I now get the pleasure to welcome Veronica Wolf, an experienced coach and seasoned corporate and community leader, Veronica specializes in the area of emotional intelligence, EQ change and transition. Is on a mission to empower individuals, groups and teams to foster resilience and empathy while effectively taking action in the face of personal and professional changes and challenges, take it away. Veronica,
thank you so much. I appreciate the warm introduction, and I love the last speaker, so I have to gather myself here. So I'm talking today about something that I've been doing for quite a while, started with empathy circle work many years ago. I don't even remember how long, double digit years and met and studied with Marshall Rosenberg. So nonviolent communication and the RE architecting of my brain to be non judgmental entered my life, and then did some work with Doctor Dick Schwartz. Most people call him that, the founder of internal family systems. And I've been hosting circles in New Thought communities, spiritual growth circles, and also now as empathy circles, because I'm also a certified grief educator, something we don't always ask for, but life hands it to us, and so today I'm talking about the foundational empathy circle, and then feathering in nonviolent communication and internal family systems, which has had a beautiful healing effect on a lot of the groups that I work with. So we know why empathy matters, right? The world is changing really fast. With change comes loss, and empathy fosters understanding. The circles that that Edwin has founded, they create a safe, structured dialog. And it's on that foundation that I'm going to add these other models that we play with. So when we combine NVC and IFS the internal family systems, or what's also popularly known as parts work, the empathy circles deepen. They deepen the connection, the self awareness, and also the compassion and the self empathy. So we know the empathy circle is a structured, deep listening practice, the core steps, I think most folks here have studied, but I'm going to pop a slide just for anyone who's
new. Let's start here and share.
So I don't know how large that is. Let me adjust.
Think that's as large as I go. Okay, so we gather the group, we assign the roles. We figure out the time, we make sure the reflective listening happens, until the speaker feels heard, and then we rotate the roles until all have shared what I'm adding to that, or building on top of that, is this piece of non violent communication. So the language of feeling is feelings and needs. So we're taking the foundation, we're adding the language. It has four components. I'll touch on those in a moment. And NVC, just by its beingness supports clarity, compassion and mutual understanding. And so the components of NVC include being able to observe, making an observation, stating the facts without quote, loaded language, without judgment. And that takes quite a while for some folks to get to that place. But in a circle of empathy, people pick up the language rather quickly. That's what we're finding. And the not just the language, but the essence and the feeling that goes into living and being in this state, the feeling. Can we name it? The closer we get to naming it, the better we are at being able to serve ourselves in the moment, a little self empathy, and then we can when we can identify the universal need. As Marshall calls them universal feelings, universal needs, things that we all have across the globe, then we can make a request for something very specific and positive. And when I took a look at some of the main features of the empathy circles and NBC, it was a. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Of course, they go together, right? So now we're going to go take a look. I'll spend a little more time here on internal family systems. It is a therapeutic method, and it recognizes that each of us, we are, each separate ecosystems, and it identifies a core self at the center. And this core self is calm, compassionate, curious, courageous, clear, confident, creative and connected. I hope you all recognize when you're in that space we call it in ifs the self with a capital S, or the core self I see snapping like we love I love that. It's flow state for me, and it's at the center, and then surrounding it are a multitude of other parts. And so the method assumes that there are no bad parts, and it uses gentle, open ended questions with access to that self in the center, a person can heal their wounded parts with this method. So by befriending the parts, a person can the language here is unburden them according to ifs, and it brings greater inner peace and harmony to the system, the ecosystem, allowing the person to be more self LED. And as I'm saying this, I hope you're recognizing like, oh yeah, when I remembered when that happened, I was feeling this, and what I really wanted was some honest communication, right? I was frustrated or I was angry. When we can do that. And then we we go down, that's NVC. Then we go down a bit deeper with internal family systems. So we go into the parts. And I'm sure you've had these discussions in your head. One party wants to go work out. Let's get to the gym, right? We're on a roll. We want to stay fit and healthy. And another part is like, no, let's just stay home and relax, Netflix and chill. Okay, we all have these conversations going on all the time. And what I learned from Marshall, and I literally re architected my brain that weekend, is that when we can manage the conversation in our mind, the conversation that flows from us and out into the world with others, is a very different conversation, and so bringing this into empathy circles just felt really natural. So the parts fall under four main categories. We've talked about self kind of the