What's in a name? (I'm not a violent person!)

I attended a 2-day workshop by NVC founder, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, in Santa Barbara, CA in 2005. I was struck by something he said -- that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't call the process he pioneered, "Nonviolent Communication."

Immediately I recalled dozens of people who had said to me -- upon hearing me tell them about NVC -- something like, "I'm not a violent person, so that's not for me."

In the 1960's, when Dr. Rosenberg was first developing what became NVC, the term, "nonviolent" was more in people's consciousness due to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work in civil rights, and not long prior was Mohandas Ghandi's nonviolent protests in India. My guess is that many people understood the term, "nonviolent" to mean a form of active, powerful social change, whether they agreed with the principles of King or Gandhi.

In the years since, my guess is that the term, "nonviolent" has lost its luster, and people take it more for the literal meaning of, "lacking physical violence" rather than the general sense we see it in NVC, as any kind of thinking or communication that alienates us from the life in ourselves or others.

In any event, Dr. Rosenberg said that if he had to do it all over again, he would have named the process, "Compassionate Communication," or, "Life-Enriching Communication." (see his book title by a similar name). I like both of these terms, and have frequently made use of the former in my own NVC trainings.

But even though Compassionate Communication seems to be an improvement over Nonviolent Communication, it still doesn't fully convey the power of this process to radically transform our lives and the society we live in. While people generally like the idea of compassion, many still seem to associate it with weakness, passivity, or ineffectiveness.

In the past 24 hours, I have come across two new names for NVC, one by Steve Meyerhardt of Columbia, MO, who attended an NVC retreat in Santa Cruz, CA, and learned the term, "Conscious Communication." Boy, I sure like that one!

And I was visiting the website of NVC Certified Trainer Gregg Kendrick from Charlottesville, VA and he refers to NVC in his trainings with businesses and organizations as, "Connecting Communication." I can see how that term would be less "loaded" for business cultures.

I'm going to "try on" these new names for NVC, but at the moment, I am most excited about, "Conscious Communication" -- thank you, Steve!