

It was designed by Marshall Rosenberg and it's been around since the 70s and it's been developed and improved over many decades.

And I'm gonna give you the simple version of this now so you can start practicing with it today.

So there are four core pillars to nonviolent communication.

Observations,

Feelings,

Needs and requests.

So observations,

Feelings,

Needs and requests.

Okay,

So the first one is observations and more specifically you observe without evaluation.

Okay,

So if there's an issue in your relationships and you wanna improve it,

You don't wanna just criticize them,

Right?

You don't wanna just say like,

Like an example of a bad observation would be you work too much,

Okay?

Is that an observation or an evaluation?

The too much part is not an objective truth about anything,

Right,

It's your own evaluation of the hours that the person works,

Okay?

You meditate too much.

It's like,

What does the too much mean,

Right?

That's a bad observation.

A good observation would be you spent 60 hours in the office last week,

Right?

You're just observing something,

You're taking up the evaluation and you're just explaining exactly what you see.

The problem is when you evaluate after an observation is people just hear criticism.

Another bad observation would be whenever I speak to you,

You complain about other people,

Okay?

There's something in that,

This is a subtler form of an evaluation there and we should try and make it clearer and more objective.

So whenever I speak to you is not accurate.

So instead we should be more concrete,

Okay?

So on Monday and Tuesday,

I had a phone call with you on both times you talked about how people treated you in ways that you didn't like,

Okay?

It's just like really making it as concise and accurate as possible.

You know,

Trying to make a theory about them,

You know,

Trying to be a psychologist here.

When we get into psychology and self-improvement,

We wanna analyze everyone and like almost like impress people with our,

You know,

Legendary Freudian analysis of other people.

But yeah,

This is not a good way to do things.

The next one is gonna be feelings,

Right?

You wanna be expressing feelings.

I used to really struggle expressing feelings.

I said what I would often do is talk about thoughts,

Right?

So I feel like you made a mistake,

Right?

That's actually a thought.

There's no feeling there.

A feeling would be a feeling word,

Anger,

Frustration,

Irritation,

Annoyance,

Sadness,

Grief,

Happiness,

Right?

That's a feeling word.

And so instead of saying something like,

I feel like hitting you right now,

You could say something like,

I feel furious toward you.

Right,

You don't have to hide that.

You can still express honestly,

But it's,

You're actually talking about feelings.

Now to drive this point home,

I actually think one of the most important things you can take away from this talk is to use more feeling words in your communication.

So when you're communicating with people,

One of the things that you'll probably be tempted to do is to hide your feelings from the other person,

Because that makes you more vulnerable when you express your feelings.

Imagine if you and I were in an argument and I started saying things like,

Well,

When I was in this argument with you,

Or when you did this,

I noticed that you did this and this,

And I didn't like the way that you did that.

And I just,

I think you should change what you're doing.

And I think you've got some issues.

Imagine if I came to you with that versus,

Hey,

I got to tell you,

When you said that thing to me the other day,

I just felt super sad about it.

I could just really hurt my feelings when you said that.

Right,

Like which one is gonna lead to a better conversation?

Which one is gonna open the other person up?

You know,

And I've got a four year old and like the way that he can express and children in general so authentically and from the heart is part of what makes them,

One of many things that makes them very adorable is that they can just say,

I miss this person,

Right?

And it's just like,

Boom,

And you can see the sadness on their face and you just kind of can't help but feel for them,

Or I'm sad,

You know,

And they just say,

It's amazing to have that.

And we kind of lose that for some reason.

You know,

Maybe we experienced difficult relationships and we learned to kind of hide our feelings and become tougher in a slightly toxic way.

So we have observations without evaluations.

We have real feeling words and then we also have expressing needs.

So generally speaking,

When it comes to needs,

All of our needs are sort of things that lead to feelings.

So an unexpressed need leads to a certain feeling.

So if we need to be treated with respect and we don't get it,

That's going to lead to our anger,

Right,

If we need our partner to come home and greet us politely and they don't,

That's going to lead to our frustration,

Right?

So oftentimes feelings come from unmet needs or negative feelings come from unmet needs.

And if we don't even know what our needs are,

Then not only do we not know where our feelings come from,

We also can't help the people that we're in the relationships with to give us what we want.

So imagine being in a relationship,

You have like 10 needs that are not being met and you don't even know that you have these needs because you're not looking at them.

And your partner certainly doesn't know that you have these needs because you don't even know you have these needs.

And so you end up just complaining and moping around and having conflict when you just have these needs that you can locate and correct,

Right?

You know,

And it could be something as simple as to be listened to more or to go for walks,

Right?

And so what we want to do is as much as possible,

Try to understand what we need and always ask ourselves,

What are my needs in this situation?

And when someone is talking to us or complaining or expressing certain things,

Try to listen for their needs.

So if someone is very flustered and hostile and they're saying,

You know,

Like,

You never clean up,

You never clean up,

You never clean up.

Instead of going like,

Whoa,

You know,

You're being hostile.

Let's shine the spotlight at you for your terrible behavior right now.

You can instead go,

What does this person feel and what does this person need?

Well,

They feel angry and they probably need to feel like I'm on their team,

Right?

