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.

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.”

Leaders sometimes try to alleviate the suffering of the spirit by introducing new visions, new missions, new approaches to challenges. These may be valuable aspects of a business strategy, but are merely palliative to the suffering spirit. They may relieve the suffering for a time, distracting it with super-charged striving, but they cannot cure it. The suffering is caused by inhumanity, by denial of human imperfection and vulnerability.

Can human imperfection and vulnerability exist side-by-side with competitiveness and striving? Can that be encouraged? Can it even be allowed?
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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.

I like to think that I have already done my bit to keep bad-example-hood alive (no confessions) and am now off the hook. But, who knows? I may be serving as a bad example right now somewhere without even knowing it. I’m not going to worry about that.
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