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The User's Guide to the Emotions Compass & Needs Compass

Download your User's Guide plus the 4 steps of NVC!

Subscribe to our newsletter and get 20+ pages on emotional intelligence, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), all about the Emotions Compass and the Needs Compass, and how to use them in various coaching settings.

Ways to remove the sticker on your compass

Rubbing alcohol

Put rubbing alcohol on a paper towel and rub on the sticker.

Hot water

Apply hot water on the sticker and gently rub it.

Hair dryer

With a hair dryer, apply heat on the sticker’s glue for easy removal.

Your handy guide to the 4 steps of Nonviolent Communication

This user’s guide features the 4 steps of nonviolent communication. It provides examples on how to express observations, feelings, needs, and requests – to inspire compassion and empathy.

To give you an idea of what’s inside, below is our rationale behind developing coaching tools focused on emotional intelligence and nonviolent communication.

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Why we need emotional intelligence now more than ever

As inventors and innovators, we humans have reached a point in history where rapid and massive changes happen by the day. Some of the brightest minds among us are remotely operating space rovers to explore Mars. Our engineers and scientists created self-driving cars. We clone extinct species from preserved DNA. The interconnectedness of our transportation systems paved the way for the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, our communication systems allowed crucial information about this disease to be exchanged all over the world in a matter of seconds. This helped us develop vaccines within an unprecedented time period.

These are but a few examples of how our collective intelligence and creativity have provided solutions to problems and pursued progress in the modern world. But despite our technological and scientific advancement, our society continues to be saddled with ill will, suffering, and confusion. Why is this the case?

A lot can be said about the major issues that we face today, where their roots lie, and how to solve them from different perspectives. However, as coaches, therapists, and team leaders we know that our contribution lies in the work that we do with individuals and communities. 

At metaFox, we believe that much of the ill will, suffering, and confusion we’re experiencing today can be eased and illuminated by developing our emotional intelligence (EI). This belief stems from the components that constitute emotional intelligence as well as the significant benefits of developing our emotional intelligence.

What is emotional intelligence?

The central skill of being emotionally intelligent is self-awareness. Knowing ourselves and our inner landscapes is the foundation of our ability to regulate our emotions and/or use them to do what we need to do and achieve our goals. Thus, self-awareness helps us develop self-management. Understanding ourselves naturally leads to “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes”, that is, practicing empathy. And when we can successfully read, manage, and influence not only our emotions but also those of the people we interact with, we’ve developed our social skills.1

Self-awareness
Self-management
Empathy
Social skills
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Translating emotional intelligence into the 4 steps of Nonviolent Communication

A major chunk of our interactions with people happens through communication with spoken and written language as the main avenue. In addition, we have inner dialogues and conversations with ourselves. The metaFox team favors Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as an approach to communication and as a way of enacting and living out our emotional intelligence.

At the heart of NVC is the idea that people are capable of compassionate giving and receiving and it’s mostly a matter of understanding our needs, how we can fulfill them, and how to communicate these strategies with others. The NVC process consists of four steps: observations, feelings, needs, and requests.2 NVC asks us to first observe what’s happening without adding meaning or evaluation to the event or circumstance. Then, we ask ourselves how we feel about what’s happening, what emotion is rising within us. Next, we dig deep and connect our feeling with a particular need that we have. If that need is not being met, we formulate a request asking for a concrete action that someone can do to help us fulfill our need.

Compassionate receiving is just one-half of NVC. The other important half is compassionate giving, which involves empathic listening when people express how they feel about a situation, the needs they have, and their requests for certain actions from us to meet their needs.

Simply speaking, NVC is similar to the good old “give and take” but doing so with compassion from our hearts. This is why NVC is also referred to as collaborative communication and compassionate communication.

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metaFox coaching tools for emotional intelligence and NVC

The coaching tools that we develop at metaFox are all designed to grow the emotional intelligence of the individual as well as groups of people. We envision a world filled with emotionally intelligent persons who have a heightened sense of self-awareness, who are empathetic, and who can effectively communicate with others in order to collaborate and create good things together. Thus, we want to contribute towards building a society whose emotional intelligence is on par with their technological and scientific knowledge. The Emotions Compass and the Needs Compass are complementary coaching tools under the metaFox “Content at a glance” product series. They are concrete manifestations of our focus on helping people develop their emotional intelligence through nonviolent communication. We created these tools hoping that they can support you – coaches, therapists, trainers, team leaders, counsellors, educators, personal development enthusiasts – in the important work that you do with people (and within yourself) as you guide your clients, coachees, team members, students in becoming empowered agents who ease ill will, lessen suffering, and clarify confusions within themselves and in their circles of influence.

1 The four components of self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skills constitute Daniel Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence. Goleman helped popularize the concept of emotional intelligence in his seminal work Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995).

2 The NVC process and its four steps are taken from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (2nd Edition).

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