Paying Compliments - The NVC Way

My last blog post was about compliments. What are they? Why do we give them?

And today I was reading Marshall Rosenberg’s book - Nonviolent Communication (NVC) - which dedicates an entire chapter for the subject.

Expressing appreciation is the name of the game. The book gives a prescription of how to give compliments as a way to celebrate, as opposed to being a tool of manipulating (which in my last blog post I referred to as “taming”).

In his book Dr Rosenberg goes even further by saying that compliments are actually a form of judgement. Positive judgement, yes – it is still a form of judgement.

And the advice of giving compliments is simple.

First, only give compliments from the intention of appreciating and celebrating – not as a mean of manipulating someone to repeat a sought after behaviour or for retaining a certain characteristic.

The celebration can be expressed simply by saying THANK YOU.

However if you wish to be more specific – what you are saying thank you for – then you might want to structure your compliment in a way that will convey truthfully what you are thanking for.

For this, make sure you are stating: the specific actions that triggered a positive feeling within you; name those feelings (and please distinguish between feelings and thoughts!) and also remember to explain which needs have been fulfilled.

Distinguishing between thoughts and feelings can sometime be obvious – and some other times they might be a bit misleading. Due to the way our language is structured or due to the way we are “habitualised” to think, we sometime confuse the two.

As an example I was planning to use the scene where children are being complimented for sharing; that example was used on the Alfie Cohen video from my last post (“Good sharing, I really liked the way you let Patty play with your toy too.”)

I had a really hard time trying to rephrase this into an NVC format of expressing appreciation; probably due to the fact that it’s hard for me to believe a scenario where someone would truly be amazed at a simple act of sharing… Well… 

I came up with something along these lines:

“Seeing you sharing that toy with Patty makes me feel so joyful right now – I had a hard day at the office today and seeing this beautiful act of kindness reminded me that love is all around me!”

Hmmmmmm.

Well that goes to show that I probably have a lot to learn about expressing appreciation, right?

I might just stick to my standard THANK YOU!

Comments

[Grant Campbell]

NVC is brilliant. Its techniques should be taught in schools.
Great article Maya!

[karen]

I loved your attempt at NVC reframe. I have gradually added this type of communication into my relationship with my niece and nephews...and they are really thriving on it now after we all got over the early awkwardness about speaking to each other a little differently. It is more in depth, it really deepens the emotional connection between people. Thanks for your blog, it inspires me to see people being open to improving the quality of communication on the planet.