The AI Nonviolent Communication Coach skill for Claude

The problem this skill solves almost always starts at the same moment: there is a draft on your screen and you do not send it. You know it is too sharp, but you also know the friendly version achieves nothing, because you have already tried that twice. So it gets put off, and the subject grows. What happens then: the sentences that provoke defensiveness come out, and sentences come back in their place that carry the same content. Not softer, but aimed differently: at what happened rather than at who the other person is.

It is useful for work situations in the broad sense: a colleague who is always late, a manager with whom you want to set a boundary, a client whose email raises your blood pressure, a supplier who stretches agreements. The frontmatter also explicitly names the difficult-news conversation and saying no without damaging the relationship. It is part of the skill library NL that we make available for free from the AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards.

One thing is stated literally in the file, and it is the most important sentence on this page: the skill does not pretend the method changes the other person's behaviour. It changes the chance that you get heard. That sounds thinner than what training courses on this subject promise, and it is exactly what you should expect from it.

Diagnosing the other person. You apparently have no idea what that means for me. That is precisely the sentence the other person reacts to, not the rest of your email. The moment you say something about what is going on in the other person's head, the conversation becomes about that and no longer about the report. Every diagnosis is marked separately and then taken out.

Always and never. Generalisations invite exactly one response: finding the exception. Say 'you always do this' and back comes the one time it was on time last month, and you have lost the conversation over a detail that did not matter. Every generalisation is therefore replaced by a count: over the last three months.

The pseudo-feeling. Ignored, rejected, attacked, manipulated, unappreciated. They sound like feelings and they are not: they are interpretations of what the other person did, phrased in the first person. That is exactly why they provoke the defensiveness you wanted to avoid. Real feelings are words like worried, tense, disappointed, tired, relieved or irritated, and the skill notes in the output which interpretation it removed.

The disguised demand. I expect you to be on time next time. In friendlier words: I would appreciate it if you took this into account from now on. Both are demands the moment no is not an acceptable answer. The difference between a request and a demand is not in the sentence but in what you do when the other person says no. That is the fourth test from FIG.02, and immediately the only one you can only check afterwards.

Too much feeling in text. A rule of its own from the file, and a surprising one: in email and chat, long feeling passages land more heavily than intended. That is why the skill has a short variant in which observation and request are spelled out in full and feeling and need come together in one sentence. For a spoken conversation the opposite applies.

In diff form, with lines from the skill's example: what goes out and what comes back in its place.

After that comes the theory, and it is unusually extensive for a skill file. It explains the four steps, the three confusions that determine whether it works, and the fourth test about the difference between a request and a demand. Then eight fixed steps: first ask about the factual situation and separate it from what the user thinks about it, mark every judgement and every disguised demand, translate pseudo-feelings, look for the need underneath the feeling and test whether it is not a strategy, formulate a request that no may answer, deliver the message in two forms, prepare the user for the other person's reactions, and warn if the situation cannot be solved with a conversation formula.

Before anything is written, the skill runs through a mandatory eight-point checklist: what factually happened, with when and how often, who the other person is and what your relationship is, what you yourself feel in your own words, even if that is anger, what you concretely want to change, whether you have said something before and what happened then, the channel, whether there is a power difference or an ongoing procedure at play, and what the consequences are if the conversation achieves nothing. It only asks about what is missing.

It contains eleven writing rules, from no dashes in running text to no therapy-speak: write it the way someone would say it out loud, not the way it appears in a training handout. And there is a separate review mode: give it an existing email, chat message or conversation note, and you get a version marked up sentence by sentence, a pseudo-feeling check, a demand check, a balance check and a rewritten version. That balance check is striking, because it tests the other direction too: if the text is softened so much that the message disappears, the file treats that as just as big a mistake as an accusation. If you want to learn to build an instruction file like this yourself, writing a SKILL.md NL explains how that structure works.

The file closes with eight things the skill never does and a source list of six titles. Those two lists shape the character of this skill more than all the steps put together, so they get their own place further down this page.

The method comes from Marshall Rosenberg. He described nonviolent communication, usually abbreviated to NVC, in the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, first published in 1999, with later editions in 2003 and 2015. In 1984 he founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication, which publishes lists of feelings and universal needs that you can use alongside this skill. His starting point: people naturally like to contribute to the wellbeing of others, provided they are not pushed onto the defensive. Not a soft assumption, but the entire reason the four steps are the way they are.

The background comes from Carl Rogers. Rosenberg worked in his tradition, and On Becoming a Person from 1961 is listed as a source in the file: on empathic listening and unconditional acceptance. That explains why the skill has a variant in which you apply the four steps to the other person and ask whether your guess is right, instead of starting from your own observation.

The conversation types come from Stone, Patton and Heen. Difficult Conversations from 1999 splits every hard conversation into the facts conversation, the feelings conversation and the identity conversation. This is referenced the moment the core of the conflict is not about what happened but about how someone sees themselves: as a good colleague, a reliable supplier or a good parent. A better formulation does not help there; you need a different conversation altogether.

The high-stakes angle comes from Patterson and colleagues. Crucial Conversations from 2002 is about conversations with big consequences and opposing opinions. Where Rosenberg supplies the language, that book supplies the context: the higher the stakes, the sooner people fall back on silence or attack.

And there is a workbook. The Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook is in the source list, with exercises for the four steps. That fits the character of this skill: the steps are simple to understand and hard to stick to the moment things get tense.

For the organisational side there are related skills in the same library. If it is about giving feedback to someone on your team, the Radical Candor Coach NL is the more direct route in, with situation, behaviour and impact instead of observation, feeling, need and request. If it is about why someone gets defensive before you have even finished speaking, the answer is often status or autonomy, and that is the territory of the SCARF Model Coach NL.

Even without installing the skill you can improve your own email today with these principles: take out the diagnoses, replace always and never with a count, and check whether no is an acceptable answer to what you are asking.

After that, using it is simple: paste in your draft email, or describe the conversation in your own words, including your irritation. The rawer the better, because that is exactly the material the skill pulls the judgements out of. It only asks about what is missing. If you get stuck on the installation itself, the full route is in installing Claude skills NL. If you want to learn to set up this kind of work with your team, that is the subject of our AI training NL.

If you are still in the emotion yourself, the order changes. If you are still angry, it does self-empathy first: the same four steps aimed at yourself, before anything is written for the other person. If the other person is the one who is angry, it does not start with your observation but with a guess at their feeling and need, and it asks whether that is right. In a formal context, such as an appraisal conversation or a file note, it keeps the four steps but notes feeling sparingly and puts the weight on observation and request.

There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone, and the file is unusually explicit about that. For intimidation, threats, discrimination or violence, the skill does not use this method as a solution, but points towards a confidential adviser, a manager, a lawyer or support services. It also gives no advice on forgiving or on staying in a situation, because that is not a communication question. And it refuses to use the four steps as tidy packaging for a demand, which in practice is the most common way this method gets misused.

One more honest limit, and it is stated literally in the file: the method does not change the other person's behaviour, it changes the chance that you get heard. If someone consistently breaks agreements and is still doing it after three conversations, the subject is no longer the delivery but the division of work, and someone else needs to be involved. That is not the method failing, that is the moment the method is done. If the conversation is about a clashing interest rather than a need that is not being heard, the Negotiator skill is the better route in.

If you want to build this more broadly into your business, there are two routes that cost something and deliver something. In the AI training NL your team learns when to put an AI between two people and when not to. And if you want your agreements and your tone to still be known to your AI next month, instead of explaining them again every session, that is Jarvis, from €9 per month including VAT.