 Hi, I'm Isaac. I'm here to talk about nonviolent communication. Since a lot of you might not know who I am or what I'm doing here, I figured a really brief intro would be useful. Those of you who do know me probably know me from Node and NPM. I've been working in the software business since about 2002, but it was technology that got me interested at first, but I've come to realize over time that all of the really interesting hard problems in technology are really problems of social dynamics. Content warning for this talk, there are some pictures of jackals getting a little toothy. Nothing gory, but if you have a history with dogs, it could be rough. I'm also going to be talking about handling feelings and sharing some communication tools that I found useful. But since any language can be pretty badly misused, especially when we are talking about feelings, the term NVC, just that term can be triggering for some people who have gone through some types of emotional manipulation or abuse. I'm not going to delve into that stuff. I don't actually have time to go into every possible failure mode, and there's always this really fine line between sharing a communication technique between, well, I don't want to inadvertently say anything that's kind of harmful, so I'm going to scale it all the way back until it's also not useful. My goal is to be walking that line, and we'll see how I do. So software is a fundamentally social activity. It's really always been that way, but I still sometimes hear people talk about being, I'm only about the code and not about the people. I'm not going to belabor this point too much. It's been discussed elsewhere a lot. The Abelson quote there is a pretty good way to capture it. It was also captured nicely by Melvin Conway, who said that when a group of people design a system, the interfaces of that system will tend to mirror the communication structures of the organization. Actually, he put it stronger. He said it's constrained, that it must reflect the communication structures of the organization. And so anytime we're doing software development, what we're really engaging in is this sort of cooperative group thinking activity. And a corollary of this principle I've found is that if we improve our communication structures, then we'll end up creating systems that are more thoughtfully designed, that are more empathic. Just internally as well as of the user and so on. And so speaking of cooperative thinking among primates, in 1992, there was a primatologist named Robin Dunbar. And he noted that there was a correlation between primate neocortex size and the size of their social groups. And when you extrapolate this out to humans, it predicts a maximum effective human group size of about 150 members. And this 150 number shows up a lot in human history, farming village sizes, tribe sizes, hunting troops, military companies, and so on. But we have one piece of technology that really sets us apart from all other primates, and that's that we have developed this thing called language a couple hundred thousand years ago. So language really complicates our socialization behavior a lot. Instead of always relying on face-to-face communication, we use these words, these symbolic tokens to communicate in a way that isn't symmetrical or synchronous. But this comes at the cost of a much lower bandwidth connection. We spent a few hundred thousand years evolving to use language or evolving in the presence of language, I guess is a more accurate way to put it. But we spent many millions of years evolving all of the machinery to deal with all that other stuff, all the tone and body language and so on. So when we're faced with a really low bandwidth connection of text, we just sort of invent whatever context makes sense, and we interact with that. And it might be very different than what the other person is actually intending. For example, there's this tweet from Jacob Groundwater. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about right now, but you totally put it in context and you think that he's making a point for me. And that's just so meta, it really tickles me. So when your project is small, you have much less than 150 mental models to maintain. And so it's pretty easy for everybody to know everyone. And for the most part, we mostly behave. However, as the project grows, this inadvertently or inevitably sort of falls apart, we're just not cognitively capable of maintaining mental models for that many people. It's actually probably a lot less than 150 when we're also thinking through how the different software bits are all interacting with one another. And so the nature of cognitive limits is that when we hit them, we don't notice we're hitting them because the first thing that goes is the self-awareness to notice what it is we're noticing. So there are some pretty judgmental open source stereotype personas that we tend to lump people into. You probably know all these people. You've probably been most of them at some point. But while I'm being an architecture astronaut, I don't see it like I'm being an architecture astronaut. No, no, I'm just being careful. I'm just trying not to create a disaster. One of the worst of these is actually the positive judgment. We tend to think of bad judgments as being negative, thinking you're bad. But the positive judgment of good guy is one of the most pernicious because it makes it a lot harder to identify abusive behavior when we have cast the perpetrator in this sort of good guy mold. If we want to create software that's