Fred Sly, Rose City NVC
Vika Miller, Thriving Life
Photo by Monica Miles (monicamiles.com)
Discover How our “Broken Toes” Sabotage Our Relationships! (a sneak preview to the Amazing Relationships Workshop)
Nonviolent Communication (NVC), also known as Compassionate Communication and Giraffe language, is being used worldwide to promote and nurture cooperative relationships that support everyone’s thriving.
NVC was developed by Marshall Rosenberg PhD. (See below for more information about “what is NVC?”)
At Rose City NVC and the Thriving Life Institute, we’re excited to provide you with the training, skills, and personal support that you long for.
We offer a broad range of NVC classes as well as 
coaching, mediation, and consulting services to individuals, couples, families, groups, and organizations. We’re glad to tailor our offerings to meet your needs.
Whether you’re entirely new to NVC or have been practicing for years, Rose City NVC and the Thriving Life Institute offer opportunities to build your skills and consciousness.
Interested in learning how to teach NVC? We offer extraordinary teacher training opportunities that will dramatically increase your ease and facility in teaching NVC to others, click here to learn more.
Click on the Calendar button or the Class Schedule button to access our current offerings.
What Is NVC?
Do you long to know how to create a deep sense of freedom, safety, ease, and joyful connection in your relationships with your loved ones? (partner, children, parents, neighbors, coworkers) Do you long to know how to heal and release old pain and limitations from the past? Nonviolent Communication (NVC, or Compassionate Communication) teaches a way of perceiving, understanding, and communicating that:
- transforms our understanding of our own and others’ pain, fear, anger, and other “negative” emotions in a way that creates tremendous clarity, joy, freedom, and safety
- creates a deeply safe, accepting, compassionate environment that leaves us feeling free to be everything we are — our real selves — with others
- clarifies what truly contributes to our well-being (=happiness), so that we can focus our efforts on what actually does make our life more wonderful
- reveals what’s really causing our conflicts with other people, and shows us how to dissolve these misunderstandings so we can experience the natural satisfaction, inspiration, communion, and joy that our relationships are meant to give us
After more than 75 years of combined research, we’ve found that learning and incorporating the basic principles of NVC in all our endeavors — from our personal relationships to our economics, politics, education, health care, and other social institutions — is the quickest way to create the abundantly joyful, healthy, wonderful life that’s our birthright. (And the quickest way to heal our hurting world.) NVC’s core principles:
- The purpose of Life is to THRIVE
- When we thrive, we feel happy, secure, and peaceful (we long for happiness because it means we’re thriving!)
- In order to THRIVE, every human being needs to have the same universal “life-needs” met (for example, we need clean food/water/air to survive, but to THRIVE we also require belonging, acceptance (from self as well as others), self-expression, freedom to choose, etc. CLICK HERE for the list of 12 universal categories of life-needs, and a detailed list of some specific life-needs)
- Everything we do has at its foundation an authentic, legitimate “reaching-for-life”: an attempt to meet one or more of our human life-needs (however unskilled, ineffective, or even destructive that attempt may be)
- Our feelings are guides, letting us know whether some of our life-needs are met (so-called “positive” feelings) or unmet (so-called “negative” feelings). CLICK HERE for a list of feelings when needs are met and unmet.
NVC principles help us realize that money, stuff, and power over others are just things we use to try to meet our life-needs; they aren’t things we have an inherent need for — which is why having them (as we all know) doesn’t necessarily make us happy … that is, doesn’t necessarily feed our well-being. (If you’re hungry, buying ice skates won’t fill your belly. In the same way, if you long for acceptance for who you are, buying something won’t meet that need; having compassion for yourself, or having someone else welcome you just as you are, will.) When we understand what truly contributes to our well-being and how to communicate with each other in ways that honor and support everyone’s thriving, it becomes possible to enjoy relationships full of genuine harmony and peace as our everyday experience. Come discover what’s possible! – Fred and Vika