Nonviolent Communication: Interview with Radio Focus

Nonviolent communication creates better and better relationships between people. It can be used on a personal level, but also for groups of people. This is what one of our founders, Toni Lyubenova, said in the program “The Man in Focus” on Radio Focus.

Nonviolent communication is a way of life in which we choose whether to connect with the person across from us, or reject them and use the way of communication we already know. A lot of conflict comes from people not realizing that our feelings are like a weathervane to our needs, she explained.

“By knowing our emotions, we know ourselves. Everyone has needs and they are universal. Emotions exist to help us understand them and yet satisfy them in one way or another. Nonviolent communication speaks about our needs being universal and our feelings being quite similar, but the strategies we use to meet our needs can be very different. Conflicts arise at the level of strategies – our strategy may conflict with the other person’s strategy to get our needs met. But the moment we understand what the other person feels, what they need, then our conversation is much easier,” explained Toni Lyubenova.

The actions we take to satisfy a given need are called strategies in nonviolent communication. “One such strategy might be ‘I feel hurt because I need to be understood, therefore I go as far as physically confronting someone because that’s the only way for me that I know,'” she explained.

It is very important to translate what we learn about nonviolent communication into the groups we work with – our family, our colleagues, at a higher social level. “I think it’s possible to resolve conflicts not in the traditional way that we’re used to, but maybe it’s a matter of practice and practically oriented education, not so much theoretically. I think that nonviolent communication works for everyone, it’s just a bit harder with some people,” added Toni Lyubenova.

This conversation was related to one of the first collaboration events of Creatosphere and was the result of the Bulgarian team’s local action from the Erasmus+ training course “Building Bridges” organised by NVC Brno – namely the workshop “EmotiON”, related to nonviolent communication and theater, which took place at the Aleko Konstantinov Community Center in Sofia, Oborishte district, on 02.03 from 16 to 18.30.

You can also read the article on Radio Focus in Bulgarian here.