captain of your ship, if you're a sailor or a pilot or something, managers, I chose a heart icon because they have really good intentions. They want to protect, they want to prevent emotional pain and maintain control. And they do this in ways that are not always in our best growing interest. They make us perform and produce. You may have heard of people pleasing. If you're a people pleaser, that part is the manager for you. And then we have the firefighters, and they come out. They're reactive, you know, somebody steps on your boom, right? You react. You don't. There's no thought process. It is an it is a reaction. And they are also protectors, and they're acting in response to a perceived threat. There are times when they sneakily look like something else. They may look like procrastination. They may look like sitting in front of that Netflix screen for six hours. They want to distract and numb and soothe and kind of keep you safe where you are. And then the exiles a little face down at the bottom of that slide there, they're the parts of ourselves that we deny and push away, and we are less than 100% of our authentic selves. We can be of less service. We don't have as much love to give. We don't We are not all of who we are when we're loaded with exiles that are protected. So the idea of getting into a psychologically safe space in an empathy circle where we are well held, and then using the language of non violent communication allows us to go ahead and access this deeper part of ourselves. So when I looked at how do we integrate ifs into the circles, there are several different places where it just naturally comes in and when we're preparing to speak. So I start circles, we take a few minutes, I ask a few questions, I slow everybody down, and. Then ask them to notice what's going on inside. What am I noticing in me, what parts are active? And what this does is it brings some calm and clarity, some intentionality, and brings my attention into what's going on inside, so I can best serve those that are with me. So what part is activated or alive in the moment. It is a feeling that I want. What is that part feeling that's going to help me understand? What does it need? It also prevents over identifying with the emotion. Kind of that victim that the Drama Triangle points to, or the emotion is the only thing that that comes out often in identifying the needs, which is non violent communication steps three, what is the true need underneath the protectiveness I may have gotten, gotten flaming angry, but what I really needed was some space, and I didn't know how to ask for it, but the feeling that came up led me to understand what the deeper need was. And then when we are in circle, listening to others, the IFS contribution here is to see with curiosity, how do I feel towards this person's parts? What are they doing to my parts? Right? We have all these mirror neurons. We can have a party with this stuff. It's really It's actually quite a lot of fun, but it helps us in the moment, increase our compassion and reduce the reactivity that can come out of this. And so when I pulled all the parts and pieces together again, and I got empathy circles lined up with NVC, and I added ifs, I went, Oh, wow, there is this element of ifs that goes into the internal what's going on with me? I'm not just listening and present. I am attending to the aliveness inside of me that is also impacting how I listen and how I participate with you in our circle, active listening across the board, emotional awareness in ifs we go more finely tuned, and we map that what part so where somebody might say, what are you feeling
in non violent communication, ifs will go A little different. What part of you is feeling frustrated. Or rather than saying I am frustrated, we will say part of you is feeling frustrated. You feel there's a fine difference in that, and it truly helps. Folks often lay down the load of whatever they're carrying emotional awareness. Yes, it's encouraged in empathy circles. It's explicitly taught in non violent communication, and we map it specifically to parts in internal family systems. The focus on needs is implied in circles. It's part of the design of NBC. And again, the needs are mapped to the parts, because rarely are we feeling only one thing at a time. We have those conversations going on, no judgment, non judgmental presence required across the board. And then the inner conflict work. This is where ifs stands out for me, because if we're conflicted, when we go into a circle, guess what? We bring that, and we're kind of loaded for bear, so to speak, when we do that. So I suggest that inner conflict work that we take those few minutes before both if we're doing just an empathy circle or a pure nonviolent communication conversation, but you get that when you are working with the parts in ifs. So to me, this trio is absolutely magical. I have years of working with this, I had to step away from saying, Oh, it's just an NBC circle, or it's just an empathy circle and and and explain what we do. And that's the way I put it out there. I call them empathy circles, and I explain that we're going deeper, for folks that are just familiar with the circle format, but empathy circles give us this one minute, and non violent, non violent communication gives us the language of feelings and needs and the mindset for connection and understanding and IFS gives us the inner lens to hold our experience with compassion and the self leadership. So together, they help us speak from the heart. Work, listen with presence and relate to ourselves and others with radical compassion. So thank you. I appreciate your time, your attention. Contributions this group is making to furthering unity and harmony and inner peace and world peace, and helping to raise our global consciousness so.
