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.
How Human Organizations Become Inhuman
To be human is to be imperfect. To be human is to be vulnerable. Humanity is denied when organizations encourage norms requiring that we relinquish our imperfection and our vulnerability, and require instead that we bring only our competitive nature, our striving, and the pretense of perfection and invulnerability within their doors. They then become inhuman. They become not “human organizations” but “organizations of humans.”
A friend told a Native American shaman that he was in the business of “bringing spirit into the workplace.” The shaman shook his head, “That is impossible,” he said. “You cannot bring spirit into a workplace because it is always there. It may be suffering, but it is always there.”
Doing My Part As A Bad Example
A former colleague told me, “Every person has a purpose. For some that purpose is to serve as a bad example.”
I laughed when I first heard that, but it does have the ring of truth about it as I cannot imagine life without bad examples. Someone, it seems, must at all times bring the mythic energy of bad-example-hood to life.
Fortunately, many who have studied and written about life purpose (including me HERE) have observed that people’s purposes can and most likely will change from time to time during their lives. It is unlikely that most of us are doomed to a entire life of bad-example-hood.
The Mythic Pull Of Pathways
I can’t pass up a photo of a pathway. I have dozens of them; all images of roads of one kind or another stretching to a narrow point in the distance. From time to time I puzzle over my attraction to such images. I sense something is at work that I cannot explain with any of my habitual ways of interpreting reality, something mysterious, at least to me.
Hanging Out With Hoodlums And Hanging On With Rock And Roll
Sometimes it is good to let go, and sometimes it is good to hang on.
The Scout (bless her scouty nature) found Hoodlums Music, an independently owned music store in Tempe, Arizona, a ten minute drive from our home. I’m like that kid in the candy shop in there. They specialize in the old stuff, stuff I used to have on vinyl.
And the people who work there know the music. I was chatting with one of them when I spied a Todd Rundgren album. I said, “Geez. I’ll bet I haven’t thought about Todd Rundgren in thirty years.” He said, “That’s OK. Nobody has.” Priceless.
Thoughts Masquerading As Feelings
In the latter years of the last century it became at least okay if not expected that people would express their feelings to one another. But not everyone who got the memo declaring that feelings were okay is able or willing to recognize or express them. That was when people began to pawn off thoughts as if they were feelings.
Here is a tip for those who wish to get better at distinguishing thoughts from feelings. Whenever you hear yourself or someone else begin a sentence with the words, “I feel that…”, be prepared to hear a thought, usually judgmental, masquerading as a feeling. “I feel that she is avoiding me.” “I feel that the car is overpriced.” Those are thoughts, not feelings.
Places That Stir Creative Juices
Geetali’s excellent blog, Shimla Gallimaufry, conjures thoughts of places I have visited that had a very positive effect on my creative energy. Geetali writes about and photographs the town of Shimla, where she lives. Shimla lies in the northwest corner of India, with Kashmir and China to the north, Pakistan to the west, and Nepal to the east. That grayish mass on the map below, stretching from the north to the east and south depicts the Himalayan Mountains. The red “A” marks Shimla.
What’s In A Voice
He is in his early fifties and he visits his parents most Sunday mornings. When he gets out of his car in his parent’s driveway, he is the age that he is. He regresses to about eighteen by the time he says, “Hi Dad,” in the living room, and then to about twelve by the time he reaches the kitchen and says, “Hi Mom.”
He is aware of this regression because the pitch of his voice is lower than normal when he says, “Hi Dad,” and higher than normal when he says, “Hi Mom.” The lower pitch is proof to Dad that the son is now a man. The higher pitch is proof to Mom that the son is still her little boy.
