We all face difficult conversations in the workplace: criticism from our boss, a conflict with a client, a co-worker we find irritating, a subordinate who submits incomplete work—these all might entail a conversation we do not look forward to having. When we anticipate that an interaction might be complicated, there are steps we can take to engage with the other person in ways that are more likely to be satisfying.

We might think about this in three stages: preparing for the conversation, having it, and then learning from it afterward. These three stages may then repeat. If you find that there is an ongoing difficulty in having the kind of connection and relationship you would like to have with a person, you might cycle through these three stages again and again, learning more each time.

The preparing stage involves making sure that you have done your enemy image work ahead of time (see Chapter 5 of Words That Word In Business). If you anticipate that the conversation will be difficult, you might well have judgments and analyses of the person based on past interactions.

Doing the enemy image process—giving yourself empathy for your judgments and doing silent empathy for the other person—can help you transform the intense emotional charge you might otherwise have going into the conversation, a charge that will tend to create exactly what you don’t want.

This is particularly true when you have thoughts that you want to make sure you don’t act on. For example, some part of you may believe that the other person is not treating you fairly. If you simply think, “Well, I don’t want to say anything about them not treating me fairly,” you have actually increased the likelihood that your judgment will leak out in some way. In doing the enemy image process, you rehumanize the person and connect with your own needs.

In preparation, you also may want to practice having the conversation with someone else in a role-play. You can tell the other person what you imagine would be difficult for you to hear from the person, and then in the role-play take the time to give yourself empathy, do silent empathy, then formulate a response. In practice this may take a few minutes, but you will still be learning in-the-moment reaction skills by slowing it down—skills that may well serve you during the actual conversation.

Right before having the conversation, you might want to plan in some time to do self-empathy. Typically, there will be an upwelling of concerns and anxieties before going into a difficult situation; planning a self-empathy session around your reaction to anticipating the conversation, especially with a support person, can help you be present when you go into it. Setting an intention for the conversation ahead of time will also help. You can keep your intention fresh in your mind during the conversation by writing it on a three-by-five card, your hand, or your notepad.

You might well have planned how you want to start, and you may have role-played various versions of the conversation, but in the actual conversation, you want to be as present as possible and not rely on a script that cannot be true to the present moment. Holding your intention foremost in your mind instead of a planned script will help you maintain the kind of spontaneity and flow that the other person is likely to expect from you.

If you are able to do self-empathy during the conversation, it can help by keeping you present to your needs; however, when first learning, it may be more than enough challenge to simply be in the conversation with as much presence as you can muster.

I have found it is best to anticipate that after the conversation, there’s going to be a flood of judgmental thoughts about yourself, the other person, and the situation—try to schedule a time to do empathy.

During this time, you can celebrate and mourn the needs met and not met in thinking about what happened during the conversation, and you can guess the needs of the other person. You can then shift into figuring out and naming what you learned. In this learning, you might replay how the conversation went, either in your head or again in a role-play with someone else—but replay it as you would like it to have happened. In this way, you are creating neural networks that store the information in the brain in a way that makes it more readily available when you are next in a similar situation.

After going through this process, you then think about the next step, if there is one. As you plan for that step, if it includes another conversation, you cycle back to the first stage of preparation.

Thus, I felt enormous pressure to be able to solve the conflict. I was the one who had to fix it.

Only after years of experiencing NVC did that view finally begin to shift. Initially, I didn’t get the whole “connection” thing; for years I heard Marshall Rosenberg saying that the focus with NVC was on connection without grokking at all what that meant. It seemed to me that he was focusing on the wrong thing: to solve a conflict, you have to focus on the solution, not on some vague concept like connection.

Even as I continued to hold onto my beliefs, however, I simultaneously began to experience what he was talking about, both in my own life and in witnessing mediations. I began to see that when people were connected, they naturally began to collaborate to resolve their dispute; they didn’t need the mediator to come up with an answer.

As my thinking continued to shift, I realized a couple of things. First, the people in the dispute clearly had the resolutions, or the means to get to the resolution, within themselves. All they needed was a little help to connect deeply with themselves and their own motivations, as well as the underlying motivations of the other party. Second, since the parties in the dispute were the ones who had to live with the results of the mediation, it only made sense for them to be the ones to arrive at a resolution. A solution imposed by a mediator, or sometimes even suggested by a mediator, would be much less likely to be satisfying to everyone and therefore to last.

Now, I trust completely in other people’s ability to resolve their own conflicts. What I offer is no longer an attempt to be omnipotent and find the solution that will fix everything; I simply offer a few skills that are likely to increase the quality of connection between the parties, which can then flow into a collaborative resolution. Not only is this a much more enjoyable (and sane) way for me to be in the mediator’s chair, I think it also contributes far more to solutions that work.

I use NVC because it provides a frame of reference and a doable model in alignment with my purpose to contribute to compassion.

NVC basics

In NVC the awareness is fostered that all humans share the same basic generic NEEDS (e.g. shelter, sustenance, respect, meaning, connection, etc.), that all human endeavors are attempts to meet these universal needs, that each person can identify the needs that they and others are seeking to meet, and that everyone’s needs are equally valuable and important.

FEELINGS are seen as barometers for how well needs are met in each moment. For describing any situation, NVC teaches us to look for the OBSERVATION rather than an analytical understanding or judgment of it. Movement in this model comes from the principle of REQUESTS, where actions are taken out of a natural desire to enrich life for self and others.

