Empathy School

Top 3 Take-Aways from Empathy School

This spring I had the opportunity to attend “Empathy School”. Although a program designed for educators and instructional coaches, the lessons taught are also highly applicable to business and personal life. I’ll list the three main take-aways here.

I want to preface all following statements by saying that it is crucial that this whole process be done authentically both for reasons of operating with integrity and because authenticity is crucial to successful outcomes. I am not advocating for manipulation or trying to make the other party think you are listening to them just so you can achieve your own pre-determined goal. If you care about the people you are speaking with, these tools will help you.

Empathy is about connection.
Empathy is the capacity to understand and communicate your understanding to others. There are four components of empathy:
1. Taking others’ perspectives
2. Recognizing emotion in others
3. Staying out of judgement
4. Communicating understanding of others.

The main action involved in empathy is mirroring.
This means listening carefully and attentively. It helps establish a rapport with others. Important parts of mirroring are making eye contact and repeating what the person is stating and feeling so that they know you understand them.

Avoid empathy blockers.
There are a few actions to avoid if you want to make the person you are speaking with feel heard.
They are:
1. Silver-lining it- Looking for the “good” in a tough situation. There may be a time and place for this, but that time and place is not when someone is first confiding in you.
2. Being a fixer upper- Jumping right into problem solving before listening to the other party and making sure they feel heard.
3. Interrogating- Asking many questions of the other person before mirroring what they are stating and feeling.
4. Stealing the thunder- Changing the topic of conversation to your own feelings or a similar situation in your own life.
5. Sympathizing- Telling the other party you “feel sorry for them”. This can actually be a block to forming the bond necessary to work past conflict. Sympathy is different than empathy. Empathy is what’s required for strong relationship building.

Next time you are in a tough conversation, try employing some of these actions. Validating the emotions of others is important to healing, and allows the conversation to move on to problem solving and a healthy and productive way.

Empathy School is a program hosted by FuelEd. You can check out their website here: https://www.fueledschools.org/about-us