The heart of it
- The Living Work is a practical, embodied practice for leadership and family life, built over twenty-five years on foundations of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and evolved well beyond them.
- It is not a communication technique. The power is not in the model; it is in the shift in the person doing the work. Around ninety per cent of clear communication is self-connection.
- The practice has four moves: the facts, the internal signal, what matters, and the forward step.
- It is not therapy and not self-help. It works in the present, builds a skill base you keep, and never needs anyone to be wrong for someone else to be right.
- You learn it in the room: Leading with Connection, my two-day foundation intensive, runs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
In one breath
The Living Work, defined
The Living Work is a practical, embodied practice for leadership and family life, created by Sydney-based facilitator Shari Elle. Built over twenty-five years on foundations of Nonviolent Communication, which she studied directly with founder Dr Marshall Rosenberg, it goes well beyond communication technique: it changes the place a person's words, decisions and leadership come from. It is taught in a two-day intensive, Leading with Connection, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The question I'm asked most: is this just another communication model?
People usually ask me what The Living Work is while expecting a familiar answer. A framework. A model. Seven steps to better conversations.
I understand the expectation. I just can't honestly meet it.
Because here is what twenty-five years in the hardest rooms has taught me: the power is not in the model. Every leader I have ever worked with has been on the receiving end of a communication model, and most of them can recite one. Almost none of them were changed by it. The real shift, the one that alters what happens in your boardroom and at your dinner table, is a shift in the inner being of the person doing the work.
That is what The Living Work is for. Let me tell you where it came from, and then exactly how it works.
Where The Living Work came from: Marshall Rosenberg, and four feeling words
In 2000, I went to a weekend workshop in something called Nonviolent Communication, on a free ticket, certain I did not need communication training. I ran a consultancy. I had been a top-performing salesperson. Communicating was the thing I was good at.
I was wrong in a way that rearranged my life.
I discovered that weekend that although I meditated and did yoga, I had no language for my inner world. I had about four feeling words: mad, sad, glad, bad. Four. And I saw, with real shock, how much of my life force I had spent arranging the outer world, other people, outcomes, circumstances, trying to get my needs met from the outside, because I could not even name what was happening on the inside.
I booked myself into a nine-day intensive with Dr Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, on a snow-covered mountain in Switzerland, with twenty-one other people. Then I came home and began to teach. I became one of the four original trainers to bring NVC to Australia, and over the twenty-five years since I have taught more than ten thousand people, in every Australian state and internationally, and mentored many of the trainers now working across this country.
I am telling you this lineage for one reason: so you know the foundations are deep. But The Living Work is not the thing I learned on that mountain. It is what a quarter of a century of boardrooms, successions and family tables demanded that learning become.
From NVC to the boardroom: how the work evolved beyond its origins
Marshall was reluctant to take this work into organisations. He worried it would be used to manipulate, and he was not wrong to worry.
I took it there anyway, deliberately, because organisations are where adults spend their lives, and where the cost of disconnection compounds daily. But the work had to change to survive contact with real conditions: hierarchy, deadlines, performance, money. In an organisation, the primary focus is not connection for its own sake. It is connection enough to achieve what you are there to achieve together.
That single reframe changed everything, and it is one reason this work lands with leaders who would run a mile from anything that smelled of a healing circle. The Living Work is unapologetically practical. It exists so that decisions get made, successions complete, and teams do the thing they were assembled to do, with the humans intact and better than intact.
In good company
The foundation this work stands on is among the most respected bodies of work in modern leadership. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, one of his first acts was to ask his senior leadership team to read Nonviolent Communication. William Ury, co-author of Getting to Yes, called it "one of the most useful books you will ever read". Jack Canfield put it more strongly: "Nonviolent Communication can change the world. More importantly, it can change your life." That is the ground Shari Elle trained on, directly with its founder. The Living Work is where she has taken it.
“It's like tuning the dial on a radio station. You start to pick up a whole different frequency, and perceive underneath what was previously appearing.”
— Shari Elle, creator of The Living Work
The four moves of The Living Work: facts, signal, what matters, forward step
The practice itself moves through four steps. They are simple to say and a life's work to embody, which is the correct ratio for anything that actually changes people.
The facts
What actually happened, stripped of interpretation. Not "he undermined me in the meeting" but "he spoke while I was speaking, twice". Krishnamurti called the ability to observe without evaluating the highest form of intelligence, and I have watched that one skill alone dissolve arguments that had run for years. Most conflict is not a disagreement about reality. It is two interpretations, each mistaken for reality, colliding.
The internal signal
What you actually feel. We are sentient beings; we are meant to feel, even in the workplace, and pretending otherwise does not make the feeling go away. It sends it underground, where it leaks into tone, decisions and health. A real feeling word, not a disguised accusation. There is a difference between "I feel frustrated" and "I feel ignored", and the second one is not a feeling. More on that in another article.
What matters
Beneath every feeling is a need: the qualities of life that make life worthwhile. Respect. Contribution. Security. Meaning. Needs are where human beings stop being opponents, because at the level of what matters, there is less separation between us than you would ever guess from the argument. When I say the work gets to the heart of things, this is the layer I mean.
The forward step
A clear, doable request or action. Because we are in physical form, insight is not enough; we actually have to take action. The forward step is how trust gets rebuilt, including trust in yourself. Take the step, and something in you re-remembers that what matters to you matters.
