Nonviolent Language and Communication

Does your language normalize violence?🧐

Weaponized, violent, and militaristic language is ubiquitous in professional contexts:

📍Bullet points
📍Hitting targets or benchmarks
📍Gun metaphors like “I’m shooting for” or “give it a shot”
📍Military metaphors in health care, such as “fighting cancer” or “the war on Alzheimer’s”
📍”Take a stab at it”
📍”Killing it”
📍”Diehard” - originally referred to those who struggled the hardest when they were hanged.
📍”Meeting deadlines”

Does that last one surprise you?

The origin of the word deadline is typically traced to the inhumane conditions in Confederate prison camps in the 1860s. Prisoners were subject to hunger, overcrowding, violence and disease – conditions which killed thousands of people. Desperate Union soldiers held captive in Confederate prisons were shot for crossing a “dead line”—a line drawn around or within a prison, sometimes imaginary or marked by stakes, fencing, or a trench.

I now use the terms “due date” or “deliverable” instead of deadline.

👉🏽Militarized and weaponized language desensitizes us to violence and degrades our capacity for authentic connection and inclusion.

👉🏽What are you doing to embrace nonviolent communication on your team?