better and communities that are less harmful, we really need to steer away from harmful interactions and also try to reduce the harm that gets caused by inevitable interpersonal conflicts. And so to do that, we need to let our communication get at the underlying truth past all of these generalizations and shorthands. And it has to work even in spite of the fact. It has to be something that we can practice and systematize and turn into muscle memory so that it works when we are hitting our limits of our cognition. How many of you have heard of NVC before this talk? Cool. How many of you would say that you actively try to practice it or you have actually sort of studied it and looked into it a lot? Okay, so fewer but still a bunch. I want to get into a little bit of NVC's nuts and bolts and talk about really why it's useful in handling these challenges. And in my own experience, the biggest value is that it can help us move past those stereotypes and give us tools to not take other people's sort of spiky communications quite so personally. So this book here, Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life, is sort of like the foundational text of NVC as it were. I do recommend reading it, but if this doesn't agree with you, that's totally fine. There's a lot of different approaches and a lot of different people who have written about the subject and different things will appeal differently to different people. Another book that I've found really helpful recently that digs into the NVC framework is called Choosing Peace by Ike Lassiter and John Kinian. I'm going to put my slides online and there will be links to these things, so you don't have to scribble down the notes or go by them right now. There's a ton of stuff written on the subject though and a lot of different approaches. So what I want you to take away from the suggestion is just that there's way more to learn than I can possibly teach you in 40 minutes, especially in kind of a lecture format. So NVC is a framework. It was, like I said, it was developed by Marshall Rosenberg and it has a pretty large community of people who use it in the context, primarily of doing mental health therapy or conflict mediation, business, negotiation, that kind of stuff. You can almost sort of think of it like a web framework or a set of design patterns, but it's less prescriptive about what you say than it is about how you think. So in his work as a therapist and a conflict mediator, Rosenberg identified some subtleties in how we use language that affect our thinking and our ability to connect empathically with another person. So certain language, basically certain language patterns tend to pull us apart and others tend to kind of allow us to come together and connect. Humans are, we are just intrinsically motivated to connect with other humans around us. This is a very, very common theme for almost all people. We want to be heard and understood. We want to hear and understand the people around us. We need this so desperately that it will actually sometimes trump other, like even biological needs, right? And more often than not, unfortunately our cognition and our language tend to kind of get in the way of that and prevent that from happening. When I say use language, when I'm referring to language, I'm really referring to three different things, three different parts. So there's talking, there's listening, and then there's also thinking, which is the conversation, the talking and listening we do internally with ourselves. So there's no, there's no magic words that you can say to, that you can use in your talking that will automatically make someone do what you say or certainly you shouldn't try to like push someone to open up more than they're willing to. That's, so this isn't, NBC isn't like a technique to become some kind of magic svangali, that's, that would actually just be another form of violence. We, it's sort of the goal is to change how we receive and process information from other people as well, because connection isn't one way and it can't be forced. So there's no real objective here except to kind of get out of the way and, and allow a greater understanding and a deeper connection. And I use the word allow very deliberately because you can't really like force it to happen, you can't make it happen. So the nonviolent part just means that it's a, it's a set of tools to avoid the ways that language can be used to harm one another, either intentionally or unintentionally. And when we, when we opt out of that harmful activity, we can start to kind of respond rather than react and things can, can grow in a healthy direction. There's a metaphor that Rosenberg used a lot to talk about this, the jackal and the giraffe. I want to, I want to talk about that a little bit because it's a really useful metaphor. This is, this is him with, with his hand puppets. You should look him up on YouTube. It's, it's, it's really great stuff. It's, it's kind of adorable and it's really sad that he's, he passed away this year. So the giraffe is, is very tall, keeps a very long view of everything. They see, they see predators coming from a very long distance. They can move at this really relaxed pace. They have the largest heart of any land mammal, which sort of symbolizes communicating with empathy. By contrast, the jackal has these big ears. They, they live in a very violent world. It's filled with competition. The jackal keeps really low to the ground. It's always on the lookout for threats and hunting opportunities. And this is the, the