"Compassionate Communication"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
December 20, 2009

Last summer at our UU General Assembly, looking for tools to help Northern Hills with our Covenant of Beloved Community, I attended a workshop called “The Power of Non-Anxious Presence” given by Rev. Cathleen Diane Cox, a Community Minister in Berkeley, who is a UU Spiritual Director.  She told this story to illustrate one of her attempts to be non-anxious at a time when it wasn’t easy for her to do so.

It was 5 minutes until time to begin the worship service when a woman came to Rev. Cox with an announcement.  She excitedly explained how on Thursday night the Parents Group had decided to enlist the Young Religious UU teens to hold a car wash the following Saturday to raise money for the Youth Group’s  trip to UU headquarters in Boston in May.  However, recently, the church had established a new rule that announcements had to be submitted in advance and printed in the Order of Service, and there were to be no verbal announcements in the service anymore.  Rev. Cox wanted to support the Parents Group and the YRUU Group, and she told the woman she understood her need to have an announcement.  She also told the woman of her need to honor the new rule.  She said it was hard for her to balance the two needs, but she felt they must follow the rule.  Looking for a way to meet both needs, she suggested the woman make a sign and stand outside the sanctuary after worship to bring attention to the car wash.  Fortunately, Rev. Cox says, that’s exactly what the woman did, and everything worked out fine.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we do this at Northern Hills, but we do ask our Worship Associates to make the announcements and to do only 2 or 3 verbal announcements each week.  So, they are the ones who have to deal with this “last minute announcement” issue.  I’ll bet they can identify with the tight spot this puts them in sometimes.  I tell this story not to start a discussion about announcements, really, but to give an example of an interaction that started off with some awkwardness and could have gone badly, but it didn’t because one party kept a lid on her anxiety.  That is what “The Power of Non-Anxious Presence” means.  I chose the Sunday before many of us will be visiting with family and friends over the Holidays for this topic because I thought we could all use a reminder to try to remain calm when emotions rise as they inevitably do this time of year.

Churches and families have a lot in common.  In both, we get to know others intimately over a long period of time – years, even decades.  Relationships go well beyond the surface level; we drop our pretensions – that layer of protection we keep up around us in public and unfamiliar places – and we let the real person out.  That means in both families and churches, others will hear us laugh out loud – that belly laught that ends with a snort – they will see us act  on our true emotions.  Northern Hills Fellowship is such a place, a community of friends where we encourage people to be real.

We don’t have much choice when it comes to our families, but we can choose whether to  join a church or to leave one if it is not working out for us.  So, families and churches have at least that difference.  Whether our family is a safe place for us or not, we need our church to be a reliable place for us to be ourselves, a place that will support us and care for us – even when we are not at our best.  At Northern Hills, we are committed to being that kind of safe place.  We have the choice not only to join or leave; we have the opportunity to make this the place we need and want it to be.  Simply practicing compassion for each other in our communications and remaining calm in stressful situations can take us a long way toward being a life giving community.

We are committed to being a loving place for all our members, children, visitors, and friends.  To show you why I say this, let me share with you what a dozen or so of our folks said about that two weeks ago at our workshop.  We met to begin to articulate a vision for the Beloved Community we want to be.  Here are the Provocative Propositions three small groups wrote:

1. “In order to nurture transformative relationships: Northern Hills Fellowship nurtures and transforms through a circle of support, compassion and caring that synergizes everyone into a beloved community.”
2. “In order to use positive energy from our differences to enrich our common good: Northern Hills Fellowship is a place where the symbiotic relationship between community and the individual is honored.  We have an enhanced awareness of the needs of the individual and the needs of the community.  We provide tools, encouragement and expectation that we engage in active listening as spiritual practice.  We focus on healing relationship when resolving issues.
3. “In order to enrich individual wholeness within our community: NHF is a community in which members are transformed and enriched through worship and the power of personal action to effect change both in the person and in the community.

Don’t you just love those ideas?  I certainly would be happy to be a member of a church where these things were true.  All three of these will require us to stretch a bit to make them reality – that’s the nature of provocative propositions.  They are not just idealistic goals, though.  They are doable, and the teams who wrote them have already begun action plans that will move them from visions to experiences.  Through participation in goals like these we will have opportunities for all of Northern Hills’ members to help to make our community what we want it to be.

One of the things we can all do to create a supportive and life giving community here is to practice the technique of non-anxious presence with each other.  The techniques involved come from the field called “Non-Violent Communication,” also known as “Compassionate Communication.”  You can find lots of information on Non-Violent Communication on the internet; in fact, one can take courses and become certified as a practitioner and teacher of it.  Today, we will only have time to cover the basics of it, and we can talk about further work on it later.  Some of us may already know how to remain non-anxious under stress, and others of us may blow our tops pretty quickly, but the good news is we can all get better at this with just a little understanding and practice.

Practice and understanding – those are the keys to becoming a better communicator – and I believe understanding comes first.  So, before we go into techniques, I’ll tell you the philosophy underneath the Compassionate Communication.  First, our goal here, as friends, as church members and leaders, is primarily to honor the inherent worth and dignity of each person and to form a loving community together.  Accomplishing activities, coordinating programs, even providing for the security of the institution, are secondary to those goals.  Second, in order to honor each person and form community, we need real connections between folks – at the level which allows us to care deeply about each other.  Third, although we may not see it at first, there is no inherent conflict between people at the level of core needs.  We all need pretty much the same things.  When your need of the moment is different from mine, we can both still understand that the other person’s needs are valid.  If we think about our own experiences we’ll probably remember when we felt the same need.  Understanding another’s need is what it means to have empathy.  Empathy for another person creates compassion, and employing compassion, we can help each other get our deep needs met.  This is why I like the term Compassionate Communication, because it reminds us empathy and compassion are the spiritual source of our connection.

