NVC & Understanding Power

A 6-hour experiential training for navigating difference, tension and power with greater awareness, choice and self-connection.

NVC offers powerful practices for staying connected to ourselves and others when conversations become difficult. But what happens when the people in a conversation do not have equal power? When hierarchy, identity, privilege, exclusion, institutional authority or access to resources shape what can be said, heard or decided?

Power affects communication — and communication can also reproduce or transform power. 

Here are the aims of the day

• To strengthen the foundations of your NVC  practice
• To increase understanding of power and how it impacts communication and choice
• To remain grounded and self connected when navigating tension and difference.

We will:

• Create a strong container
• Create shared reality around understanding power, using various tools and frameworks
  • Steven Lukes - 3 dimensions of power
  • Miki Kashtan's Scarcity, Separation, Powerlessness (and their antidotes) framing
  • Pathways to Liberation matrix
• increase somatic self-empathy
• Resource ourselves and explore options for challenging conversations
• Practice giving and receiving feedback within different power dynamics
• Body centred, Self-Empathy and Roleplays for exploring situations in which power  plays out

All this with a compassionate lens!

The session will involve reflection, discussion, practice and role play.

You can watch a short video about this session here.

Here is a testimonial from a participant

I’ve done other workshops addressing equality, diversity, inclusion, racism and privilege, but what made this one stand out – and, I think, made it effective – was regularly returning to our somatic and emotional responses and seeing these as important sources of information. I have sometimes felt frozen and afraid of ‘getting it wrong’ when approaching privilege from a cerebral place and the focus on my body helped me to begin to understand a different way of doing this work. (November 2023)