scary picture. Sorry. They, they have to be violent to defend what's theirs. Anything that isn't definitely a friend is probably an enemy. This is, this is two jackals fighting over the carcass of an elephant. An elephant. Like, look at how big these dogs are. Like they can't eat that whole thing ever. But still, they're just in this mode of scarcity. Like, no, no, no, this is mine. So the, the interesting thing about this too is that the jackal has all the same needs for companionship that, and connection that the giraffe has. It's not a villain, but they symbolize in this metaphor, a mindset that's focused on violence and scarcity. One thing that's really, really interesting about giraffes is that they feed on the acacia tree, which is covered in these big gnarly thorns. And what they do is they, they actually just, they have these really long tongues and they just strip the whole branch and then sort of separate out the thorns into the side of their cheek while they're chewing on the leaves. And over time, those thorns get softened until the giraffe can safely chew and swallow them. So where the jackal mindset is to respond to threat, a threat with violence, right, kind of in kind. The giraffe mindset is more to kind of take these spiky bits and turn them into something useful. Now the, the giraffe style language is made up of these four contrasting elements, observations versus evaluations or judgments, feelings versus thoughts, needs versus strategies and requests versus demands. This is sometimes referred to as OFNR for observations, feelings, needs, requests. I'll talk about each of these in a little bit more depth. We, just one warning though, before I do, we nerds love replacing social conventions with weird rules to paraphrase the wise and funny Judge John Hodgman. NBC is not a set of rules that you should go, use to go around tone policing everybody in your life. It's, thank you. It's, it's a framework for making better sense of what we hear from other people and, and for making our own speech less divisive and harmful so we can get out of the way and let the connection happen. And it's also a way for us to direct our internal self talk in a way that sort of keeps the fire alive within us and keeps us from, from withering. So with that in mind, observations are, are objective things that you see in the world. They are things that you can perceive with your senses. Stuff that would be captured on a video like that doesn't require any inference or evaluation. By contrast, evaluations are statements that are sort of phrased like, like observations. They sort of look like an observation, but it includes some additional inference or judgment. And regardless of whether that's true or not, it's another layer of abstraction. So there's, there's nothing that's really wrong with evaluations, but they're, they're a little bit more complicated. Now, just to take this example here, if you are complaining about my choice in clothes today, if you said, oh, Isaac's trying to attract attention with that fancy shirt, it's, it's a lot harder for me to hear that, right? Because, because that's an inference about my motives. And, you know, even fancy here is an evaluation. I could, you know, when you say what's up with the fancy shirt, I could be like, well, there's literally nothing on this shirt. What's fancy about it? But anybody with color sensitive vision can look at me and understand that I'm wearing a red shirt. This is not something that we even needed to debate. Feelings are a lot like observations, but they're observations of what's going on inside of us. So they're, they're not loosely held judgments or tentative conjectures. A feeling isn't something that somebody can criticize or take away from you. If I said I feel hungry, any reasonable person is probably going to, you know, no reasonable person is going to say, no, you don't feel hungry. You're lying, you, you don't know what you're, you're hungry. And we, we learn this as a chill, as children and then sort of subconsciously the words I feel become this, this sort of barrier against criticism. So if I want to express a thought or a judgment, I'm not sure how it's going to land with you. I put, I feel in front of it. So the other person won't attack me and I'll say, Hey, that's just how I feel, you know. Um, the problem is that this is a jackal move, because in the, in the attempt to become less vulnerable, we actually, we put up that armor and that prevents the connection from happening. Another sort of faux feeling is when we sneak in a statement of what somebody did to make us feel this way. Um, it, you know, a good example is I feel insulted. Like insulted isn't really a feeling. And maybe you weren't, maybe you don't think you were insulting me. And I, I might feel lots of ways if somebody came up here and insulted me, I would probably mostly be surprised because that's an unusual thing to do while someone's giving a talk at a conference. Um, you know, see, I guess maybe I shouldn't be surprised here. I don't know. Uh, I didn't, I didn't put amused in this list in my notes here. So that's, I am actually kind of surprised. Um, but you might feel, you know, somebody insults you, you might feel angry or ashamed or confused and, and insulted doesn't really capture that. So, uh, moving on needs are the things that everybody everywhere needs. Uh, there are things like order, teamwork, space, food, shelter. Um, and what's important is that they're not specific attempts to meet those needs. Uh, one of, one of the hardest