I think there's a (small) subset of people who can pull it (NVC) off but it requires them to have had the empathy in the first place. You can't just manufacture empathy in a way where it passes the sniff test.
As an example, a quick Google search just now for "nonviolent communication empathy" turns up an article from 2011 at the "Center for Non-Violent Communication" titled "How to DO empathy." I couldn't possibly roll my eyes harder. It's a failed premise from the jump. It's like an ask I recently had at work, "We need to DO machine learning," says the CEO, "because all of our competitors are [putting it on their slide decks]."
I notice the same behaviors in people who read Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and think that it's an instruction manual. It comes off as insincere and it instantly sours me to further communications with the person.
So true. I agree that you can't pull it out of a hat or learn it from reading a blog post. But, I believe it is learnable. I've gone from being a person who had no words for my emotions because I literally could not feel them most of the time, to being able to really bring heart and mind together and really speak from that place. I didn't learn it from a self-help book though, I learned it through practice and a lot of personal work, and I was lucky to have some very good guidance along the way.
Hmmm... I may have been better off with "and" instead of "but" here, because I was agreeing with the parent comment and adding my own encouragement. scruple took no clear stance in the original comment on whether empathy is learnable or not. I believe it is.
I didn't intend to imply that it can't be learned, I also think that it can be. My argument is with folks who think that things like NVC are a process they can apply by following a series of steps.
As an example, a quick Google search just now for "nonviolent communication empathy" turns up an article from 2011 at the "Center for Non-Violent Communication" titled "How to DO empathy." I couldn't possibly roll my eyes harder. It's a failed premise from the jump. It's like an ask I recently had at work, "We need to DO machine learning," says the CEO, "because all of our competitors are [putting it on their slide decks]."
I notice the same behaviors in people who read Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and think that it's an instruction manual. It comes off as insincere and it instantly sours me to further communications with the person.