A difficult message to hear is an opportunity to enrich someone's life.

When you are in a jackal environment, never give them the power to submit or rebel. We want to teach this to children very early: Never lose track that you are always free to choose. Don't allow institutions to determine what you do.

Life-Enriching Education: an education that prepares children to learn throughout their lives, relate well to others, and themselves, be creative, flexible, and venturesome, and have empathy not only for their immediate kin but for all of humankind.

Natural Giving: Anything we do in life which is not out of that energy, we pay for and everybody else pays for. Anything we do to avoid punishment, everybody pays for. Everything we do for a reward, everybody pays for. Everything we do to make people like us, everybody pays for. Everything we do out of guilt, shame, duty, or obligation, everybody pays for.

NVC is a reminder; to focus our attention where we are most likely to get our needs met.

To practice NVC, it's critical for me to be able to slow down, take my time, to come from an energy I choose, the one I believe that we were meant to come from, not the one I was programmed into.

You're going to lose it when you follow the world "feel" with the words "because I think". Any time you are thinking, your chance of getting what you need is greatly decreased, especially when you follow the word "think" with the word "you". I predict you won't only not get heard, but I predict a defensive aggressive reaction.