challenges in NBC thinking, at least for me, is, is separating out strategies versus needs. So a lot of times when we talk about needs, we sort of stop at the strategy. We say things like, I need this job. And maybe what you really need is, is financial security so that you can feed in clothing. How's yourself yourself? But if you got a better job or if some rich old relative died and lived you millions of dollars, like maybe you wouldn't need that job anymore. Um, also you might need the job for completely different reasons. Maybe a rich old relative already did leave you millions of bucks, but you just really like what you're learning here or you love being a part of the team. So there, there are needs that you might meet with that strategy that are completely apart from what somebody else might infer. So that's why it's important because understanding the need behind a strategy is a very powerful way to understand what's going on with somebody else or with ourselves. The last step in the OFNR pattern is to make a request and a request in NBC lingo is asking somebody to do some specific positive action, something with a verb, something that they do. If a person says no to a request, that's okay. That tells you something about their needs. So the difference. So the goal is to figure out what they're willing to do and what they're happy doing and what will move us both towards a place of greater understanding and greater connection. The key difference between a request and a demand is that a demand is not optional. If the person says no, there are some negative consequences. As a result, making a demand doesn't teach you anything about their needs because they might do it just because they don't want the negative consequences. They don't actually like it. So it kind of pushes out rather than drawing in. Now there are completely valid reasons and situations in which you will make a demand and it's totally like absolutely what you need to do. There are sometimes when you have to give somebody orders or set a boundary, there are situations when you have to enforce something maybe even physically or perhaps violently unfortunately. A great example, if your kid is about to run into traffic, it's not the time to sit down and have a patient conversation about their need for freedom and expression and your request that they please not get murdered by a car. Like no, you just grab whatever you can grab like arm, leg, ear, hair, whatever and you hold them and you make sure you make a demand that they stay out of traffic because they're your kid and it's their life. You know, the code of conduct at this conference is also a demand. If you don't follow it, if you don't abide by it, you're out. And maybe that's the only reason somebody follows it and maybe sometimes that's okay. So it's important to understand the difference though. Even if a demand is absolutely warranted, it's important to understand that you're not actually building a connection in that case. You're sort of cutting that conversation off. So with all this framework in mind, let's talk about software a little bit. It's a very social activity, like I said, an open source in particular is even more social because our users are not limited to our team or the team next door at the same company. The code is out there. Other people can send us new ideas, new bug reports. They can come to rely on our free software so much that they get really anxious and frustrated when it doesn't work the way that they want it to. And then they bring a lot of that anxiety and frustration to kind of to our doorstep to deal with. And there's a lot of ways that it can fail. My favorite is of all of these is when a user makes a request that just makes no sense whatsoever. I wonder sometimes if people working in other fields have this. If you make SOCs, if you work at a SOC company, do you ever have somebody call it the tech support line and they're like, how do you make the SOCs stretchier? You're like, well gee, I don't know. We have a sports SOC line that's like Lycra or whatever. I guess that's a little bit stretchier than a normal one. No, no, no, no. I tried that. It's way too small. Maybe what's your biggest size of that one? Well, we have this, you know, the men's triple extra large is our biggest size. And they're like, you know, and you go back and forth and they're just not happy. And then in your all the time wondering like, what are you stretching this sock around? And all the while you get to the end and you're like, you realize that they're trying to stretch it around a table to use it as a tablecloth. And eventually they're like, yeah, whatever, never mind. I'll just cut up a bunch of socks and sew them together. Thanks for making a bunch of work for me, click. Right? Like, this is actually what we deal with in open source. I had people use stuff that I wrote for stuff that just makes no sense. I'm like, go use the other thing. It's better. No, no, I'm just going to have to code around it. You know, and so this is the X, Y problem. You've identified problem X and you're trying Y and now you ask for questions about Y without telling me what X is. The other sort of failure mode that follows on from that is that maintainers come to expect this. So they respond to perfectly reasonable requests with, you know, these kind of jerkwater responses like, oh, you should be using Erlang or Ember or whatever. It's like, I just asked about about jquery.ajax. I don't even know what Erlang is. So another thing is if you have a bunch of people