Am I showing them that by pointing out how angry they are and how they're not communicating well?

Probably not.

So maybe what I should do is say like,

I see that you're angry right now.

I want you to know that I understand that you're frustrated,

E-A-R method.

And I want you to know that I'm on your team and I wanna sit down with you and help you sort out the cleaning chores,

Okay?

I completely understand you're probably overwhelmed.

Okay,

Simple,

Not always easy to do.

And then the fourth pillar of nonviolent communication is requests.

So this would be the expression of what you actually want from a situation.

And this is very different from demands.

So a demand is a request with a punishment built in.

So can you bring me a glass of water?

It's like,

If you don't bring it and you shout at them,

That's a demand,

Right?

That's not a request.

If there's a punishment attached to it,

That's not a request.

A request always has the built-in option of the person not doing it.

And if they don't do it,

That's fine.

That's something worthy of investigation,

Something that you can talk about,

Something that you can learn from.

Maybe you need to have a discussion about their needs or understand where they're coming from or look at the way that you're expressing your requests.

The right way to express your requests is to express them in a positive,

Concrete and clear way.

Right,

So I've got some examples here of making compassionate requests.

So this is a bad example.

I'd like you to feel more confidence in yourself,

Right?

So it's a request,

But is it concrete?

Like,

What's concrete about it?

Just feel more confident in myself?

Is it positive?

Is it clear,

Concrete?

It's not.

Here's a better way of expressing that.

I'd like you to take a course in assertiveness training,

Concrete,

Which I believe would increase your self-confidence,

Okay?

So that's a clear request.

That's a good request.

Another bad request is I want you to stop drinking.

Nice work on putting the request out there,

Right?

It is a request,

You're doing it,

But what does the person even do with that,

Right?

Stop drinking,

Negative,

Not clear,

Not concrete.

Instead,

Something that they can actually do and you can work with is I want you to tell me what needs of yours are being met by drinking and to discuss with me other ways to meet those needs.

Clear,

Positive,

Concrete,

All right?

And so when we put these together,

The next time you have a situation in which you need to discuss something with someone,

Maybe they're high stakes,

You can just go through the process.

What are my observations,

Clear observations?

What do I need from this situation?

What is the other person needing as well?

How do I feel?

And I'm gonna put my feelings on the table.

And then what is an actual request that I can make?

Some of my friends are very good at the feeling part.

They can express from the heart.

They can observe without criticism,

Very good.

They can express their needs.

One thing I've been seeing in some of their communication,

Which I've been kind of pointing out to them is all of this is great,

But what do you want?

Like what's your request,

Right?

We can sit here and talk about our feelings and our needs and just put them out there,

Amazing.

But you get to actually ask for what you want and you're not doing it.

So instead I'm left with all of this information,

I don't know what to do with it.

And so I often ask them is like,

I'm listening to you,

Please tell me what you would like.

And they're able to sometimes just simplify it into one sentence.

And it's like,

Got it,

I'll do that for you.

But if you don't tell me,

I can't do it for you.

So it's very important to give people the request as well and sort of take charge a little bit and just let people know what you'd like to see more differently moving forward into the future.

So yeah,

That's the pillars,

Three pillars of good communication.

There's a lot of stuff in there.

And I think if you actually apply even half of the ideas in this talk,

I think you'll see huge changes in your relationships and you see a lot of great benefits.

Reviews

Be sure to take notes! This talk makes sense and it revealed a lot about me. I’m convinced that by learning and practicing these methods I could see a huge improvement, not just in how I communicate with others, but in my overall satisfaction with my life.

Helpful mental attitudes and communication techniques

Really useful, constructive ideas, I will listen again and follow this teacher🙏

🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Really excellent points! Very helpful!! Thank you. 🙏🏻

I keep listening to this but really need to listen during the daytime and take notes. It’s fab. Really would love a transcript. It’s brilliant thank you X

Spectacular ! I want morros this with acted examples 💗💗💗💗please the world needs more of this

Excellent. Concise, and covers a lot of ground. Thank you very much for this talk.

Thank you for this enlightening and incredibly useful talk 🕊

Thank you Jon for this Excellent in-depth session. No matter how good we think we are at communicating with others, there are things here that can remind, or awaken us to how we can better this relevant skill. 😊🙏🏾

This is fabulous
I took notes and bookmarked it
Thank you!

Some great skills here, tricky to always remember! Thanks

I really took some wonderful tools from this session. I have to listen to this more and figure out how I react in conflict so I can chance myself. Thank you so much Jon I really appreciate you sharing this information🙏

Thank you for such a succinct and wonderful talk. The tools and examples were easy to grasp and now the challenging part-putting them to use! I will bookmark the talk and hope to review the concepts every few months.
What a loving service this is!

Amazing..

Thank you so much for your guidance and your practical ideas..

Your talk is very truthful and inspirational. It IS very hard to take a hard look at yourself but as you say this is the only way we can grow and change. It's part of being human. We are not perfect but it should be part of the journey - to grow, change and lead the way to a better society through truth and honesty. Thank you for this talk. I am grateful that you shared this. 🙏

That’s a 10! Nice work and great integration. Wonderful reference piece. Thanks!