The basic techniques of remaining poised when communicating are observation, noting feelings, and interpretation.  That is, when we notice ourselves or others beginning to push too hard or stress out, we try to detach just enough from the situation to analyze what’s going on.  First, ask, “What would a video camera record right now?  What actions, words or patterns do I observe?”  The goal is to temporarily separate our observation from any interpretation.  Next, is to ask “What emotions are arising in me right now?”  Feelings help us interpret what’s going on with ourselves and provide information for our thought process.  Then, ask “What interpretation am I making about this interchange?”  If you can go a little deeper, maybe you’ll recognize an internal story or assumption you carry that lies under the meaning you are taking from the other person’s actions.

If we can practice this much objectivity in the midst of a thorny conversation we will likely prevent it from turning really bad.  This technique is simple to learn with practice.  Once we can do this, we can return our focus in a conversation back onto the connection we are making with the other person.  If we remember our goal is to discover the other person’s and our own real needs, we can move the conversation towards getting real needs met.  Often people have a strategy for meeting their needs already in mind when they start a conversation, and they focus on that instead of making their needs clear.  It is usually at the level of strategy where conflicts of interest arise.  Therefore, when conflict arises, it is best to let go of strategies temporarily until there is a sufficient level of understanding of each other’s needs.  Having confidence that the other person really is concerned for our needs makes negotiating strategies so much easier, not to mention the positive impact it has on a relationship.

Let’s take an example of an imaginary interaction to demonstrate how this can happen.  Say a member of the Nominating Committee, we’ll call him Gus, approaches a member, and we’ll call her Shannon, to ask her about running for the office of Trustee.  Gus begins by saying, “Shannon, I am looking for people to nominate for Trustee at our Congregational Meeting in two weeks.  I did my time on the Board many years ago; we need for one of you new folks to step up and provide some of the leadership for the Fellowship.  I found out you have been active, and you have children in RE.  Don’t you think this would be a chance for you to contribute?  All Trustees have to do is meet one night a month.  Can I put your name on the ballot?”  Shannon, visibly flustered, replies, “Well, Gus - is it?  I am honored you would ask me; I do feel the need to give back to the church, but I’m not sure I’m ready to be a Trustee.  I can’t make night meetings because of my kids.  Don’t you think I should have some experience as a committee chairperson or something like that before serving on the Board?”  Gus, quickly catching this hasn’t started out well, says, “Really, I have noticed how creative you are when you organize the snack for coffee hour, and others have recommended you because you have a level head.  If you want to know exactly what a Trustee does, I’ll arrange for Grace, who is a Trustee this year and who will also be on the Board next year, to meet you for lunch.  You can get to know her and ask all the questions you want.  After that, if you decide you are not ready, we can talk about it again next year.  I really don’t mean to coerce you into this job.”  Shannon, brightening up, says, “Well, since you put it that way, I will think about it.  Maybe I could serve if there was child care.  Will you please tell Grace to call me at home tomorrow?” 

In our vignette Gus needed to find an effective person to become a Trustee, and Shannon needed to know her creativity and competence would be useful as a member of the Board.  Gus remembered – almost too late, connections first, issues second!  And only when we are convinced connections are strong, should we move to issues.  After we have established a relationship it is so much easier to explore strategies that might address each other’s needs.  Ask yourself: “What impact is the other person’s suggested strategy going to have on my needs getting met?” And vice versa.  Ask the questions you really want to ask, like “What strategy do I want to explore?”  And keep in mind the goal of finding common ground to move forward in harmony.

I know we have flown over the practice of Non-Violent, Compassionate Communication and Non-Anxious Presence at an altitude of 30,000 feet this morning, and we can’t expect everyone to “get it” without more information and practical experience.  If you like what I said about it, we’ll do that, but for today, I mainly wanted you to get the connections between these practices and UU values and their connections with the work we are doing on becoming a Beloved Community.  Compassionate Communication seems to me to fit so well with Unitarian and Universalist core values.  In closing let me make that connection for you.

When asked to explain Universalism, UUs often tell what it was 200 years ago saying, “Universalists believed a loving God would not condemn anyone to eternal damnation.  Therefore, they preached that everyone received salvation without having to agree to abide by a creed.”  A shorter and more modern version of this Universalist core belief is – “Love holds us.”  By the same token, the original version of Unitarian belief was something like, “We don’t agree with Calvinism which says some people are predestined to be saved and others not.  We believe all people can improve their characters and aspire to live like Jesus, whose human example we follow.”  Today’s Unitarian core belief might be stated – “All is interconnected.”   Therefore, we Unitarian Universalists, living in a post-modern world can say with certainty, “We are all connected and supported by love.”  This is the theological grounding for our vision of Beloved Community and the motivation for practicing Compassionate Communication both here and in our wider communities.  My wish for us is that we will always continue to make our loving connections deeper and stronger.