working on a project, it gets even more complicated. They might be working for a competitor of yours. They might be in college and only able to spend, you know, an hour here or there. They might not really be interested in the problems that aren't fun for them. Obviously, understanding motivations is a really important part of leadership at all levels, but it's even trickier and open source. You can really easily ruin a relationship and by failing to give somebody the right amount of credit or falling through with things that don't seem like very consequential responsibilities to you. Some of you who are involved with Node a few years ago may remember PronounGate. What you might not realize is that, like, I actually totally dropped the ball as a leader of the project in that case long before that ever happened. I didn't even realize I'd done it. Nobody came out of that whole story bathed in glory, to say the least. But because I didn't understand the needs of the people on my team, it sort of ended up blowing up into this catastrophe that turned a whole bunch of people away from Node. So it had some actual long-term lasting harm. And I'm still not really on very good terms with the other person involved in that. If you don't understand the needs of the people around you, it is not going to go good, just in general. So what really open source kind of happens in this crowd of jackals, people operating way past their Dunbar limit, falling back on stereotypes constantly. And you see people at your worst, because you see them when they're frustrated about computers, which are like the most frustrating thing that humans have ever invented. And that's leaving aside the engagement with like really dedicated trolls who are doing, who are just kind of like bugging you for entertainment reasons. Like, you know, remember before when I said about valid uses of demands, banning somebody who can't respect the social contracts of a community is absolutely a perfectly reasonable demand. You don't have to make friends with every troll. That is, I don't love that term troll, but you know, you don't have to make friends with every person who's behaving badly. But even in its best possible case, maintaining a popular open source library is a very emotional sort of labor. And if you really care about the project and the people in it, and if it's successful, you find yourself in a position where you are almost immediately overwhelmed. So I asked on Twitter for some examples of people being nice or being jerks in open source. And what I found was really interesting. In the in the good examples, mostly what people seem to connect to wasn't really like effective or compassionate communication. But a lot of there was a lot of like links to underdog defending and drawing firm boundaries against trolling. And those are all really, really good and important things to do. But what I found is it's really hard to find examples of good NBC in practice. When at least without, you know, getting into private conversations that are that are inappropriate to share with a broader audience. But when communication really works, it usually doesn't look like anything special. It looks like everything just kind of going smoothly. And also, I think the whole nice versus jerk request of mine. Looking back, I realized that's an extremely judgmental way of framing it. And I think it primed a lot of people to think about conflict. So anyway, I did get one one link to a classic open source jerk quad. I don't know if you can really read this, but this is a great example of what not to do. So this person scribby has a has a question about how require works in node and an idea of how they think it should be. And kind of explain their position pretty well, I think. And then the maintainers just like, no. And the problem here isn't the problem here isn't the answer I gave per se, like we actually can't change that. Like what they were requesting was something that can never happen. But it's all the things that weren't said there. There was really no appreciation of the needs that this user was expressing or the work that they'd already done to try and figure out a way around it. And so it's tempting to say be nice. Right. In that thread with scribby, I was actually pretty friendly. Like I made kind of a joke. You know, it was supposed to be a joke. And in hindsight, it feels kind of like just a snarky brush off. But you know, being nice is almost never enough. I'm I'm sure you're probably all aware of, you know, had this experience in the past where you were totally friendly, totally polite, totally respectful, and somebody reacts like you just like flipped a booger at him or something. And I think the reason the reason really is a frustrated jackal doesn't want you just to be nice to them. They want to they want you to understand their needs. They want you to help them get their problem fixed. And even if they're even if their problem is unfixable, they at least want to be understood. And so unless they're unless their problem is politeness, being polite isn't going to solve it. So people tend to people actually will believe that you care about their needs when they see you do the work to figure out what those needs are. This is kind of the hack of NVC. If you actually practice this, it works because people see that you're working at it. And the vast majority of people when they see you putting in an effort, they try to match that effort. Not everybody, but a lot. Another good, good result of this, a focusing on needs is that