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Yeah, I strongly recommend going to a workshop, someone I practice together with has told me about NVC New York: https://www.nycnvc.org/
She went there and she seemed pretty good at it.
If you tell them that you are low on money then they might be willing to either offer you a discount or to let you do the workshop for free, I don't remember which one it was.
In terms of practice, I tend to take it easy because there are so many things to master.
One of the easier things to get better at is to stop making things worse, by applying punitive measures in cases where it's counter-productive.
One of the way harder (for me) things is to actually go through the entire observation-feelings-needs-request chain in a conflict, because I find it that during a conflict, I need empathy so my capacity for empathy towards others is limited, so the first step is to give yourself empathy. Don't expect initial good results doing this, the book doesn't warn you how hard it is, you could practice just the first step (observations), and also practice things in your own mind, without sharing them - Marshall Rosenberg says that the most important part of the process is not the words that you use, even if you do all of it silently it would still work well, but if you do it out loud and do it wrong then people might be pissed off at you, it has happened to me sometimes. I've also had good results, and it's unreliable. So this takes a lot of practice.
Another great thing to practice is empathic listening.
I find it that coming up with the magical keywords for the correct emotions and needs is not as powerful as we might believe; instead, the powerful part comes when you are fully listening and you are connecting with the other person's feelings and needs.
Rereading parts of the book is also worth it. Also watching their workshop videos on Youtube is both inspirational and instrumental.
Good luck! Workshops are expected to be totally worth it!
What the creator of NVC means by "violence" isn't just physical violence, and it can apply to any behaviour. Funnily enough there's even a chapter about when to use physical force if it's necessary - it says: only preventative force; never punitive.
So what it does mean is anything that is for punishing others. The idea of the framework is that we can do better than that, and reach harmony without having to do an action that is mildly harmful to yourself and (typically) much more harmful to others, by getting them to care for your needs instead of using leverage to incentivize them to do that if they're an entirely self-interested rational agent. The author doesn't talk about game theory, those are parallels that I'm drawing to make it clearer to people reading Lesswrong, and the reason author is disagreeing with game theory is that game theory makes the core assumption that every participant doesn't care whatsoever about every other participant, whereas the author of NVC says that if your needs are heard then you are much more likely to hear other people's needs.
It's possible that sometimes it means alienating language, for example if we call someone a word - even a compliment - thus making the generalization about them, instead of being connected to our observations about them - such generalizations kinda suck, they're too inaccurate, and our brains do a really good job automatically without us doing them explicitly. Once I told someone, "you're a great showman", and then it felt weird, and I don't think he liked hearing it either. What he would have liked hearing more was my observation that when he was presenting this writer's meetup (I wish I could remember which specific moments of that), I could hear the people laugh and when I talked with people, I did not feel tense and people seemed easy-going because of this established context in my opinion, so I enjoyed myself at the event... okay that's not that close to my original observations, but it's still a lot more information and now he'll know better what he did right. There's no such thing as being a great showman anyway, there are many micro-skills.
I started getting into NVC about a year ago and at this point I've read the book, watched about 10 hours of workshop videos, and have tried to apply it in many real-life situations, though I feel that it takes a lot more practice than that - it is hard.
I appreciate that you are emphasizing on observations, because IME it is one of the components of NVC which can work well on its own, whereas a lot of its other lessons only work well together, e.g. if you were to completely cease using any "punitive force", such as being upset as a punishment for them not keeping their word, then you also need to make your feelings and needs clear to them, which is very difficult to do, especially when you first need to infer theirs - otherwise they might not be aware that they even did anything wrong, if you avoid punishment but don't communicate anything. (Although I've done this, and people who are my friend or my partner, aren't abusing the lack of punishment and I usually can't stop them from feeling guilty for what they've done because I believe that guilt is a very ineffective and painful way to bring about change. So this particular concept did work well on its own; but most other techniques don't. I guess I picked a non-ideal example, but you get the point.)
I've decided to invest a lot more time in it in the future because I believe there is a lot of promise in the framework.
I hope you have another one next year or in 2024 if this one is successful, I wanted to apply but the dates are not good for me.
That was really good, I'm looking forward to the next one :)
The linked study for processed meat is a dead link, but it's on archive.org or alternatively this is a working link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20479151/
There is a problem with it, though. This is from the abstract:
> Conversely, processed meat intake was associated with 42% higher risk of CHD (n=5; relative risk per 50-g serving per day=1.42; 95% confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.89; P=0.04)
P=0.04 is way too high and my subjective probability for it replicating is somewhere below 50%.