Feelings Are Meant To Be Felt:
Last week, I celebrated my 31st birthday. It was beyond perfect for what a covid birthday could look like these days. I’m still trying to gather my thoughts on how fortunate I feel to have had the outpouring of love and celebrations in every form (including a Cameo from Paul Pierce about 24 hours before he went viral, lol). I keep writing down lots of notes and thoughts I want to keep when I think back on last week. I plan to try and sum it up in some form of post here, eventually. But for now, I wanted to focus on this piece.
In January this year, I had written a blog on 30 lessons or reminders that stuck out to me in my 30th year. Of course, 2020 was a unique year and 2021 is a unique year. So, I think having these down somewhere for reference was especially helpful.
I tend to steer clear of too many discussions surrounding feelings, outside of the occasional conversations with family and friends, as it’s not natural for us (me) to stop and analyze our feelings.
Lately, I decided that was a silly and not productive thing to do, especially when all we have right now is time to grow and learn and reestablish, or set new, priorities and goals as the world starts to open up again.
And then, a friend of mine introduced me to the topic of nonviolent communication in the past few months. Anyone that knows me well, knows that I will dive head first in to a topic (hoping to write a piece on the beauty of ADHD and hyper focus at some point) if it seems worthy or if it even just seems like something I should know a bit about. So, I soaked it up like a sponge.
I was a bit turned off by the name at first but once I got reading, it all sort of clicked. Here was a very literal way to look at feelings and needs and thoughts and try our best to make the connections between them all. I won’t pretend to know anywhere near enough about nonviolent communication to preach about it full time but I do know that it seems to be a practical tool that could help a lot of other people.
What Is Nonviolent Communication?
For a basic explanation on what nonviolent communication is, you can head over to the center for nonviolent communication (CNVC), and read all of their resources on the web (that’s what I did). For now, here’s an excerpt from their page:
“With Nonviolent Communication (NVC) we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others. Through its emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others—NVC helps us discover the depth of our own compassion. This language reveals the awareness that all human beings are only trying to honor universal values and needs, every minute, every day. NVC can be seen as both a spiritual practice that helps us see our common humanity, using our power in a way that honors everyone's needs, and a concrete set of skills which help us create life-serving families and communities. Through the practice of NVC, we can learn to clarify what we are observing, what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We will no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment or domination. We can experience the deep pleasure of contributing to each others' well being.” source: https://www.cnvc.org/learn-nvc/what-is-nvc
And for a fundamental definition, I referred to Wikipedia for the purpose of this post:
"Nonviolent communication (abbreviated NVC, also called compassionate communication or collaborative communication) is an approach to communication based on principles of nonviolence. It is not a technique to end disagreements, but rather a method designed to increase empathy and improve the quality of life of those who utilize the method and the people around them. Nonviolent communication evolved from concepts used in person-centered therapy, and was developed by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. NVC focuses on effective strategies for meeting fundamental needs for all parties in a conversation.[4] The goal is interpersonal harmony and obtaining knowledge for future cooperation.[5] Notable concepts include rejecting coercive forms of discourse, gathering facts through observing without evaluating, genuinely and concretely expressing feelings and needs, and formulating effective and empathetic requests." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
So why am I still talking about this?
I decided that when I had my birthday last week, it would be a good time to revisit my post of 30 things and see what I had to say. And when reading it, I couldn’t help but keep analyzing my list of lessons and reminders. Common themes woven throughout, and then it hit me. All of these things that make me tick, they’re all fulfilling or helping me to meet one of my core basic human needs (see list below).
When I went through the list a bit closer, I saw the connections between my 30 and what need they may fill in my life. The easiest way to do this is to share the link to the needs inventory which is also from the CNVC. The header states:
"The following list of needs is neither exhaustive nor definitive. It is meant as a starting place to support anyone who wishes to engage in a process of deepening self-discovery and to facilitate greater understanding and connection between people."
So, to me, it seems as though 99% of people would want to know about this strategy. As mentioned earlier, all we’ve had is time this year. Why not work on a general greater understanding of connection with others.
All We Need Is:
For the rest of this post, I’m going to be focusing on basic human needs and how they relate to this. In the future, I hope to do a post on feelings. It’s really interesting to see it described in the way that, feelings are really just a result of a basic human need. The list they refer to at the top of the Needs Inventory, lays it out so you can see common feelings when needs are met and common feelings when needs are not met. You can really get into it, but for now I’m just zooming in on basic human needs.
When you click on the above Needs Inventory from the CNVC you’ll see they’re broken down into a few categories:
I grabbed a few that felt most important/stuck out to me specifically, which you can see below:
As mentioned, this post was really inspired by a revisit to my list of 30. If you didn’t get a chance to read that post (it’s extremely long, consider the below infographic your spark notes). These are the 30 things that feel most important to me in life and lessons/values I live by. It’s by no means complete, and I’m sure I could add a few more if I took the time to extend it (at least to 31), but for now I focused on these:
My next move? More analyzing of course. I went through and tried to see what needs could be directly related to one of the thirty things on my list. It was interesting to see the variety of needs being met just by these 30 that I had already identified.
So what’s it all mean? For starters, when I was creating the infographic above, I was impressed with the spread. I think it’s important to realize that most things we do in life, are really just an effort to better our lives, and at times, meet a very basic human need.
I know there is plenty more to say on this, and I certainly plan to, but for now this was a good enough reminder as any. Sometimes, without even knowing it, we’re prioritizing exactly what it is we need to tick.
More to come!