Speaking as someone with hundreds of hours of NVC training, practice and teaching others, my take on this so-called NVC Coach is that it could be helpful for teaching some basic generic communication skills, but it is no NVC expert, and not a very good coach. It missed some major opportunities on both of those counts. First, you identified yourself to the NVC Coach as a beginner. That should have been a cue to give a brief introduction to NVC, which could have been done in less than a minute. Next, the tool prompted you to express observations and needs. That's just part of the model -- the complete NVC model is observations, feelings, needs, and requests. The coach didn't say *why* it was prompting you to use only observations and needs. Without a more complete overview of the basic model, the client and listeners could come away thinking NVC consists of just observations and needs.
At the end, the tool suggests that you say to the woman, "I understand you're only going to be gone for a minute, BUT (my italics) I'm still concerned that someone who really needs the space might arrive while you're inside." A popular quote from Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NVC, is, "Never put your 'but' in someone's face." So I can't imagine that an experienced NVC coach would suggest that sentence. Also, feeding someone a line to say as a first response, especially a not-strictly-NVC line, does not "teach you to fish." In other words, it does nothing to help you develop the skills needed for practicing NVC yourself. An experienced NVC coach would have guided you to make an "empathy guess" that tuned into the other person's feelings, not to utter an intellectual understanding of the woman’s "only gone for a minute" strategy. An experienced NVC coach might have asked something like, "What do you think the woman who parked in the handicapped spot might have been feeling and needing?" This would have given you, the client, the opportunity to develop the inquiry muscles needed to practice NVC. If you were struggling or unable to do that, the tool might have prompted you to ask yourself what *you* might be feeling and needing if you yourself made a choice to park in a handicapped spot. If you really couldn't come up with anything, the tool might offer an example empathy guess that you could say to the woman like, "Are you feeling stressed and wanting some ease in your day?" Instead, it gave you a pseudo-NVC sentence to parrot.
Finally, the tool could have asked you if you wanted some empathy for yourself around this situation. That would have both modeled the skills of issuing empathy guesses, and also helped you, the client, get into a mindset of receptivity and capacity for empathizing with the woman who took the parking space, and crafting a more effective NVC response.
All in all, the tool missed a huge opportunity to offer true NVC coaching to you, the client who identified himself as a beginner. In its current incarnation, this NVC Coach has so far presented as a rank amateur at NVC itself. I’d give it a D+, maybe a C- on a good day. It might still be useful for someone to increase their basic communication skills, but not to develop true expertise or even basic literacy in NVC. That tool would need a lot more training for that.
