I recommend this book to you: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships !
I recommend it to friends, to clients, to people I train in emotional intelligence workshops, to everyone who wants to improve their skills in communicating with others. I believe that if you read this book carefully, as if reading a textbook… and begin to apply in your life the things written there, you will gain the most valuable thing – fulfilling communication with other people. It is written in very accessible language and with many examples that present the practical application of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model in the most diverse spheres of our lives.
If you allow what is written there to touch your consciousness, you will learn how to express even your most painful feelings in a way that does not hurt!
And expressing feelings is a very important skill that we are still not taught in school. High levels of conscious communication with others, when we don’t blame, don’t label, don’t insult, but instead take responsibility for the way we feel, is an enormous rarity.
We are accustomed to dealing with our negative feelings either by suppressing them or by blaming and criticising. In both cases, however, not only does our psychological well-being suffer (because every suppressed emotion undermines our self-respect and health), but our relationships with others suffer as well. This is how depression appears, illnesses, the feeling of alienation and loneliness, destroyed intimate relationships and deteriorated work relationships.
This invaluable book provides a model with which to deal with the traps of suppressed feelings. As well as clear guidance on how to use words to express our own truth in a way that enriches life and our relationships with other people.
The model is indeed very simple – it consists of four basic elements. However, this does not mean it is easy. Changing the linguistic habits of communication requires a very high level of psychological maturity and awareness, and that is the real stumbling block for its practical application. The other reason is that at the beginning of applying it, it seems stiff and awkward, somehow unnatural. But this is only at the beginning. If one succeeds, however, in turning it into a habit, into second nature, one understands that one has gained something priceless.
One will have learnt the most important of human languages – communication through empathy, the language of love.
Kameliya Hadziyska
