In the Nonviolent Communication community, there is a certification program to become a certified NVC trainer through the Centre for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC). We are not associated with CNVC, though our work is designed to support their goals.
In practice, we see several helping professions accessible to people with NVC skills that are not recognized. Our main purpose is to increase recognition of these roles, help people gain the skills and confidence to help people in those roles, help connect people who need help with people who can help them, and help people with those skills to financially thrive using their NVC skills so they can work towards a social change effort full-time. Harmonic Mediation Society (HMS) was created in part as a governing body to provide a certification path for these professions, a record of certification for practitioners, and support for practitioners.
These NVC-based helping professions and certifications are:
1) Empathic Listener, where practitioners listen and reflect and help people connect with their feelings and needs.
2) Connection Guide, where practitioners help people to prepare for difficult conversations.
3) Harmonic Mediator, where practitioners help two or more people to deeply understand each other and reach agreements.
We also are designing these courses with the intention of applying for certification as continual education credits for other professions, such as coaches and therapists, as applying these skills to those professions has historically made practitioners better at their jobs. This will also bring help the spread of NVC into these professions and to their clients.
Our board includes certified CNVC NVC trainer, John Kinyon, who has been teaching these skills for 20 years. We are in the process of converting his training programs into robust certification programs that align with these three professions. The certification program requires that students can demonstrate understanding and application of the skills being taught to become certified and includes a practicum, feedback, and mentorship to support their abilities and grow their skills.
HMS certification candidates will also be taught marketing and business skills and will be supported in growing a sustainable business.
John Reel
Sometime early last year, a client asked me for a flowchart to aid them in having a difficult conversation. "No problem", I thought. However, every time I tried, it devolved into chaos as I tried to account for all the possibilities.
Ever since, I've been working on a deck of communication cards to aid people in having connecting conversations about difficult topics. They have gone through many redesigns and revisions in that time and we now have two decks totalling 50 cards.
The "Mutual Understanding and Agreements Deck" aids people in sharing, listening, reflecting, and coming up with agreements to meet everyone's needs together. (I was quite giddy when I found a way to shoehorn the steps of our needs-aware doable agreement checklist to use the acronym, "P.L.E.A.S.E.", which fits well into the concept of agreements as requests.)
The "Healing and Reconciliation Deck" adds extra cards for more emotionally challenging conversations, including a set of cards to handle difficulties that come during a conversation and a set of exercise cards to help people connect empathically with themselves and others.
Each card has a QR code, which will bring people to coaching videos and options for support from people who have gone through our programs as certified Empathic Listeners, Conversation Prep Guides, and Harmonic Mediators.
My vision is that we will encourage clients to buy or print out the deck. Then as we help them in through pre-mediations and mediations, we will guide them to use the deck, for example, we might say, "It looks like something just shifted. Which orange card might help right now?"
The goal is that this will help people to gain the ability to navigate these conversations on their own instead of being dependent on us. They can still seek our assistance when conversations are more challenging than they can handle without support. (I'm confident there are way more people who need our help than there people trained in this style of mediation, so we'll still have enough clients to be sustainable even as we help them gain independence.)
These will soon be available as a professionally printed deck with an optional donation for HMS at purchase, or as a by-donation PDF download people can print at home.
Current status: Final kits are being sent to the printers this week.
The Wheel Of Life is one of the first tools I encountered when I trained to be a relationship coach and is known by coaches worldwide.
For context, I asked ChatGPT if it could pinpoint the origin of the Wheel Of Life. Here is what it shared:
The Wheel of Life is a popular coaching tool used to help individuals evaluate and reflect upon the balance and satisfaction in different areas of their lives. While the precise origins of the Wheel of Life as it's used in contemporary coaching are somewhat nebulous, the concept of representing life in a circular form has ancient roots.
1. Buddhism: One of the earliest representations of a "Wheel of Life" is found in Buddhism, where it's known as the "Bhavachakra." This wheel represents the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth, and the various realms of existence. While not directly related to the coaching tool, the idea of life being a wheel or cycle is an ancient one.
2. Modern Coaching: The modern adaptation of the Wheel of Life as a coaching tool likely came into prominence in the latter half of the 20th century, as life coaching and personal development fields began to take shape. The wheel is divided into various segments that represent different areas of one's life, such as health, career, relationships, finances, personal growth, recreation, and so on. Individuals rate their satisfaction in each of these areas, and the visual representation helps them identify where they might want to focus their efforts for improvement.
3. Paul J. Meyer: Some credit Paul J. Meyer, the founder of the Success Motivation Institute in the 1960s, with popularizing the Wheel of Life in the context of personal development. Meyer's work laid the foundation for many contemporary personal development and coaching methodologies.
While the exact moment when the Wheel of Life was first used as a coaching tool is difficult to pinpoint, its widespread adoption can be attributed to the rise of the coaching industry in the latter half of the 20th century. The wheel's simple visual representation makes it an effective tool for quickly assessing and reflecting on life balance and satisfaction.
How the Wheel Of Life connects to Harmonic Mediation and our strategic plans:
Our approach to spreading the skills of conflict resolution is to combine coaching with NVC-based mediation.
For example, the kits that we are about to release for couples starts with a Wheel Of Life to assist couples in identifying things they appreciate about their relationship and want to improve about their relationship. Then, the Mutual Understanding and Agreement card deck and coaching videos create a structure for those discussions based in Harmonic Mediation.
I have also begun developing an app version of this kit. I started with the Wheel Of Life as it was the hardest part of the user interface to develop. The image here is from that app.
The plan is to reach out to Coaches, Counsellors, and Therapists through a LinkedIN outreach campaign to offer this tool for free to help their clients, perhaps with a paid tier in the future.
The goal is for this to act as a lead-generation method to bring these professionals into our certification program and their clients into our communication coaching programs.
Planning way ahead, I reached out to the owner of the WheelOfLife.com domain two years ago with the hopes of buying it as it appeared to be abandoned, but did not receive a response. It recently expired and I acquired it at auction on September 27.
I'm tremendously excited to own this domain-defining domain name. I anticipate that hosting this app at WheelOfLife.com will aid in increasing discoverability and increase perceived authority as the definitive app to use, all of which will bring more people into Harmonic Mediation.
Our plan is to spread the skills of Harmonic Mediation by focusing on specific types of people who are in conflict with marketing and messaging that speaks to their situations, as opposed to marketing NVC or Harmonic Mediation.
The first group we are reaching out to is couples in conflict. They represent a readily accessible market, who know they need help, are looking for help, and have a very short sales cycle when compared to other markets such as working within corporations.
Our plan is to build a pre-launch list through the Google Ads grant, offer our relationship kit for couples for free or as a professionally printed kit, offer weekly workshops for couples to train them to use the kit, offer paid support groups, and connect them with people who have gone through our certification program for additional one-on-one support.
We are currently working on getting the ads to function.
The relationship kit comprises of the Thrive Decks referenced above and two log books to help people prepare for conversations and log their agreements afterwards. These are all complete and in final review, so they will be available soon.
In partnership with the head of the fastest-growing department a leading Canadian college, we are planning a certification program to bring Harmonic practices into workspaces.
The program will focus on topics like group-informed decision making, Harmonic conflict resolution, emotional safety in the workplace, leading from the heart, team empathy, and more.
We are planning the structure to use in a pilot program with a few organizations that we're already in talks with.
By connecting with people in the workplaces with this unique workplace program, our Harmonic practitioners can support those employees in the workplace and as a whole person, with our Harmonic Couples program, Harmonic Parents, etc.
Once we have this program up-and-running, we will also add a specialization certification training program to train Harmonic Workspace trainers.
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