michiel reviewed Non-Violent Communication by Deepak Chopra
Not a revelation, but this should probably be taught in schools in some form
4 stars
Multiple people I respected recommend this book, so I thought I'd look at it. The title is a clever sales pitch, as it implies that our normal style of communication is violent, and you wouldn't want to be violent, would you?
Like most American non-fiction books, it tries to oversell itself. If you believe the author, he's not only able to solve gang violence and the Israel-Palestine conflict, but has successfully made peace with the most odious, argumentative group imaginable, software developers!
Looking past that, it touches upon truths most of us realize about communication in our teens; that statements of fact often are very effective ways to lie and manipulate.
There is a degree of over-simplification here. Marshall interprets a "violent" statement like "You're so insensitive!" as a factual assertion, when the vast majority of the population would understand this to be a subjective expression. In …
Multiple people I respected recommend this book, so I thought I'd look at it. The title is a clever sales pitch, as it implies that our normal style of communication is violent, and you wouldn't want to be violent, would you?
Like most American non-fiction books, it tries to oversell itself. If you believe the author, he's not only able to solve gang violence and the Israel-Palestine conflict, but has successfully made peace with the most odious, argumentative group imaginable, software developers!
Looking past that, it touches upon truths most of us realize about communication in our teens; that statements of fact often are very effective ways to lie and manipulate.
There is a degree of over-simplification here. Marshall interprets a "violent" statement like "You're so insensitive!" as a factual assertion, when the vast majority of the population would understand this to be a subjective expression. In practice there's no miscommunication.
The non-violent version might be "The way you act around me makes me feel like you're not responsive to my needs ..." (or something even longer), in a style that brings to mind Mr. Spock and Sheldon Cooper, not creative, emotionally sensitive people.
But we teach young children to grammatically deconstruct sentences at an age when they're perfectly capable of forming them without ever learning what a verb is. To me, it makes at least as much sense to teach children to emotionally deconstruct an argument, and find the subjective statements embedded in it. It might make them more resilient towards manipulations by parents, teachers, partners and politicians.