it helps you kind of turn a lot of hostility into problems to be solved. That's kind of the metaphor of the giraffe and the thorns. We're so eager for connection. However, that, you know, we're like these like connection sponges out there trying to connect to anything we can emotionally that we tend to internalize the judgments of other people and then get really harmed by that. And it's usually not about you personally. So a really important part of this whole thing is to turn that giraffe mindset inward and to take care of your own needs and your own heart and make sure that you can sort of keep that fire alive, keep sort of feeling like I'm good, I'm connected, I'm feeling engaged here. When we're in a really balanced state, when our needs are being met, it's a lot easier to approach things in ways that don't add to the harm. So process, putting this all together. The practice of NBC is about iterating towards empathy and understanding, both in specific conversations, as well as overall. Over time, by continually practicing it, we can increase empathy just like any other skill, just like strengthening a muscle by picking up weights. However, if you try to set your goal as like jumping all the way to the end, you know, so that you can just be amazing at this skill like you walk out of this talk like, yeah, now I know it, I'm going to be good at this. You know, in the next conversation you have with somebody in a conflict, you're going to just like, just like nail it, see exactly what's going on with them and get it. Sorry, it's not going to work out that way. It's actually difficult. It's kind of frustrating if you set your sites as something that is so unattainable. The good news is that even though it is pretty much impossible to be perfect at any of these things, people will tend to respond positively to even small improvements. Because like I said, we're like, we humans are like connection machines. We want it to happen. But we kind of don't know how and we get in our own ways a lot and we sort of lash out and try to do harm in order to defend ourselves. But the minute that you see somebody sort of responding empathically, it tends to take everything down a notch. And so there is kind of a constant reinforcement of small victories and that does feel really good. And that's kind of helped me continue being motivated to keep up with this practice. Important thing to keep in mind that Jackal is not the enemy. There are these sort of non-OFNR language techniques, evaluations and thoughts and strategies and demands. These are all really valid and important parts of the communication dance. Like sometimes you actually have to kind of get whatever's in your head out before you can sort of piece through it and figure out, oh, OK, I see what the underlying need is. But the reason to kind of keep these dichotomies in mind, these separations in mind, is that each of them hides an underlying need. And so the goal is to take what somebody gives you and get at those underlying needs. So if somebody spits thorns at you, kind of the giraffe style response is to make what you can with that and then try to try to get closer to a connection. So like I said, the practice is about getting in touch with our own needs and the person we're talking to, not like a club that you use to browbeat everybody into talking better. And that goal, the long term goal is understanding and connection, both with ourselves and with others. So we really kind of need to keep that as like the star, the motivating principle that we keep moving towards and continually reevaluate if we're getting closer to that goal or further away from it. So this isn't about any getting anybody to stop being jackal-ish in their communication. It's about how to kind of move past that defensive mindset ourselves so that we can connect with those needs and figure out what's really going on and take care of ourselves along the way. It can help a lot, like a real lot, to pair up with somebody else. If you decide to, you know, take some of my advice, I'll give you some homework later, but if you decide to try and implement some of these things in your own life and especially in your open source projects, I highly recommend finding somebody else who you can lean on for support in the process. Preferably somebody else who's kind of also trying to improve in their own way so you can bolster one another and bounce ideas off each other. It doesn't have to be an old man in a kimono distributing swords by firelight in some random cave. Probably this sword is not going to help you be less violent anyway, so it might not be a great analogy. But, you know, I grew up when this was a popular video game, though. So the point is that this stuff is work, though. It's real work. It's like you're learning new skills. So moving from that defensive jackal mindset into the giraffe language, it's not just like a switch that you flip and then you're done. It's real gritty, challenging work. And, you know, banning trolls is one thing, but dealing with this, the hordes of well-meaning jackals who just want to connect and get you to understand their needs is like, oh, that is a ton of work. Like, you got a time box, that stuff. It will quickly swamp all of your time and energy, and if you feel like this is just an unsolvable problem, you know, you need somebody else that you can go and talk to and be like, hey, this is bumming me out. Most people I found, they do want to help, and you might be surprised just how helpful they are if you reach out to some