Marshall Rosenberg: 5 Powerful Lessons on Listening
Marshall Rosenberg gave me one of the simplest relationship questions I know: are my words opening a window, or building a wall?
Les mots sont des fenêtres (ou bien ce sont des murs). Words are windows, or they are walls.
Marshall Rosenberg wrote that sentence – and I had come across it somewhere before I knew who he was or what NVC was. A book list, a recommendation, a conversation. It had stayed with me as one of those phrases that lands before the rest follows.
When I finally read it in 2021 – just one year after discovering Nonviolent Communication in English – I had a specific reason for choosing the French edition. I wanted the phrases. The exact language of empathic listening, in French, so I could try to use them with my children. The six-day intensive NVC course in Montpellier came four years later, in June 2025. The book came first.
Every word I speak to someone I love is either opening a connection or closing it. Not usually dramatically. Not usually with intent. Just – this word was a window, and this one was a wall, and the difference was not always visible until I looked back.
Table of Contents
Marshall Rosenberg, Feelings and Needs
Marshall Rosenberg wrote Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life as the core text – the full framework, the four components, the theory and practice of communicating from observation, feeling, need, and request rather than from judgment, accusation, and demand.
Les mots sont des fenêtres is the companion – shorter, more poetic in its approach, and focused less on the speaking side of NVC and more on the listening side. If the main book asks “how do I express myself without creating walls?”, this one asks “how do I hear what is actually being said underneath what is being said?”
Both are essential. For me, the second was harder – and more transformative.
I can, on a good day, remember to speak from observation and feeling. I can, when I am well rested and not already activated, remember to make a request rather than a demand.
But listening – genuinely listening, without preparing my response, without hearing the words through the filter of my own story, without evaluating whether what I am hearing is reasonable or fair – that is considerably more difficult. This book is about that.
Words as Windows
The central image of the title is deceptively simple.
When I speak from a place of genuine connection – from my actual feelings and needs, from curiosity about yours, from a willingness to be present in the exchange – my words open. They create space between us. You can see through them to what is actually happening inside me, and that visibility creates the possibility of real connection.
When I speak from evaluation, from judgment, from the need to be right or to protect myself – the words close. They become walls. I am on one side, you are on the other, and what passes between us is not connection but negotiation, defence, or distance.
What Marshall Rosenberg is describing is not a set of polite phrases. It is a quality of inner presence that either exists before the words or doesn’t. The words follow from the inner state. You cannot use NVC language to say an NVC thing if the inner state is evaluation and judgment. It comes through.
This is why the practice is so much harder than the theory. I can know all four components – observation, feeling, need, request – and still speak from a place of “I am right and you are wrong” if that is where I actually am inside. The language is the last step, not the first.
The Listening Side of NVC
This is what makes this book feel distinct from the main text, and it is what I needed most.
Marshall Rosenberg describes a quality of listening he calls empathic listening – and he is precise about what it is not. It is not:
- Advising (“have you tried…”)
- Consoling (“I’m sure it’ll be fine”)
- Interpreting (“what you’re really saying is…”)
- Interrogating (“but why did you…?”)
- Explaining (“the reason this happened is…”)
- Evaluating (“you shouldn’t feel that way”)
All of these are things I do in the name of being helpful or supportive. All of them, in Marshall Rosenberg’s framework, are forms of moving away from the other person’s experience rather than towards it. They redirect the attention from their feeling to my response to their feeling.
Empathic listening means staying with the other person – with their feeling, their need, their experience – long enough for them to feel genuinely received. Not solving. Not reassuring. Just present.
This is extraordinarily difficult with the people you are closest to. It is much easier to be empathically present with a stranger than with a partner or a child who is saying something that touches your own fear or guilt.
What We Hear Instead of What Is Said
One of the most useful ideas in this book is the distinction between what someone says and what we actually hear.
