Marshall B. Rosenberg

Use anger as a wake-up call to unmet needs.

Always hear the 'Yes' in the 'No'.

When we hear the other person's feelings and needs, we recognize our common humanity.

To do this, you can bring in nothing from the past. So the more psychology you've studied, the harder it will be to empathize. The more you know the person, the harder it will be to empathize. Diagnoses and past experiences can instantly knock you off the board. This doesn't mean denying the past. Past experiences can stimulate what's alive in this moment. But are you present to what was alive then or what the person is feeling and needing in this moment?

If the other persons behavior is not in harmony with my own needs, the more I empathize with them and their needs, the more likely I am to get me own needs met.

Postpone result/solution thinking until later; it's through connection that solutions materialize - empathy before education.

It's harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.

It may be most difficult to empathize with those we are closest to.

With empathy we don't direct, we follow. Don't just do something, be there.

Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward.

Translate all self-judgments into self-empathy.

By maintaining our attention on what's going on within others, we offer them a chance to fully explore and express their interior selves. We would stem this flow if we were to shift attention too quickly either to their request or to our own desire to express ourselves.

Tragically, one of the rarest commodities in our culture is empathy. People are hungry for empathy, They don't know how to ask for it.

What evidence is there that we've adequately empathized with the other person? First, when an individual realizes that everything going on within has received full empathic understanding, they will experience a sense of relief. We can become aware of this phenomenon by noticing a corresponding release of tension in our own body.

When people hear needs, it provokes compassion.

An important aspect of self-compassion is to be able to empathically hold both parts of ourselves-the self that regrets a past action and the self that took the action in the first place.

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.

It's never what people do that makes us angry; it's what we tell ourselves about what they did.

Analyses of others are actually expressions of our own needs and values