Developing Empathy
Empathy. What’s the big deal?
You come into this world alone and you leave this world alone. Between those two points of time though you will likely have to deal with other people. It doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest recluse in the world; at some point you will depend on others.
The biggest titans of industry, the geniuses in the lab, or any leader, to enact their plans, has to use other people. In developing oneself and leading we often times forget this. Personal development means developing the self. We leave the other pesky individuals out of the equation. I am the first one to admit, I prefer to go it alone for most things. When it comes to getting the bigger things done though, I’m afraid I need help.
I’m here to tell you that doing this is a mistake. That at the core of being more successful (at a skill, as a leader, at being happy, at anything), is being empathetic. We need to learn empathy.
Empathy is a skill that is at the top of the list of things that one must learn so that they can become fully developed. This is the a core skill of leadership and something that needs practice. This becomes even more important as you succeed and propel yourself above your peers.
Even Batman (this is a Super Geek Life article after all) has trained his empathy skill in order to get inside the minds of villains he is fighting. Empathy is a hero skill. Like a backflip, mental acuity, or physical strength. I’m not labeling this article as such, but it definitely is. Empathy is one of the great tools in the belt of the world’s greatest detective.
Misconceptions:
I will first dispel some of the misconceptions of empathy. One of the major misconceptions is that empathy means that you are feeling sorry for, or agreeing with a person or their feelings. While this may be the case in some instances, it’s not always. Don’t mistake empathy for sympathy in which you have a common feeling with another person or sorrow for their misfortune.
Empathy as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is:
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
‘The ability to understand’ should be the major take away here. It’s the core of the idea. Your ability to understand what is making other people tick. What their feelings behind an idea are, and why they are what they are.
Again, this is important because if we all got the slightest bit better at this we would likely be far less polarized then we are these days. Empathy is the skill required by the great leader, the great detective, the activist, the politician, and individuals alike.
Classic Scene:
Here is a common scenario. A media outlet which leans a particular way puts out a news article colored through their perspective or political bias (or ambitions). Thousands of people sitting on that side of the argument rally, a minority on the argument comments as well and gets torn to shreds by the majority. First off, yes this sort of commentary is a waste of time. It’s also inflammatory and divisive. It only leads to anger and frustration and solves nothing. I have no idea why anyone comments at all. The people who you are trying to convince will never agree with you in this forum. You aren’t going to convince anyone of anything here.
In fact if you’re doing it on an article that has obvious bias and marketed towards people that don’t agree with your viewpoint, they’re going to label you a troll or an idiot and write awful things until their fingers are bloody nubs. Everyone is brave behind a keyboard. Point being is that you’re not going to convince anyone, even if your point is well stated, well informed, and un-confrontational.
On the other hand if you’re commenting and writing a long diatribe in agreement, you’re just as bad as you’re not doing anything constructive. You’re mentally masturbating to completion in a room full of people guaranteed to agree with you. This is a waste of time.
What would be better?
What would be more interesting and constructive would be for you to actually get an understanding as to why someone ended up thinking the way they do in the first place. To do this you have to empathize with them. Again this doesn’t mean you have to agree with them. It doesn’t mean you have to like them. You can do this with someone who is xenophobic, racist, sexist, prejudiced in any way, even if you are the object of the prejudice. The point is that you can do this with anyone, no matter how different they are from you.
We can better deal with the shark that is trying to eat us if we let ourselves fully understand it (thanks to my dog for illustrating the point, though I hope by better understanding it you don’t get eaten).
This can be hard to do. We are egocentric. Our consciousness forces us to be the center of our own universe. Many of your feelings are hardwired. Setting aside your feelings to comprehend someone else’s isn’t always easy. The larger the dichotomy of the feeling, the more difficult it will be. Yet, if your goal is to come to an understanding, or move past something, or even educate about something so that it is no longer a problem in the future, the biggest step forward is through understanding. Heck, even if your goal is to best your mortal enemy (as in comic book terms) your best bet is to empathize with their motivations to suss out their next move.
Am I saying you should let someone be rude or racist or sexist to you? No, absolutely not. I’m not saying be overly sensitive or a pushover. Understanding is not forgiving or allowing. Understanding is having a full rounded perspective on the causation of a situation.
Coming to this sort of understanding will allow us to systematically root out ignorance and begin to close the divide that has widened over the years.
More grounded examples:
So far I’ve used some extreme examples. Let’s reel it in a little bit. Empathy will also help you as a leader at work. Having people on your team and understanding their underlying motivations from day to day and what makes them tick will allow you to tailor your communications to hit home with them. Understanding what makes each of your players tick on a team will allow you to coach the best performance out of them. Every horse may respond the same way to the same kind of carrot.
