Cultivating and Leading with Empathy
At some point we have all either been in a position to offer and provide support to someone else or we may have needed to seek out help and guidance ourselves. The sole nature and dynamic of your relationship with someone can determine the level of trust you have with that individual. Your decision depends on this trust to seek their support as a friend, relative, peer, teacher, or maybe even a co-worker.
Fostering and tightening your relationships involves creating bonds that uphold connection through trust, belongingness, and compassion.
We seek these relationships and connections so that we can have people to lean on through the difficulties of life and to rejoice and celebrate with us in our victories.
We might ask and wonder how we can create, strengthen, or rekindle my relationships with others?
Empathy can be acted on in many ways, but the end goal is always similar. Our capacity to empathize with others and genuinely support them in a way that echoes and aligns with what they are going through is what helps to forge bonds in our relationships, even when meeting someone new.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feels, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicitly manner.” Although long and detailed, the definition of empathy provides insight into the complex action of being empathetic with others because it goes beyond simply “walking in someone else’s shoes.” Before diving deeper into what empathy is, let’s first consider what empathy is not.
Empathy is not to be confused as a feeling or emotion. We wouldn’t typically say “I feel empathy” or that “he is feeling empathy for his friend.” While empathy involves many kinds of emotions and feelings, it is considered more of a skill that can be exercised and used regularly.
Our feelings and the emotions of the other person inform how we go about demonstrating empathy with them, meaning that the context and background of the event/moment when we use our empathetic capacity factors greatly in how the other person may perceive our willingness to support them.
“Empathy isn’t just a trait. It’s something you can work on and turn up or down in different situations.”
How we use empathy with someone may look different given the circumstance we find ourselves in at the moment. Like brushing our teeth, someone wouldn’t use empathy once and say they’ve mastered it or assume that the problem is fixed.
Empathy is a daily action and occurrence in our lives in how we connect with people through experiences, emotions, and feelings and encourages us to go beyond just offering pity for the other person.
Empathy is not synonymous with sympathy or pity. Some people might frequently mix up empathy with sympathy. Simply put, sympathy involves understanding and maybe even feeling bad, sorry or pity for the difficulties or struggles of the other person but focusing on your perspective of the dilemma. This is like saying, “I’m sorry that happened to you but it could be worse.”
Empathy means attempting to understand the other person’s feelings and thoughts through their perspective and without judgment. In action, empathy means sharing your observations, gently asking for clarification, letting the other person know how you are understanding their struggle, and maybe the same thing happened to you.
In practice this is observing, “I noticed this morning that you seemed upset, and you didn’t say much during lunch today. I might not know what to say, but I’m happy to listen if you want to share.” Empathy invites us to build mutual trust and respect with the other person and strengthen our bond and relationship with them.
Here is Brené Brown describing the differences between sympathy and empathy:
Empathy and what we know about it has evolved greatly. Over the years, researchers have conceptualized empathy as comprising two types that complement each other. First, there is affective empathy which is described as the ability to share others’ emotions. Then, cognitive empathy is considered as the ability to understand or infer the emotional experiences of the other person.
These two types are not mutually exclusive. They coexist together.
To help you recall what empathy is and why it matters, I encourage you to consider using the MUSIC method. Each letter in the word music helps demonstrate a component of empathy in our lives:
(1) Moving away from judgment;
(2) Using perspective;
(3) Sensing emotions;
(4) Imparting your understanding;
(5) Connecting with other people.
Think of a song that provokes strong memories for you. Maybe it’s a song that reminds you of someone special. Perhaps it’s a song you listen to every morning on your way to school or it might be a song you listened to the first time while on vacation. It could be a song a relative introduced you to at a family gathering.
Whatever the tune, like all songs, empathy provokes strong emotions for us and the other person. Think music when you see someone being empathetic or when you are engaging in empathy with a friend.
Like music, empathy can help people connect and build community with each other.
