What's The Big Idea: Thom Bond: Compassion - An Intro To Non-Violent Communication
“When we become acutely aware of one another’s universal human needs, then we suddenly, organically, care about each other.”
Today’s guest: Thom Bond
His big idea: Nonviolent Communication is a way to understand the universal needs that we all share and how compassion is the most efficient means to connecting with people and solving the problems we face.
Thom Bond is a thought leader, author, peace educator and mediation consultant. He is best known as the creator and leader of The Compassion Course, a comprehensive online training, that has served over 20,000 participants in over 130 countries, in four languages. Thom is a founder and the Director of Education for NYCNVC, The New York Center for Nonviolent Communication (a United Nations Civil Society Organization). He is the author of The Compassion Book, the founder of The Engineering Peace Project, and a former member of the Advisory Board for the Communications Coordination Committee for the United Nations (CCCUN). He is the author of "Shifting Toward Compassion" (theexercise.org), and "64 Days for Peace" an open source, online, self-led small-group curriculum.
Listen to What’s The Big Idea on your preferred platform below:
Key insights Shared:
What is compassion: “A lot of folks think of it as pity - really it's caring.” Sometimes an uncontrollable sensation or experience. It’s a moment when we’re truly connecting with others and ourselves. A form of genuine organic caring that we’re capable of expressing.
Compassion was once considered a duty or chore: We used to think about compassion as something we “better do, or else,” a chore that we had to constantly work at in order to fit into society. Instead, what Thom explores that compassion is actually something very organic and sometimes involuntary. When we become aware and connected to other people's needs, we start to show compassion naturally.
Marshall Rosenberg: American psychologist, Rosenberg began developing Nonviolent Communication in the 1960’s and founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984. He has been an important inspiration and peer for Thom as he has taken on this work.
An engineer's approach to the compassion shortage: What one thing can we apply for maximum effect? When you try to solve a problem as an engineer, you look for the root problem or the solution that will yield the best overall effect for efficiency.
You can’t have compassion and poverty, you can’t have compassion and violence, you can’t have compassion and separation. If we consider compassion as the root cause, it would be the key to solving the widespread issues global society faces.
Empathy: The pursuit of the understanding of one's own, and other peoples, feelings and needs.
If you’re being empathetic in the moment, you ask yourself “what is someone feeling right now? What are they needing?” It's that wondering that creates the special formula to start caring about one another.
It's not that you’re “co-experiencing” or having a sympathetic reaction, instead you’re having a deep understanding of their experience. Why? Because we’re both human so we have our own experience and emotion that is triggered when we connect with other people and their problems. I’m not hurting with you, but I care that you’re hurting. This is more powerful because you can now come from a place of understanding and it gives you a vantage point to care and connect.
Empathies relationship to compassion: “A = B” empathy is needed to be compassionate. We don’t all share the same thoughts or the same experiences but we all share the same emotions and needs. They are the same everywhere (shelter, food, belonging - as Maslow outlined)
What do you call someone without needs? Dead?
What is Nonviolent Communication?: It's a way of thinking, a perspective and set of concepts - that is based on the framework that when communicating there is something universal that connects people, feelings and needs. Instead Nonviolent Communication isn’t focused in the realm of theories and independent ideas but rather the communication that’s fueled or centered by the universal emotional experiences like pain and loneliness that binds us. We can meet at our humanity and that’s why the communication style works so well.
Judgements: Often we express our needs for others and ourselves as judgements. We say to other people “you’re an idiot” but underneath this combative statement is a need that this person has. It can be complicated (a team member who isn’t performing) or simplistic but if we recognize If we decide to go to the root of judging as the problem, we will have a
Requests: Now that you live in the “awareness of needs” how do you start making changes in the world that respects everyone has the same emotional needs, it’s a way to act on our and everyone else's needs. To act in a way that’s voluntary for us
Never give up the title of human: Do we live to the highest of our ideals all the time? Of course not we’re human, but it doesn’t stop us from having ideals to move towards. When we make judgements or react to other people's judgements, it's ok to fail, but it's ok because anything worth doing is worth doing poorly in order to get better.
What Is that?: Thom’s three favorite words. Say someone is calling you an idiot (this is a judgement) and your natural human response is to get defensive or angry. Thom will reflect and ask “what is that?” What is making us angry? Why are we trying to reflexively consider what the other person's needs are when they attack us? Thom typically defaults to asking what is that person's need, who's making a judgement and how do we respond right now.
Sometimes the answer to this question will come in two seconds, sometimes it will come in two years.
The Basis for NVC: we can look at all human actions (we’re talking everything we’re ever going to do) is an action to meet a need or set of needs. We can start to then identify the correlation between our actions and our needs.
What are feelings, what are accusations?: Ask yourself, have you ever said or thought “I feel unheard,” “I feel cheated,” “I feel abandoned.”? These aren’t feelings (like love, hate, fear) these are accusations of what someone did to us. We recognize this to understand that feelings aren’t ideas, they’re sensations in the body. Feelings are kind of like radar for needs, there's a very specific correlation.
To learn more about Thom and his work:
Visit Theexercise.org
Pick up his book The Compassion Book