Hello, wonderful person!
From a “boring personality” to meeting and getting to know an entire stranger’s family, inspiring stories just happened this past week that show our members’ progress and growth
(I’ve started doing manual newsletters just because the automated ones had generic email subject lines like “Your YYYY-MM-DD updates”, which don’t really give you a preview of the interesting news that’s inside, but now you can see the difference!)
Updates
- In our Open CNC Practice online event, one of our members shared a social situation where someone named Arram was hanging out with a girl named Tochi, but Tochi said “Let’s not meet again. You have a dry personality”. Wow, if you were Arram in that situation, how would you respond? That’s what we did during the event: all attendees (including me) were given 3 questions
- What could be Tochi’s unspoken Pure Emotion (CNC skill #2)
- How could Arram respond using CNC? (CNC skills #1-5)
- What could Tochi’s Core Need be in this situation? (CNC skill #3)
- We all came up with ways to use CNC (Core Needs Communication) to both understand what Tochi might’ve been feeling, and why she said those things, to identify the positive intention behind her words
- We all shared and posted our answers in the text chat for the event in our Discord server. If you want to see them (or even join the next event) you can visit Ugeddit’s server and go to Ugeddit/#cnc-challenges/Boring Personality Challenge
- Our Deep Dive on Friday was on “What To Do About Red Flags”, and man was it interesting. More than a couple members shared examples of real situations or behaviours they consider to be “red flags”
- We first discussed our personal definitions of what a “red flag” is, and we all had slightly different ones, with my own definition being “Something you saw or heard someone do or say that you don’t feel comfortable about, because of certain expectations you have”
- Then we all ended up talking about using CNC (Core Needs Communication) to recognize what we specifically observed from the other person (CNC skill #1) and how to ask them about it casually and cleanly, to effectively clear up any mistundersandings before continuing the conversation or interaction
- We also posted about this in Ugeddit’s Discord server, so again if you want to see what happened next, here’s the link, and the specific channel it’s posted in is Ugeddit/#🧠-deep-dives/What To Do About Red Flags
- For our in-person CNC practice event, again two people showed up, but this time it was more focused on CNC. Guess what happened. With tips and encouragement, one of our members who used to barely be able to talk to people just started a conversation with a complete stranger in a mall food court, using a certain style of starting the conversation that I showed him
- Do you know what happened next? They both ended up talking (wow, eh?), and then started sharing different parts of their lives with each other, getting to know each other pretty well in just 5-10 minutes, and the former stranger, now friend, has a daughter who returned to his table with food, and because I noticed she was confused about why they were talking, I eventually introduced myself to both of them, and we all started talking together, before naturally splitting into two chat groups with each other. His daughter had a 2-year-old herself, and we ended up talking about how her 2-year-old was a Covid baby and was nervous around people, and about how many youth and people could improve their social skills, especially online
- But you won’t even guess what happened after this. Just as we were preparing to say goodbye, the new friend man said their family was on their way to come to their table from somewhere else in the mall, and that we could meet them. This guy’s entire family then comes over, and we both got to meet his two sons, mother and father, and maybe one brother as well
- So from a formerly-insecure guy who was afraid to talk to a stranger, with one encouragement, had started a conversation that led to us getting to know a person’s life, and then getting to know almost their entire family, in the span of 15 minutes
- I want more people to experience this. Who do you know who wants to improve their communication skills? You can tell them about Ugeddit and our Discord community
On my side
- I chatted with my friend who’s an Agile coach, scrum master, and pilot. He told me, after I introduced him to it, how he started using NVC (Nonviolent Communication; what CNC is based on) with his teams and clients, and that he’s noticed differences in both how he felt about the interactions and how other people have been responding to different things in more helpful ways
- He even said, since he also lives in Vancouver, BC, he’s interested in joining our in-person CNC practice events. I’m excited for this
- I had a video chat with someone who travels around the world meeting 100s of people, and you’ll never believe what she said (because I definitely didn’t)
- Despite how we started off struggling to find a schedule to meet that works for both of us, having to reschedule multiple times, and then once we started chatting, discovering some differences in our opinions…
- Despite all this, at the end of our chat, this is what she said to me (paraphrased): “Compared to most people I’ve met, you have a thoughtfulness and intentionality behind your words that I find… inspirational. So, if there’s anything specific you can think of that you need help with, I’d be happy to help”
- Holy fricken crap, I was so surprised by this that, immediately after she told me, a big smile pulled on my face that I couldn’t stop
- She then said she’s flying to Vancouver, BC in the fall and is looking forward to meeting in person 🤯
Next steps
- I’m updating and adding 1-3 more example situations to CNC’s skill tree, for certain types of social situations (and desired outcomes) and how to achieve them, step-by-step, using CNC (and even other skill trees), with the main categories being
- Starting a conversation
- Keeping a conversation alive
- Completing a conversation
- I’m still working on training someone to be our first CNC lv3 “Skill Master” (besides me) to become a “Teacher” who can take on students and ignite our learning community
Ways you can help
- Join our community, check out our #cnc-skill-tree, test out one thing from it, then share your feedback about what happened when you used it in your situation. Your simple real-world feedback will help you, us, and the entire community way more than you might think
- Think of 1 person you know who wants to improve their social/people/communication skills, relationships, or self-confidence, and tell them that you know a place that has resources, hacks, and a community for this, called Ugeddit: ugeddit.com