Ingredients Of Empathy
What follows is an excerpt from my book, The Art Of Winning Commitment.
Empathy has two ingredients. The first is the experience of stepping into someone else’s emotional world without getting lost in it. A useful metaphor is watching a movie in which we are able to enter the emotional world of the characters on the screen while remaining firmly in our own seats. For example, we, the audience watching Gone With The Wind, know exactly how Scarlett O’Hara feels when she cries, “As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me! I’m going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again – no, nor any of my folks! If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill! As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” We sense both her despair and her resolve.
We also know how Rhett Butler feels when he tells her, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” He is dismissing her, proud of doing so, and quite pleased for the opportunity to let her know about it.
Entering into the emotional world of another person requires a special kind of imagination – a re-membering, a putting back together, which involves returning to our own past feelings, or calling up feelings that are with us but that we do not readily acknowledge or express. This kind of imagination is not merely an intellectual “remembering” but also a return to the sensations that characterize the feeling: we may cry along with Scarlett and nod our heads in concurrence with Rhett. When we re-member we reconnect with a part of ourselves.
As an audience, we are afforded the opportunity to step into the emotional worlds of Scarlett and Rhett by virtue of watching their lives unfold on-screen. We enter their emotional worlds in our imaginations, sensitive to the changing flow of feeling in each of them and re-membering our own feelings. As we watch, we know it is not our emotional world, we know that our participation in it is temporary, and at the same time we know how they feel.
The second ingredient of empathy is the ability to communicate to another person that his or her emotions have been understood and accepted. This communication requires a deep and honest caring about how other people feel, as well as avoiding attempts to minimize the importance of any feeling or to change it either by offering advice or judging it. Many people are unable or unwilling to step into someone else’s emotional world. Sometimes this is because they are separated from their own emotions. Sometimes it is because they fear getting lost in the emotions of others. Empathy requires a kind of emotional fearlessness.
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Tags: empathy
Dick
I’ve been thinking about this since you posted it. It’s just beautiful and I found myself paraphrasing your points to someone else today. May I ask what brought this forward for you?
Dan´s last blog post…Walmart is Us
Thanks Dan. Not sure if you mean what brought this forward right now or when I wrote it for my book, The Art of Winning Commitment, so I’ll answer both.
The book is based on the idea that leaders can engage commitment at different levels–physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual–and that there are different competencies involved for each. When I wrote the book, which is a treatise on how leaders engage others (win commitment) it became clear, through my own experience and the interviews that I did with leaders, that empathy is a crucial competency that leaders must develop if they wish to engage emotional commitment. The post is my attempt to clarify what I mean when I use the term “empathy.”
What brought it up just now was a conversation with a friend about the difference between “sympathy” and “empathy.”
Thanks for asking. Always good to hear from you.
Thank you, Dick. It’s always a wonder to me how the chains of human connection and ideas flower across the social universe. Many years ago, long before she published the poem in book form, Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s famous poem, The Invitation, came to me, a copy of a copy of a copy, from a friend who had a friend who’d been to a funeral where it has been handed out to celebrate someone’s life passing. Just so, in a small way, I read your passage and passed it along to someone who could use it and in turn share it with her whole team. Who knows the life of thoughts and of great writing? They always seem to have a life of their own.
Dan´s last blog post…The Evaluation of Management and Other Leadership Responsibilities