The four moves of The Living Work
The facts
What actually happened, free of judgment
The internal signal
What I actually feel
What matters
The need underneath
The forward step
A clear request or action
Self-connection: the ninety per cent of clear communication
Now the part that is mine, and not Marshall's, and the reason I say The Living Work goes beyond its origins.
After twenty-five years of teaching the four moves, here is my honest accounting: around ninety per cent of clear communication is self-connection. Being grounded in your own body, connected to your felt sense and to what you care about, before you speak or listen.
When I am self-connected, it almost does not matter what words I use. People hear me, because the place the words come from is already aligned, and human beings read that place with frightening accuracy. We communicate in energy before we communicate in language. Every one of us has sat in a meeting where the words were impeccable and the room believed none of it.
And when I am not self-connected? Then my problem-solving is rearranging deck chairs. My feedback comes out sideways. My empathy is a technique, and everyone can tell.
This is why The Living Work is embodied practice, not information. You cannot read your way to self-connection any more than you can read your way to fitness. You practise, in the room, on real situations, until the way back to yourself becomes a path you can find under pressure.
Power from within, not power over
There is a structural insight underneath all of this, and leaders tend to feel it land physically when I say it.
Hierarchy is not the problem. Hierarchy can be clean and efficient. The problem is conflating structure with command-and-control power, what I call power over: getting things done through positional force, compliance and quiet fear. Power over drains energy from everyone in the system, including the person at the top, who is usually the loneliest and most exhausted human in the building.
The alternative is not softness. It is power from within: natural, grounded authority that does not need anyone else to be small. People follow it without being made to. If you have ever worked for someone like this, you have never forgotten it. The Living Work is, at its core, the practice of becoming that person.
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What The Living Work is not
Three honest boundaries, because clarity serves everyone.
It is not therapy
We work in the present, on real situations, building a skill base you keep. Nothing gets pathologised and nobody is the patient. People often find old wounds healing anyway; that is a by-product, not the product.
It is not self-help
There is no affirmation, no manifesting, no vocabulary you would be embarrassed to use in a board meeting. The work is relentlessly practical, and it is done together, which is where self-help tends to quietly fail.
It is not a communication model
This is the misunderstanding I have spent years correcting, including on my own old website. Models live in the head. This work lives in the body and between people, and the difference is everything.
The Living Work and NVC, in one breath
How they relate
The Living Work stands on the foundations of Nonviolent Communication and evolves them for the real conditions of leadership and family life. Shari Elle trained directly with NVC founder Dr Marshall Rosenberg and was one of the four original trainers to bring NVC to Australia. Where classical NVC centres connection, The Living Work centres connection enough to achieve what you are there to achieve together, and adds its defining emphasis: ninety per cent of clear communication is self-connection.
Tuning the radio: what actually changes when you do this work
People ask me what changes when someone does this work, and the truest answer I have is a radio.
You have been listening to one station your whole life: the station of positions, arguments, right and wrong, who did what. The Living Work is like tuning the dial. Slowly, then suddenly, you start picking up a different frequency, the one that was broadcasting underneath the whole time. What people actually feel. What they actually care about. What is actually being asked for beneath the complaint, the silence, the sarcasm.
Once you can hear that station, you cannot unhear it. Meetings change, because you respond to what is really being said. Your family changes, because the people you love finally feel met rather than managed. And you change, because you can find your way home to yourself in the middle of the storm, and lead from there.
I watched this happen to a senior McKinsey consultant, a man whose profession is judgment, brilliantly applied. He arrived fluent in assessment and diagnosis, of markets, of organisations, and, less usefully, of every human in his life. What changed him was discovering the layer under his own verdicts: what he actually felt, what he actually needed. Within months he had traded judgments for real requests and real agreements, at work and at home, and he described the difference the way people describe getting glasses: not new objects, the same world, suddenly in focus.
That is The Living Work. Not better words. A different frequency.
Your forward step
This week, before one difficult conversation, take two minutes alone and answer one question honestly: what is it I care about in this situation? Not what you want to say. What you care about. Then walk in carrying the answer. Notice what happens to your words when the place they come from is clear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Living Work the same as Nonviolent Communication?
No, though it stands proudly on NVC's foundations. I trained directly with Dr Marshall Rosenberg and was one of the four original trainers to bring Nonviolent Communication to Australia. The Living Work is what twenty-five years of practice in organisations and families evolved that foundation into: an embodied leadership practice whose emphasis, self-connection as ninety per cent of clear communication, is my own.
Who created The Living Work?
I did, Shari Elle, a CNVC Certified Trainer based in Sydney, over twenty-five years of working with more than ten thousand people, with leaders and teams inside organisations including CommBank, CSIRO, PwC and Sydney Water, and with families navigating wealth, succession and legacy.
Where can I learn The Living Work?
In the room, at Leading with Connection, my two-day foundation intensive, which runs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. It is where everyone starts, and it costs $1,200 inc GST, with a $600 rate to bring a colleague, partner or friend.
Ready to learn The Living Work in the room?
Leading with Connection runs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. $1,200 inc GST.
Shari Elle
CNVC Certified Trainer, creator of The Living Work. Based in Sydney, working with leaders, organisations and families across Australia and internationally. Shari was one of the four original trainers to bring Nonviolent Communication to Australia and has taught more than ten thousand people over twenty-five years.