The NoFault Perspective
My Primary Premise about Human Communications is:
Like it or not, admit it or not: emotions drive everything!
Toshiro Kanamori is a teacher whose stlye is grace, whose method is compassion, whose message is Joy, and who instills safety, and promotes the telling the truth of one’s emotions. His method is the NoFault Communication Method in practice without the name.
No Fault Communication™ is the philosophy, art, and science for analyzing and mapping the associations and assumptions between words, the meanings you wed to them, and the emotional undertone that propels them.
Though the rational mind might equate not expressing an emotion the same as not having the emotion, I have found this to be the single greatest fallacy of human interaction. Most of us are afraid of emotion or have been taught to be ashamed of openly showing emotion. Somehow, cold, aloof, or neutral make us strong, or unreadable, and anything less shows us to be weak or out of control. Unless an emotion is deemed a pleasant one, suppression is often an individual’s learned strategy to avoid them. My own experience and beliefs tell me exactly the opposite: it takes tremendous bravery to confront undesired emotions and great strength to resist the seduction of strategies designed to help us avoid confronting ourselves.
For the my purposes with No-Fault Communication ™ (NFC), I suggest that there are three primary categories of attitudes in which we will place our life experiences and beliefs.
The three attitudes toward a situation are:
1) “Oh no, not again;”
2) “Ah what a relief, it is finally out in the open. “
3) “This is wonderful, I’m feeling alive and learning.”
In his book, Future Edge:Discovering the Paradigms of Success, (p. 84) – Author Joel Arthur Barker states: “So far, we understand three principles of the paradigm shifts.
- Paradigms, even as they are successfully solving many problems, always uncover problems that they cannot solve. These problems trigger the search for a new paradigm.
- Paradigm shifters are almost always outsiders—in that they don’t understand the subtleties of the prevailing paradigms and/or have no investment in them.
- Paradigm pioneers will never have enough proof to make a rational judgment. They will choose to change the paradigm because they trust their intuition.”
If we are ever to affect real, lasting, and synergistic change in the workplace, or family, then mechanisms must be put in place to resolve conflict that invite rather than prohibit, intimidate, or control the means by which disagreements are addressed.
When hiding or overriding some painful emotions; those emotions still require energy and attention to keep them in check. That internal distraction is further impacted by the attitude one holds toward “telling ones truth.” Most of us have been taught to be nice or personable or pleasant “don’t say anything unless you can say something positive” which effectively stifles being authentic because we monitor and edit what we say and to whom. Denial of one’s true emotions is to end up pretending one’s way through life. When the habit of pretending is activated in one area of life, it will pervade other area until the pretense is indistinguishable from ones reality. and hence, the distortion of one’s authentic emotion states begin to allude them. They can forget what it means feel their own authentic thoughts and emotions in favor of holding attitudes and behaviors society or their family or even your own inner judge has deemed acceptable or appropriate. “To deny a truth is to give it unstoppable and unrelenting force.”
