Power, Privilege, Awareness, Kindness, and Action

This edition of Talk It Out Radio is for you if you have power and influence in your life, and if you care about your impact on other people. We all have power – to speak, to act, to create, and to destroy. And yet, some of us have more freedom than others to exercise our power to take care of ourselves and our loved ones. This happens for many reasons.

Guest and Certified Nonviolent Communication Trainer and Ambassador Bob Wentworth and Host Timothy Regan openly explore the realities and challenges that power and privilege create in relationships, families, work places, and beyond.

Our goal is to help reduce the suffering that comes from injustice when power and privilege differences are not addressed. We present specific principles from the practice of Nonviolent Communication that bring awareness, kindness, and useful action for all human relationships where power and privilege differences are present.  Listeners are invited to call in and help us explore this challenging terrain.

Bob Wentworth played a lead role in initiating and supporting the CNVC (Center for Nonviolent Communication) New Future Process, a multi-year community-based process in which the Nonviolent Communication movement was invited to re-envision how it would like to organise itself globally. That process resulted in a plan to assimilate CNVC into a new global NVC organization founded on self-management and evolutionary principles, with a commitment to awareness and care regarding issues of access, power, and systemic marginalization.

Bob once asked himself the question, “Is there a single key that could make a difference in addressing all the world’s problems?” It seemed to him that if we could find ways to more reliably partner to work together, instead of battling or working at cross-purposes, then this could make all the difference. For him, NVC offers some critical pieces of the puzzle, concerning how we can be together in more satisfying ways. NVC powerfully contributes to making new things possible interpersonally (between people), intra-personally (in how we relate to ourselves), and potentially on larger scales (institutionally and politically). At the same time, Bob continues to search for a complete answer to his question. He has spent years looking at issues of trauma and skillfully relating to ourselves, and is also deeply interested in the functioning of groups and institutions.

Bob is a CNVC Certified Trainer, and former CNVC Board member. He co-founded Family HEART Camp, a week-long NVC camp for parents and children, currently active in six states in the U.S. He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Physics, and worked as a technologist before shifting to focus his attention on improving our collective experience of the human condition.

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