For EAs, giving honest feedback to a colleague, pushing back diplomatically or raising a concern with someone senior all come down to the same skill: saying the difficult thing without it landing as an attack. Author Tim Duggan draws on a decades-old communication framework that makes that distinction concrete.
Clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg developed an easy but revolutionary communication process in the 1960s and 1970s. During public talks, he’d bring out two animal hand puppets.
In one hand he’d hold up a jackal with brown fur, long pinned-back ears and a ferocious, albeit cartoonish, mouth. In Rosenberg’s telling, the jackal represented someone who is aggressive and dominating in how they communicate. The sort of person who uses moralistic judgement, blaming language and often demands power or punishment.
When the jackal puppet spoke to Rosenberg, his hand jerked angrily as his voice loudly made “bu-bu-bu-bu!” noises towards him, mimicking someone yelling with force. Rosenberg grew up in Detroit, and he joked that he learned to speak “Detroit jackal” before going to university and getting a doctorate in “professional jackal”.
In his other hand was a giraffe puppet with a long, spotted neck, representing the opposite style; what he called ‘language of the heart’.
A giraffe represented his theory of non-violent communication, so named to tie into the growing movement of non-violent resistance – where peace activists like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi popularised action through means other than violence.
Giraffe language (named as its long neck symbolises perspective) is to be aware of other people’s reactions to your words. It stands for compassionate, connection-orientated language that uses empathy as its guiding light.
Using giraffe language
There are four concrete steps to using non-violent communication (or giraffe language) in conversations:
- Make factual observations without judgement
- Identify authentic feelings
- Recognise the unmet universal needs beneath those feelings
- Make genuine requests rather than demands.
Observations are specific, behavioural and verifiable things that are noticed, not just interpretations of someone’s actions.
Feelings are simple and authentic emotions that you feel, not just reflections of someone else’s emotions.
Needs are universal human values, and requests are things that are actionable, that can be responded to with a “no” without resentment or punishment.
To give you an example, imagine you’re working alongside someone. Every time you try to explain something to them or have a conversation, they interrupt you before you’ve even had a chance to finish the sentence.
This is how feedback might typically go in jackal language: “You’re so rude. You always interrupt me and never listen to what I’m saying.”
This is how feedback might go in giraffe language:
- Observations: “The last two times we’ve spoken, I’ve noticed that you often talk before I’ve finished my sentences. I noticed it at least five times in our conversation this morning.”
- Observation lists just the facts, without assigning any judgement or blame. Be really intentional with every word, avoiding interpreting someone else’s actions through your own lens of how you view it. Stick to only things that are verifiable.
- Feelings: “I feel frustrated.”
- Explain what the universal and simple emotions are that you feel. Ensure you get to the bottom of what the real feelings are, instead of words that mask these. For example, instead of saying you feel “misled” or “shunned”, go deeper with words like “sad” or “scared”.
- Needs: “…because I value being heard. When interrupted, I lose my train of thought and forget what I was trying to communicate, and I don’t feel respected. I also notice that I stop contributing new ideas to our conversation.”
- Needs are things you can’t live without, like values, desires or preferences to have a happier life. We’ve all got different needs but many of them are universal and that’s what should be expressed here.
- Requests: “Can you help me understand what’s happening here? Are you excited by what I’m saying and eager to contribute, or is it something else? Would you be willing to try pausing for a few seconds after I speak before jumping in?”
- Phrasing it like this invites your colleague to reflect on their own needs. Any request you ask of someone should be open-ended and genuine.
Building trust
You might not always get the answer you want, so be prepared and okay with any response.
Speaking like a giraffe takes practice. It’s a way of observing what happened, naming how you feel, understanding what you need and asking for something specific instead of lashing out or shutting down.
Using this language is one way of building trust with the other party. Another is to lean into your differences.
Aligning doesn’t mean that your personalities have to overlap. It’s about understanding your strengths, and the other person’s weakness, so you can build your relationship intentionally around them.
