Thank you for asking the question.

I will try to answer it with a recent example from my life. I attended a workshop on foundations of networking for students and alumni and the recurring theme was about how important is to be sincere. I asked the leader if there is a place where people can learn to stay sincere in a networking situation. He was surprised by my question so I described the struggle I had had when I graduated with my MBA. I was torn between trying to be sincere during my networking and very much wanting a job at the same time. This created an enormous tension within me. About a year and a half ago I found a way of relieving this tension through the Buddhist principle of detaching from the outcome. More concretely, it is hard to be sincere when you know that you want something from another person. To resolve this contradiction: you need to tell the person what is alive in you and then try to find out what is alive in that other person and have the trust  that the answer will appear to address the  needs of both people. From my experience, people need to learn how to develop this trust instead of putting goal oriented pressure on themselves and other people. That is why I want to create some place where people can go to get support with this trust. This is what the process of Compassionate Communication is all about.

If you want to know more, I copied the extract from the Compassionate Communication website: it is also called Nonviolent Communication (NVC). It was named after Gandhi’s philosophy that allowed him to make peaceful change:

Its purpose is to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and hear others by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting.

We are trained to make careful observations free of evaluation, and to specify behaviors and conditions that are affecting us. We learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others, and to identify and clearly articulate what we are wanting in a given moment. When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, and needed, rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion. Through its emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others—NVC fosters respect, attentiveness and empathy, and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart. The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative.

While it is taught through the use of a concrete model, and is referred to as “a process of communication” or a “language of compassion,” Nonviolent Communication is more than a process or a language. As our cultural conditioning often leads our attention in directions unlikely to get us what we want, NVC serves as an ongoing reminder to focus our attention on places that have the potential to yield what we are seeking—a flow between ourselves and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.

Founded on language and communication skills that enable us to remain human, even under trying conditions, Nonviolent Communication contains nothing new: all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries. The intent is to remind us about what we already know—about how we humans were meant to relate to one another—and to assist us in living in a way that concretely manifests this knowledge.

The use of NVC does not require that the persons with whom we are communicating be literate in NVC or even motivated to relate to us compassionately. If we stay with the principles of NVC, with the sole intention to give and receive compassionately, and do everything we can to let others know this is our only motive, they will join us in the process and eventually we will be able to respond compassionately to one another. While this may not happen quickly, it is our experience that compassion inevitably blossoms when we stay true to the principles and process of Nonviolent Communication.