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, have to depend on others. In becoming leaders, we can sometimes 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.

Forgetting to work on your interactions with others is a mistake; the core of being more successful (at a skill, as a leader, at being happy, at anything), is being empathetic. We need to work on empathy.

Empathy is a skill that is at the top of the list of things that one must learn so that one cane practice becomes even more important as you succeed and propel yourself above your peers.

Misconceptions:

Let’s dispel a few ideas. One of the major misconceptions surrounding empathy is that it means you feel sorry for, or agree 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 takeaway 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 than 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 that 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 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 an obvious bias and is 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. The point is that you’re not going to convince anyone, even if your message is well-stated, well-informed, and unconfrontational.

On the other hand, if you’re commenting and writing a long diatribe in agreement, you’re just as bad. You’re definitely not doing anything constructive. You’re word vomiting in a room full of people guaranteed to agree with you. This is a waste of time. Echo chambers are toxic too.

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, or 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, 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, 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 well-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. In order to train empathy, we must curate material for us to examine critically.

Kids are taught empathy.

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 their actions affect other people and in turn how certain things make others feel.

I am a father of three. I continually go through this process with my children. But what do you do as an adult to sharpen your empathy? I myself am a caring individual, but I am crass at times. In my day job, I have led hundreds of 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.

Can adults further train empathy beyond what they learned as kids?

It’s more difficult to train empathy as adults. We have so many preconceived notions and habits. Much of our emotional intelligence is wired deep due to how we were raised. 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.

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 is 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 the source. 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 the entertainment value that there is still a large contingent of people that believe in ‘Flat Earth’. While this is preposterous (from the standpoint of science)…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.

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.

In general, prepare to let go of that which does not actually matter from day to day. That is all part of keeping an open mind.

2.  Read a lot.

Read fiction 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 of people in real life (even though writers would say the people in real life are the archetypes of the characters). Make sure you’re reading outside of your comfort zone to help understand the perspectives of people who are not like you. Reading fiction enables you to live other lives.

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 a DISC profile or a Myers-Briggs Assessment, you can learn a lot. I took a leadership seminar once 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 of 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 of the management team under me. This allowed me a clearer understanding of their motivations. I learned how each person came to their conclusions and the best way to play to the strengths of that personality type.

I’ll also say that I’m an INTJ with the Myers-Briggs assessment and similarly found the results interesting.

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. 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 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 further and say do it for someone that you don’t even like. I don’t mean hate (hopefully there are 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.

5. 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 try to maintain a healthy streak on Headspace and it has had beneficial and life-changing effects. By being mindful, you are helping to give yourself the space to consider new ideas.

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 than yours, and it’s something that is not a direct question of morality, ask questions and listen. You don’t have to agree. It means figuring 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. There are limits of course. If a person is being abusive, then it is absolutely okay to walk away, however, even in these situations, I like to listen to figure out the “why” someone ended up the way they did if only to prevent it from manifesting in my own life in other ways.

6. Journaling

Keeping a journal is an excellent way to give perspective to the things you experience. Writing our experiences down is useful for remembering and reinforcing important lessons as well as putting situations in perspective. I get a kick out of reading a journal entry from years ago as can track my own growth. There’s no right way to journal; just get some paper, and write about your day, or even a stream of thought.

NOW GO PRACTICE!

All of these activities can help build up the all-important skill of empathy. If we all worked to understand each other more completely, I have no doubt we could overcome anything that divides us and potentially prevent toxic behaviors from manifesting in our society. Go put in the work.