How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

If you are married, and your trigger topic is house work, it doesn't matter if your spouse says "you need to more house work" or "when I get home after a long day of work, I feel let down by having to do a large amount of house work, could please do more in the future?".

If anything, the latter might be seen as more accusatory, even though feeling let down is exactly the emotion that your spouse communicated, and it was "non-violently" communicated using the "I [feel]" pattern.

No. I was describing what NVC is. The book, this thread, the culture of people like you pushing it in the workplace is what I wrote. The book encourages a language form, the proponents of the book push a language form, you are pushing a 'communication style'.

>I do get the sense from a number of comments (not necessarily yours) that people think they should be able to express themselves at work however they feel most comfortable. That's an unrealistic expectation at any sizable workplace. How you choose to communicate does impact team productivity and is definitely a factor in promotions, continued employment, etc. I don't hire you to do solo work - I hire you to produce results while collaborating with other people. And communication styles do impact how well you will collaborate with people.

Comfort can be good or bad, I don't see it as a property worth examining. Working solo or collaboratively is a fine line, at the end of the day everybody does the work by themselves, you are hired for your individual skills at a particular task. The collaboration aspect is half the job and that half is not worth slavery to a language form for the sake of micromanagement.

Your communication style is not working with me. I don't see the value of your ideas on this topic. The value of the ideas should be self-evident because we are talking about how to communicate. Who's responsibility is that?

Sociology has been dealing with the fundamental attribution error for fifty years. There is little evidence that communicating in any particular style is going to solve problems and instead will likely paper over miss-attributed judgments about an individual's character rather than looking at the situation they are in. We have been working together as groups for thousands of years, it's unlikely a new fad book is going to have a solution to 'communication', one of the most fundamental things we do as humans.

If you're a boss it doesn't matter what I say because you can just set the rules however you like, it's not a workplace where I'd choose to work. I would look forward to working with people that want to talk about mission critical issues more than they want (apparently) to spend talking about feelings and structuring sentences.

The only part of your reply that contains non-belittling words is the first sentence where you admit, “I honestly don’t understand your point.”

Splitting hairs.

> And what's with "society today"? When was society any different?

About 20 years speech codes and communication frameworks were mocked openly and treated with scorn (as they should be). Today not so much.

> There are worse things. People take a whole semester course on compilers and most don't use any of that knowledge. The majority of technical courses I took in undergrad were never used for anything at work. The communications workshop has been more valuable than those.

This is a general misunderstanding by people such as yourself why they teach you these things. The first being "this is how this works under the hood" and the second is that many other problems might have similar patterns to them. It teaches you how to think in a particular way and break down problems. But alas this was lost on you.

> And about those bigger problems at work? Try solving them with poor communication.

1) Just speak to people. like adults. 2) Be honest. 3) If someone doesn't seems to know what they mean just say "Does that make sense?" and assume you made an error.

It is very simple.

> Because you have to deal with these people at work. I mean, if you're a solo developer who doesn't work in a team, then your stance is fine. If people don't want to work with you on a project, it becomes your problem. The world isn't going to change to conform to how you thinks adults "should" behave.

It isn't about how I think adults should behave. It how the rest of the world thinks adults should behave. You are there to do a job.

> This is classic way to deny yourself of agency and put the onus on others. I once told a manager of mine to stop using the word "should" - it's a way of saying "I don't want to deal with this - it is someone else's fault".

Not at all. I've accepted there things I can control (myself) and there are things I largely cannot control (other people). You seem to framing this like I go around being verbally abusive to my co-workers.

> And you are willing to disclose this in an interview?

I am a contractor. I am brought in to do specific jobs. I don't spend years working at the same place. If I don't like it somewhere I just don't extend the contract.

I also don't particular respect lifers and company men. But I tend to keep that to myself.

> You conveniently ignored the rest of my comment where the perception this happens is fairly common. No one is acting hostile, but the outcome is similar.

Because the premise was a nonsense.