How and when we learn about empathy is different for each person. You may have learned about empathy during an English lesson, in a conversation with a relative, or during a session with a school counselor or social worker.
Despite how you came across empathy for the first time or how you make sense of the term, researchers from Harvard University have found that learning about empathy in the classroom has encouraged students to develop better understanding of course concepts, show better social behavior and relationships amongst their peers and staff, become better communicators, and demonstrate an increase in classroom engagement and academic achievement.
The 21st century innovated how we learn about empathy. Fernanda Hernadez from Stanford University used virtual reality to simulate an experience where people recognized the challenges and dilemmas for people who are unhoused. The VR experience was a 7-minute video called Becoming Homeless. Hernandez and colleagues found that participants were more likely to have positive attitudes and an increase in their empathetic capacity toward people who are unhoused as compared to participants who completed other tasks besides the VR experiment. It’s worth noting that on the Becoming Homeless official website they state, “While this 7-minute journey does not come close to the immense burden of living without a home, researchers continue to find that VR experiences can be a powerful tool to help put oneself in the shoes of another.”
Learning about empathy can sometimes be brief, but the action of being empathetic requires an intentional commitment to ourselves and the other person.
We must accept that our empathetic capacity will expand over time.
Here are two other ways that students and schools can learn about empathy and expand their empathetic capacity. First, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence partnered with HopeLab and Reliable Coders to create the Mood Meter App which allows users to keep track of their emotions daily and reflect on them.
The app categorizes 100 emotions into four quadrants (meaning 25 emotions per quadrant), and they each represent a different mood:
Red: emotions are unpleasant and high in energy, like anger, frustration and anxiety
Yellow: emotions are pleasant and high in energy, like excitement, joy and elation
Blue: emotions are unpleasant and low in energy, like boredom, sadness and despair
Green: emotions are pleasant and low in energy, like tranquility, serenity and satisfaction.
The app builds on Marc Brackett and Robin Stern’s research published in the book Permission to Feel. How does this relate to empathy? Before we can expect ourselves to exercise empathy like sensing someone else’s emotions or understanding their unique perspectives, we must first understand our own emotions and perspectives.
The Mood Meter App may be helpful with expanding your emotion vocabulary by naming your feelings periodically and reflecting on how your emotions show up in your day-to-day as well as how they interact with how you connect with other people through empathy.
Empathy can and will show up in any and all settings you encounter: from an after-school activity to your English class.
Here is another example of engaging with our empathetic capacity. Narrative4 is a global non-profit that partners with high schools, universitates, companies, etc. to facilitate workshops that aid in empathy awareness and team building. Narrative 4 founded the idea of the story-exchange, which is the workshop they facilitate.
In a story-exchange, participants are presented a handful of different prompts they can reflect on:
tell a story about an experience that changed your perspective or altered your understanding about something important to you;
tell a story about a time when you wanted to give up on something and found a way to make it work;
tell a story of a powerful, vivid memory that’s meaningful to you;
tell a story of a time when you realized how much community mattered.
Participants are then paired up and have five minutes to share their story with their partners. After each partner has shared, participants will then return to the larger group and have the opportunity to share their partner’s story in first-person. This is why it is called an exchange of stories. The activity requires establishing appropriate group norms and encourages attentive listening, perspective taking, and providing feedback. These are elements of expanding our empathetic capacity.
Once everyone has shared their story, the facilitator will open discussion to reflect on how the activity was encouraging, challenging, novel, etc. As published on their website, research on this exercise from University of Chicago and Yale University shows that participating in a story-exchange increased levels of cultural competence and classroom engagement, improved communication skills and decreased intra-school conflict, and aided in encouraging positive relationships between students and teachers.
These are just two of many empathy-building activities out there! I encourage you to venture out and find more.
Alfred Adler was an Australian medical doctor and psychologist, and he cited, “Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.”
Empathy requires us to be attuned with our senses, thoughts, and emotions so that we can empower and strengthen our relationships in life.
- Oscar A. Guzmán, School Counselor