The key to conflict resolution is to help parties connect with their own and others’ universal needs; based on this connection mutually satisfying resolutions to any situation tend to occur seemingly spontaneously.

To read more about NVC, including writings by Marshall Rosenberg and video testimonials from dedicated NVC users, or to find out if there is an NVC center near you, visit the website of the international Center for Nonviolent Communication.

As a lawyer for 20 years, preparing and trying lawsuits in the civil courts, I had represented clients in hundreds of judge administered settlement conferences and a handful of private mediations with hired mediators. My experience in the mediations and settlement conferences was indistinguishable in that the structures and approaches were very similar. The only real difference was that the judge would stay in chambers and parties would shuttle in and out, whereas in mediation the mediator would shuttle between different caucuses. Since my experience in these sessions led me to initially discard the possibility of becoming a mediator, I’ll give an example of my general experience. In the mediation context, we would meet with the mediator and the other parties in joint session, where each attorney would advocate their view of the case. Then we would go into separate rooms and probably not see the other party until the very end of the mediation. For the duration of the mediation, the mediator would play shuttle diplomacy, going back and forth between the rooms. In a simple two-party case, if I represented the plaintiff, the mediator would come in and tell us all the problems with our case; if I represented the defendant, he or she would present worst-case scenarios from the defense perspective.

We would proceed through several rounds of monetary settlement offers and counter-offers. When a fairly narrow gap had been reached, the mediator would begin to use various ways of stimulating fear—uncertainty and the risks of not reaching settlement—to drive the parties together. Often, this was successful, and therefore useful in that regard, but I don’t ever remember the clients or myself enjoying the process. It certainly never occurred to me that there could be any kind of healing resulting from mediation.

When I withdrew from the practice of law, I saw many of my contemporaries setting themselves up as mediators. Due to my experience with mediation, however, I rejected that idea immediately; it had been such an unpleasant experience for me and I couldn’t imagine that the mediator enjoyed this process of threatening and cajoling the parties to reach settlement.

So how, one might ask, did I end up not only in the role of mediator, but on the board of a professional organization focused on mediation—the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California (ADRNC)—and devoting so much of my work life to mediation?

My involvement with NVC came first; so let me start there. While I was still practicing law, I heard someone mention a communication model that broke communication into four components: observations, feelings, needs, and requests. This sparked my interest, and after months of it being on my to-do list, I got on the mailing list of the organization. A while later I received a very low-budget flyer for a workshop that managed to capture my attention enough to sign up, even though at the time I received stacks of glossy professionally-produced materials for educational programs that I passed over.

The workshop was held in an adult mental health day care center near the zoo in San Francisco, a place I did not know existed prior to that time. It was a Friday morning. I remember the discombobulation I experienced in the contrast between my downtown San Francisco three-piece suit world and the marginally functioning people in this facility. I walked to the back of the facility to the conference room, where I found Marshall Rosenberg, the man who developed NVC, setting up a workshop circle for 25 people. I had never met him or read, seen, or heard anything about his work, other than the five minutes that sparked my initial interest. 45 minutes into the workshop, I had understood everything that had been said—the grammar and syntax—but there was clearly something going on that I didn’t grok. I was clear that I wanted to be able to do what Marshall was doing, even though I didn’t really understand what was going on. I just knew that it was incredibly life-affirming. It was what I had been looking for, way to understand and communicate what was really important between people.

Slowly at first, I began to develop the awareness and skills at the heart of NVC. What attracted me to NVC was its congruence with my values, developed through the practices of meditation, yoga, and aikido. My introductory workshop in NVC was in spring of 1996, and since then I’ve been engaged in the remedial learning process of incorporating NVC’s insights into my personal and professional life.

My evolution towards mediation started with a telephone call from Marshall Rosenberg, asking me to be on the Center for Nonviolent Communication board. I attended my first board meeting, in Paris, just four months before I stopped practicing law. While I was on this board, we met three times a year for five days each time, in a total of seven countries in the developed and developing world. In these travels, I experienced a different kind of mediation than I had experienced as a lawyer. I saw people transformed in the process. They may have entered the mediation closed in self-protection, defensive, and resistant–all signs of a being in deep pain. Nevertheless, they walked out openhearted beings, trusting that they had been seen and valued and willing to see and value their antagonists in return.

With time, I was ever more attracted to being in the presence of this kind of transformation. It has been incredibly satisfying and nurturing to me to contribute to these kinds of shifts.

Several years ago, I began to offer mediation workshops and ongoing weekly trainings with John Kinyon. John and I were first drawn together around the topic of mediation while on a trip to Pakistan in February 2002. This was just a few months after the invasion of Afghanistan, and days after the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who after we had left Pakistan we learned had been beheaded by his abductors. The culmination of our trip was to spend three days in an Afghan refugee camp 60 kilometers from the Kyber pass with 25 elders from the Pashto, Tadjik, Turkmen, and Uzbek tribes. John and I learned much from this experience, and we have continued our teaching collaboration ever since then. He and I also both have private mediation practices; as a part of my work I have also served on the mediation panel for the United States District Court.

So in six short years I have gone from not wanting to have anything to do with mediation to having it be the central focus of my life. My involvement with NVC changed the possibilities I see for how we communicate with each other and ourselves, and how this applies to mediation and the broader context of conflict resolution.