Quote
“Observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.”
— J. Krishnamurti, as quoted by Rosenberg, quoted by Marshall B. Rosenberg in Nonviolent Communication · Nonviolent Communication →
Why it was said
Marshall Rosenberg credits this remark to the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti in the chapter on observation, the first of his four steps. He admits that when he first read it, the thought 'What nonsense!' shot through his mind before he realised he had just made an evaluation. No original Krishnamurti source for the line has been traced.
What it actually means
'You sent the report at 6pm' is an observation; 'you sent it late again' is an evaluation, and evaluations are heard as attacks. Rosenberg's method begins by stripping the judgement out of what happened, because an observation gives the other person nothing to defend against and an evaluation gives them nothing else. The line calls this intelligence because it is genuinely difficult: the mind supplies the verdict before the fact has finished arriving.
How to use it
- 1Before a hard conversation, write what happened in terms a camera would record: a time, a count, a quote.
- 2When you hear yourself say 'always' or 'never', replace it with the last three dated instances.