A Belo Horizonte company that treats a family argument and a boardroom standoff as the same solvable problem - and hands you the tools to solve it.
Somewhere in Belo Horizonte right now, a team is sitting in a circle that isn't a meeting. No slide deck. No agenda item labeled "alignment." Just people learning, slowly and a little awkwardly, how to disagree without leaving a mark. That is a Viver com Afeto session, and it is a stranger sight than it sounds.
We are fluent in a hundred things and clumsy at the one that matters most: telling another person the truth without wounding them. Viver com Afeto - "living with affection" - is a company built entirely on that clumsiness. Its founder, Laila Tonelli, spent years in public relations, the professional art of managing what other people think. Then she decided the relations most worth managing were the ones happening at her own kitchen table, and in every workplace pretending its conflicts didn't exist.
The pivot is neat enough to be a parable. From corporate communication - the polished, outward-facing kind - to Nonviolent Communication, the inward, uncomfortable kind. One asks how a message lands. The other asks whether you meant it, whether the person across from you feels safe enough to answer, and whether anyone's needs are actually being met. It is a harder product to sell, because it cannot be faked in the room.
"Transformando as relacoes pela comunicacao."
Founded in 2019, Viver com Afeto works across three worlds that rarely share a vocabulary: families, schools, and companies. The insight holding them together is quietly radical. A toddler mid-tantrum, a teenager slamming a door, and a manager avoiding a hard review are all, in the company's telling, the same event - a need that hasn't found words yet. Fix the words, and you don't need the door.
The method has two roots. The first is Nonviolent Communication (CNV in Portuguese), the framework developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg that separates observation from judgment, feeling from story, and request from demand. The second is Positive Discipline, the Adler-and-Dreikurs lineage popularized by Jane Nelsen, which insists that firmness and kindness are not opposites you trade off - they're a single stance you learn to hold at once. Most parenting advice picks a team. Viver com Afeto refuses to.
Viver com Afeto's entire philosophy fits in a single sentence. Not a manifesto - a sentence. Each word is a decision the company claims to make on purpose.
Note: Viver com Afeto is founder-led and deliberately small. Public records also list an early-stage funding figure (reported ~US$100k, 2022); treat financial and headcount figures as approximate.
In-company programs on Nonviolent Communication, collaboration and conflict management - for the meetings nobody wants to have.
Palestras and experiential sessions for companies, groups and institutions, built around doing rather than listening.
One-on-one work on professional relationships, personal relationships, and conscious parenting.
Positive Education and communication programs for educators, students and the families around them.
Facilitated mediation for interpersonal and workplace disputes - a referee who teaches you to stop needing one.
Group experiences that build empathy and listening, minus the trust-fall clichés.
An illustrative view of how the practice's themes tend to split across engagements. Directional, not audited.
A public-relations professional and specialist in corporate communication, Laila Tonelli trained as an educator in both conscious parenting and Nonviolent Communication, including deepening work through The Center for Nonviolent Communication. She founded Viver com Afeto in 2019.
She teaches too. At ENAP - Brazil's National School of Public Administration - she runs a course on Nonviolent Communication for the remote-work era, carrying the practice into the notoriously blunt world of government email.
Her credentials read like a career, but she frames them as a curriculum with no graduation date. Raising her two children, Arthur and Luísa, is, in her own telling, part of the coursework - conscious motherhood as ongoing fieldwork rather than a finished credential.
The through-line is consistent: someone who spent a career shaping outward messages, now teaching people to mean what they say inward, at home, and across the desk.
Laila Tonelli turns a communication philosophy into a working practice in Belo Horizonte.
As distributed work strains communication, the CNV-for-remote-teams course finds its moment - eventually taught through ENAP.
Public records list an early funding figure (~US$100k). Details are limited; treat as approximate.
School-focused programming grows, pushing Positive Education deeper into classrooms and families.
"To promote happiness and a culture of peace through Nonviolent Communication and Positive Discipline."
There is an official "viver com afeto" Spotify playlist. Even the mood of connection gets curated.
Choice, care, dialogue, connection, respect. Most companies need a deck; this one needs a sentence.
Laila deepened her practice through The Center for Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg's own lineage.
The ENAP course drags Nonviolent Communication into public administration - arguably its hardest test.
Return to that room in Belo Horizonte. The circle that isn't a meeting. An hour ago, these people would have swallowed the hard sentence, or thrown it. Now one of them says the difficult thing slowly, names a need instead of a fault, and - this is the strange part - nobody flinches. The door stays open. The relationship survives contact with the truth.
That is the entire product. Not softness, not the absence of conflict, but conflict that no longer costs you the person on the other side of it. Viver com Afeto didn't invent the circle. It just kept showing up until the circle changed what happens inside it - one hard conversation at a time.