Empathy will make you a better partner and friend. Trying to understand the actions and thoughts of your peers make you invaluable to them. If a person feels that you “get them”, you’re going to move up on their list.
For the people that you do agree with and even those that you don’t agree with (for smaller infractions) you must have endless compassion. This well never runs out. Again this doesn’t mean being a wishy washy pushover. It means being a good brother, father, husband, boyfriend, wife, mother, cousin, friend, etc.
You will find that by being there and taking the time to improve your empathy will make you happier.
Can empathy be trained?
Yes empathy is something we can train. I recently read a book, called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson. The book is a very entertaining and meaningful read. Also don’t let the title fool you. The point of the book is not to not care about anything. Rather the point is to pick very carefully what you will care about because of the limited time and energy you have.
Kids are taught empathy
As an aside I started looking into Mark Manson’s blog, and watched some interviews with the guy. In a interview that he did for Facebook someone asked him if empathy was something we could train and his answer was quite succinct. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of it was that we teach empathy to children from a very young age. When a child lashes out at another child we stop them and say “no little Timmy, don’t do that, because you’re making little Suzie feel bad”. We do this enough times until the child has a sense of how his actions affect other people and in turn how certain things make others feel.
I thought that this was poignant considering I am a father of two going through that very same process. Then thought to myself, what do you do as an adult to sharpen your empathy? I myself am caring individual, but I am crass at times. In my day job I lead almost a hundred people with many direct reports. Part of me wants to do this the military way (I was in the Army) and the salty old vet in me feels at times that barking orders and giving no ‘why’ would be easier. I know that this may be easier, but it isn’t more effective in the long run.
*Side note: Mark Manson is the real deal. I actually got a response from him on a holiday weekend after emailing him about a question about his website. The format of the site is great so I asked him what he was using as his Content Management System as I was considering switching mine(an obvious question that I knew the answer to as I was already midway through converting my site to WordPress). I was pleasantly surprised that he answered and so if you read this, cheers Mark, your response to me affirmed a lot of positive things about you and your work. Thank you.
Can adults farther train empathy beyond what they learned as kids?
That said, how then can we train empathy as adults? It’s a difficult task as we have so many preconceived notions already. Much of our emotional intelligence is wired deep due to how we were raised. Not only that but being receptive to this kind of learning is almost like taking on a new language (something that was also much easier to learn as a small child).
I’ve been doing a lot of research and I’ve come up with a few things that will actually make you sharpen your empathy knife. All these activities are not things that I’ve made up, but taking a few or all of them and putting them in your toolbox may make you, (or your organization) more effective when it comes to dealing with the folks around you. Some may seem obvious but keep an open mind.
The Empathy Building Toolbox:
1. Keep an open mind.
I mentioned this above, but being empathetic and a keen problem solver is all about staying fluid with your notions. That is not to say that you should toss your moral compass to the wind. It is however, understanding that at any moment you could be made wrong by the advent of new information. This is the scientific method. The idea that we are only sure that we are right due to what we know right now. At one point people thought maggots spontaneously generated from rotting meat until microscopes came along and figured out that fly eggs were doing it. There was a point people thought the Earth was flat until new facts came to light. People fought this tooth and nail for hundreds of years until they ran out of logical arguments and the modern view of the world’s shape took hold.
I should note both in seriousness and for entertainment value that there are still a large contingent of people that believe in ‘Flat Earth’. While this is preposterous (as I’m a believer in science and math…see my day job)…I do find the logic fascinating. Heck I’ll even say I could be wrong, it’s just really unlikely that I’ll find any information that will make me revert back to ‘Flat Earth’ thinking. But if that information comes, I’m ready.
That said, if you come across an adult who believes in ‘Flat Earth’, you’re not going to be able to convince them otherwise, so ask questions, don’t look down on them but prepare yourself for an entertaining ride and a good story to tell later. This is a great example of how to deal with someone who is espousing an idea that you can’t get behind but also is not offensive. Just let it go!
Water off a duck’s back. Prepare yourself to let go that which does not actually matter. That is all part of keeping an open mind.
2. Read a lot.
Read classic literature to better understand the human condition. Great fiction is a safe and important place to explore the spectrum of the human condition. The more you read, the more characters you know. It doesn’t matter what setting the story takes place in, the characters will become archetypes for people in real life (even though writers would say the people in real life are the archetypes for the characters).
Read about leadership and emotional intelligence. I recommend reading the classics like Dale Carnegies “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”. These books show the evolution of thought in leadership and how to deal with people in a leadership situation.
