NVC Competencies

You will deepen your capacity for the following:

  • Presence: Being attentive to what is happening right now.  Not lost in thinking, emotional reactions, etc.

  • Feelings awareness: Ability to identify and experience our physical sensations and emotions.

  • Self-acceptance: Accepting oneself with unconditional caring.

  • Needs consciousness: Awareness of (and the willingness to honour) needs, the essential universal elemental qualities of life (like sustenance, love and meaning).

  • Empathy: Being present with another's experience, with unconditional acceptance of the person.

  • Openness to feedback: Receiving other's perspective about our actions with equanimity and centeredness.

  • Gratitude: “Finding the value in, appreciating, and enjoying what is.”

  • Cultivating vitality: Tuning in to oneself to support balanced self-care; cultivating the energy to serve life.

  • Reconnecting to self and recovering from reactivity Reactivity is internal resistance to what is: Recovery is letting go of that resistance.  Re-connecting to self is being with one's own experience with presence and compassion.

  • Dissolving enemy images: Transcending one's perceptions that another deserves to be punished or harmed.

  • Discernment: Clarity, insight, and wisdom in making life-serving distinctions and choices; recognising one has choice.

    Reference: Pathways to Liberation Self-assessment
    (Copyright © 2011 Jacob Gotwals, Jack Lehman, Jim Manske, and Jori Manske)

Key distinctions

You will deepen your understanding of the following:

  • Self-empathy vs. acting out, repressing, or wallowing in feelings

  • Stimulus vs. cause

  • Appreciation vs. approval, compliments or praise

  • Empathic sensing vs. intellectual guessing

  • Feeling vs. feeling mixed with thoughts

  • Life-connected vs. life-alienated
    Reference: CNVC.org Certification Preparation Packet (CPP)

NVC processes

You will practise and deepen your understanding of the following:

  • Self-empathy when (a) stimulus is external and (b) stimulus is internal

  • Self-empathy for inner conflict

  • Experiencing, expressing and receiving gratitude and appreciation

    Reference: CNVC.org Certification Preparation Packet (CPP)