When my daughter says “you never listen to me,” I hear criticism. I hear unfairness. I hear the voice of someone who does not appreciate the effort I make. My response comes from those things – from defensiveness, from the desire to correct the record, from hurt.
But Marshall Rosenberg asks: what is she actually expressing? Underneath the accusation – which is the wall, the form her pain has taken – there is almost certainly a feeling (frustrated, unheard, disconnected) and a need (to be understood, to matter, to feel close). If I can hear through the accusation to the feeling and the need, I have a completely different conversation available to me.
“Sounds like you’ve been feeling unheard, and connection with me matters to you” – said genuinely, not as a technique – opens the exchange. “That’s not true, I listen all the time” closes it immediately.
I do not always manage the first one. But I know, now, which direction I am trying to go.
NVC in the Moments That Cost the Most
The places where this is hardest – and where it matters most – are the places where I am already activated.
The argument that is already in motion. The teenager who has said the thing that catches the inner thorn. The conversation with my husband after a long day when both of us are depleted. The moment when I have already lost the patience I intended to keep.
NVC in those moments is not a set of phrases to remember. It is a commitment to pause before the wall goes up – to find the feeling and the need underneath the reaction, both mine and the other person’s, before anything is said.
This is what Thomas d’Ansembourg describes as self-empathy first: you cannot listen to another person’s need if you have not first attended to your own. The NVC listening that Marshall Rosenberg describes in this book is not possible if I am still inside the activated state. The sequence is: notice the activation → find my own feeling and need → then, from that slightly calmer place, listen for theirs.
I have managed this sequence approximately 20% of the time in the last year. This is an improvement on before.
Practical Takeaways
- Before speaking, ask: is this a window or a wall? Not every moment – just the important ones. The ones where connection is the goal and you are about to say something from evaluation or defensiveness.
- Listen for feeling and need underneath the words. When someone accuses or demands, there is almost always a feeling and a need underneath it. Hear for those instead of responding to the surface form.
- Stop solving and start staying. When someone you love is upset, the instinct to advise, console, and fix moves you away from them. Sometimes the most useful thing is to stay with their experience rather than redirecting to your response to it.
- Self-empathy first. You cannot genuinely hear someone else if you are still inside your own activated state. Find your own feeling and need first – even briefly – before trying to be present for theirs.
- Read this book alongside the main NVC text. They do different things. The main book is about speaking. This one is about listening. Both are necessary.
Why This Belongs in Heart
Heart on this blog is about the quality of our closest relationships – the daily work of staying genuinely connected to the people we love, which is harder and more important than most books acknowledge.
This book belongs here because listening – real listening, the kind that makes another person feel genuinely received – is one of the most powerful things you can do for a relationship. Not the listening where you are waiting for your turn. The kind where you are actually there.
It sits alongside Nonviolent Communication (the full framework), How to Talk So Kids Will Listen (the tools in practice with children), Cessez d’être gentil (the honest account of what gets in the way), and The 5 Love Languages (what people need to feel loved) as the Heart reading list on this blog.
Marshall Rosenberg’s work runs through all of it. You can read the others without reading him, but reading him makes all of them deeper.
Words are windows, or they are walls.
I used to build a lot of walls by accident – out of helpfulness, out of the desire to be useful, out of the need to be right. I am building fewer now. Not none. Fewer.
Et toi? Is there a relationship in your life where the conversations tend to close rather than open? I would love to hear what gets in the way – come and share in the Notes from Soph community on Skool or leave a comment below.
Related Notes from Soph: if this relationship repair thread speaks to you, read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, Grit and staying with the practice, or Hope and kinder stories.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
Les mots sont des fenêtres (ou bien ce sont des murs) – Marshall B. Rosenberg
Published 1999 | La Découverte
📚 Amazon.fr https://www.amazon.fr/dp/2707188794/?tag=websitenotesf-21
📚 English edition: Speak Peace in a World of Conflict – Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1892005174/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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