of your friends or colleagues and tell them that you want to work on improving your communication. So getting a little bit more into it, this is something that, so a lot of NBC introductions go through OFNR in a lot of detail and then sort of leave all the rest of this. But I feel like this is, this is actually what is the best thing about NBC. I recommend not trying to speak in OFNR lingo right out of the gate. Trying to change your language, especially all at once in a big abrupt way can feel very stilted and awkward and that doesn't help us get closer to connection. So the first step though is just to become aware of it. Just notice when you've said an evaluation or a judgment rather than an observation. Notice when you've kind of demanded some particular strategy rather than trying to express your needs and try to make a request that will get closer to it. Don't try to stop yourself from saying anything. Go ahead and be a jackal if you want to be a jackal but just be aware that that's what's happening. The second step is to explicitly identify those OFNR bits in what we're saying and follow it up. So if I say, you know, an evaluation like, wow, what a fancy shirt. I might stop and say, oh, well, it's a very bright red shirt, you know. And that can sometimes be a little awkward or feel funny but it's just, I'm still saying what I want to say but then I'm just kind of clarifying the important part of what I said. And eventually, the OFNR language starts to feel like it fits and hiding behind this very cognitive jackal like defense mechanism starts to feel kind of fake and unsatisfying. It's been my experience. Over the last few years, I've removed a few words from my vocabulary that had sexist and ableist implications. The hardest one was using guys to refer to a group of people but another really awful one was using that we do all the time in the Bay Area is using the word lame to mean bad. And I have enough people who, I have enough friends and people in my life who are very important to me who have, you know, various levels of mobility, ability and so using lame to mean bad just felt like, oh, it's terrible. It's like calling something gay. At NPM, so at NPM, we have a jar that we put a dollar in whenever we use problematic language. It's not actually a very effective fundraiser because over time, it gets less and less valuable. But, and also, it's not a punishment, right? It's not something that's imposed from above. It's opt-in and a lot of us use it in very different ways. But what I found is it's a really effective way to just be aware, just notice, oh, now I got to put a dollar in the jar. Nope, no good, no bad. Hey, I helped raise some money for girl development, yay. But that awareness on its own will tend to change you. So, on giraffe ears, oh, I'm burning through my time. Sorry, rambling. The first and most basic listening tactic that we can employ is just to actually listen to what somebody is saying without putting our own spin on their message so that we can reflect it back and they know that they've been heard. This is so challenging. I might just find it challenging because it's hard for me, but really, if all you can do is manage to focus on somebody and listen to them and observe what they're actually saying without any well-actualies, without any not-all-blanks, without adding in your own context, most of the time, that is a humongous step towards building connection with another human being. A next-level listening skill is to identify the observations, feelings, needs, and requests that the person is sharing and just reflect those bits back at them. That sounds kind of like, not back at them, back to them. So we're not adding anything, but you might be trying to kind of strip away the insults and the parts that aren't really effective. So if somebody says, like, you're such an asshole, you never listen to me, you might say, like, oh, you're really angry because you don't think that I'm hearing what you're saying, right? And at the really pro-level NBC technique, once we've kind of gotten skilled enough at holding what somebody's saying and understanding their message and engaging our own emotional machinery at the same time, the expert-level technique there is to try and figure out what it is they're not saying and then verify with them if we've guessed correctly. So maybe you didn't say anything that really told me you were feeling angry, but I can sort of see it on your face. I might say something like, I get the impression you're kind of angry right now. Is that correct? And the nice thing is that Jackals love telling you when you're wrong. That's like their favorite thing to do. So if you don't get it right, they'll be super helpful and guide you towards the truth. It's wonderful. So in that book I mentioned Choosing Peace, Ike Lasseter and John Kinney and talk about a self-connection process called Breath Body Need. In a lot of communication dynamics, I think we get into the most trouble when we sort of lose track of ourselves and we burn up our resources. Alex Harms' talk yesterday, Learning to Empathy started out with basically a very similar exercise of kind of going through and observing and making internal and external observations and then sort of getting in touch with what it is you really need. And you remember what I said about cognitive limits. Like when we're stressed out and unhappy, when our needs aren't being met, we are so much more cognitively limited and it becomes a lot more challenging to avoid using very defensive strategies