Read Tony Robbins’ “Awaken the Giant Within” to start building a blue print and understanding how you react with your emotions. Understanding how you use emotions and react to certain situations and how others do is a remarkable tool. Learning how you leverage your emotions and how that mixes with other people’s emotions can create a powerful playbook in life. Read the Mark Manson book I mentioned above. It does the same thing that much of the Tony Robbins’ book does while sparing you the overly positive self help guru platitudes.
There are a plethora of good books on these subjects. Just get out there and pick one and start reading. Then once you finish, grab another. The good stuff will get reinforced over and over again and the bad stuff will be overwritten.
3. Take a Personality Assessment
I’m not one to say that any one is better than the other and I’ll be the first to say there is no one size fits all with these assessments but they can still be useful and insightful. Whether you take DISC profile or a Myers-Briggs Assessment you can learn a lot. I took a leadership seminar recently and went through a full DISC assessment during the first third of it.
Full disclosure, I found out that I was a DIC (pun intended, and all my compatriots were sure to remind me this as well). What this means is that my D and C were high, only second to the I which was also high. What that means is not as important as the fact that the characteristics corroborated how I go about solving problems. Perhaps more important though was learning the profiles the management team under me. This allowed me a clearer understanding about their motivations. I learned how each person came to their conclusions and the best way to working with that personality type.
I’ll also say that I’m an INTJ with the Myers-Briggs assessment and similarly found the results interesting.
*Side note: I also want there to be a Murtaugh-Riggs Assessment which tells me whether I’m the wild card, or the salty old guy who is still packing a punch. I do have to infuse this with Super Geek Life material from time to time. If you don’t understand the reference, disregard it.
The takeaway from this if you get a chance to do one is that you can learn a lot about yourself. If you use that then to make a playbook you can be more considerate of how to best approach other personality types.
4. Some simple activities you can do on your own:
But I don’t want to read any more books, and I can’t do a full assessment. I can’t get to a seminar. All the other excuses why you can’t do the things above.
At least keep an open mind (the first item on my list). There are a few things that you can actually do to practice empathy every day.
Practiced Compassion:
A few times a day, take 10 seconds and wish someone you don’t particularly like happiness. Make it a genuine wish it for them with no caveats. Mean it with all your heart. It’s both difficult and quite easy. Just let it go.
This is an activity that I stole from Tim Ferriss’ “Tools of Titans” in a section which takes tips from Chade-Meng “Meng” Ten (One of the early members of Google and the developer of Google’s mindfulness based emotional intelligence course). Meng does this several times daily for random people that walk by.
I take it one step farther and say do it for someone that you don’t even like. I don’t mean hate (hopefully there’s few people you actually hate). The office lady or guy that gets under your skin. The person you curse because you don’t like how their face looks. A person whose political views disgust you. If you don’t have a person like this then wonderful, you’re ahead of the game, pick random people. If you do though I find that doing this activity will make you happier. You will soften your mental palate in a positive way. You will find out that there aren’t as many people you don’t like as you thought.
Mindfulness:
In the same breath you should also start practicing some sort of mindfulness also. It allows for clarity of thought in the moment. This is a meta skill that improves all other skills, particularly in the emotional intelligence department. I am currently on a 160 day streak from Headspace and it has had beneficial and life changing effects. It has drastically shifted my perspective on many things.
*Side note: I wrote about this early on when I reviewed Headspace. Each month that goes by farther affirms my assessment on meditation.
The last thing is more of a suggestion but it’s important. It’s that you should hold your tongue and listen when someone is talking. When someone is espousing an idea that is different then yours, and it’s something that is not a direct question of morality, ask questions and listen. This doesn’t mean agree. It means figure out how the person came to that conclusion. If you listen and find out that this is something that is hardwired, what good will arguing with the person do? This wasted energy results in nothing but your own frustration. It may also result in a ruined relationship. So listen.
Journaling:
Later on you can address the facts to yourself however you like (maybe work it out in your journal), but while the person is speaking you are on a fact finding mission. Write it all down in your journal and really try and do a root cause analysis of why this person thinks how they do. This is time better spent rather then arguing. People are stubborn. People don’t like to be wrong. Most people won’t admit to it even when faced with overwhelming proof. If you beat your head against a brick wall, will your head or the wall come down first (assuming you’re not the Juggernaut)?
Save your breath, add to your information arsenal and learn your people. Listen, keep an open mind, keep studying, and have endless compassion.
Empathy is a critical tool that needs exercise like any other of our skills. Do it, add it to your utility belt.
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