in our communication. So by kind of turning OFNR inward, we can make a regular practice of being aware of our own fundamental human needs. Now, you might still not get those needs met in any given situation. Like sometimes just how it is, this is reality, but at least you'll know what's going on and kind of have some understanding that like, you know what, I'm hungry right now. I'm not actually upset with you. I'm not gonna be able to eat for the next two hours. So maybe this isn't the best time for to have this conversation. My partner and I have a pretty hard and fast rule when we're on road trips that when we start getting hungry, we just stop talking. Like. So, yeah, so at least if you know what those needs are, you can gradually kind of guide the conversation back to some place where it's productive, where there's some kind of potential for connection. And when that internal awareness kind of slips and we stop showing ourselves empathy, the key component of a thing that usually happens is burnout. A key component of burnout is repeatedly ignoring and de-prioritizing our own needs. And over time we kind of start to wither like a sad little grape into a bitter angry raisin. And in that state, it becomes a lot harder to summon the mental energy that's required to initiate a connection with somebody else or even check in with ourselves. And we get grumpy. It's like this vicious cycle that just kind of keeps perpetuating. The common wisdom is that burnout comes from working too much and that can certainly be the case a lot of times. But there's been some times in my life where I've worked my ass off but my needs were being met and I didn't get into a cycle of feeling terrible. I actually was feeling great. It was awesome. If what you need is connection or recognition, then a vacation isn't gonna cure burnout. But then there are also a lot of other cases where working a lot is actually more of a symptom. And the underlying disease, the core need might be something completely different. If you don't know what your needs are, you can't meet them. And probably neither can anybody else in your life as much as they may want to try. There's been a lot said at this conference and just in general about burnout. I recommend for those of you watching at home on the internet, you go look up online Jacob Kaplan Moss's talk from earlier in this conference called, what part of for life don't you understand? And also all of the links and references that he pulled in, especially Kathleen Danielson's talk, avoiding burnout and other essentials of open source self-care. I will put some links in my notes about that but I'm running out of time. So I do have some homework for you. Like I said, if you're willing to do it and if you're interested, I'll put these slides up online and tweet the link out so you don't have to write any of this down right now. First bit of homework is to pick up one or both of those books that I mentioned earlier and read through them. Definitely don't take them as gospel. If anything in that book doesn't resonate with you, then just kind of make a note of that. First one is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. The second is Choosing Peace by Ike Lassiter and John Kinian. I hear that there's actually a bookstore in this city. It's mostly South American themed I believe but they do have a website. I don't know if they carry these, I haven't confirmed yet. Slow burn on that one. The second bit of homework is to try to find somebody, a colleague or a friend or whoever and see if they'd be interested in partnering up with you. It can be your romantic or non-romantic life partner, it can be a friend, it can be a colleague, your co-founder, whoever. Really think about it. I think it's important to pick somebody that you think will get something out of this practice as well and who you can trust to both have your back but also really candidly call you out if when you are not doing so well, not living up to your standards. And also make sure that when you phrase the request, you make it clear that no is an acceptable answer. That if they don't wanna do this, that's cool. You can find somebody else. But I think if you let them know, like hey, I think that you could also benefit from this and I could benefit from it and I'd really, really love your insight. Would you be willing to work on this, maybe meet on some kind of regular basis and just kinda check in. It's really easy to read about empathy and it's pretty easy to kinda sit there and listen to somebody like me talk about it. But actually practicing it with another human being is the only way to actually get very much out of it. It'll feel weird when you're not used to this, just speaking from my own experience, but it's also really valuable. That awkwardness is kind of a sign that you're learning a new skill, it's good. If you can make a safe space where it's okay to be clumsy, then over time it's possible to kind of get better, to get more skilled. And the last thing, if you don't like those books, if you find something, some aspects of NBC that are helpful and some that aren't, or if there's some reason that you think this homework idea is just a bad idea, not something you'd be interested in doing, I would love any feedback that you have for me personally. You can hit me up on email, on Twitter, I'll be walking around here today. I'm usually within a stone's throw of like Merritt and Oakland. I really appreciate all of your time and attention today. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.