In Kind

21. Three Thoughts: Empathy to Action - It Starts with Ourselves

• Julie Krohner

Share episode

Did you know that empathy is a learnable communication skill? It's not a personality trait - something we either have in spades or are void of. To understand and practice meaningful [actionable] empathy, some fog must be lifted. Definitions, semantics and misperceptions of the word have caused confusion and I clear them up today. With a few foundational pieces in place, you'll soon see that empathy isn't only about feelings. It's a powerful compassion tool that you can wield for yourself and others with a little training and practice [even seasoned empaths need practice, daily].

You may be surprised at the many ways you can take empathy from micro to macro, right now. Insanely worth it. Enjoy!

SHOW NOTES
Psychology Today Article Empathy v Sympathy (this isn't the correct definition of empathy!) 

Recently a friend mentioned that empathy sometimes gets a bad rap -  for losing its meaning if it’s ‘just about feelings and doesn’t translate into action. A lot of this comes from the world of persuasion, where advertisers or humanitarian causes appeal to empathy as a means to get someone to act - to buy the thing, to give time or money to the cause. When studies find that this doesn’t work terribly well or reliably, we think empathy has somehow failed. And could it be worse if we feel something but consciously decide not to do something. The resulting by-product emotion of that scenario is guilt.

Today is an effort to begin debunking empathy’s bad rap. To do that, we need to start way earlier in the process than being charitable or an impulse buyer. We need to start with a definition and with ourselves.

I’ve heard lots of definitions over the years of what empathy is and isn’t. Where does it stop and start? Is it ‘better or worse’ than sympathy - stronger or weaker? Does it have an active component?

Thought 1: Operational Definition. The definition I use in my research and in my life is simple -  feeling with another. I recently saw an article with a chart defining “Engagement” with other humans - it’s in Psych Today and I’ll link to it. It started with Pity and ended with Compassion. Pity was defined as “I acknowledge your suffering.” Sympathy, next up on the intensity ladder, was “I care about your suffering.” Then empathy, “I feel your suffering,” and finally Compassion, “I want to relieve your suffering.”

But this is a miss too. One word in all of these definitions confuses people. Your. If I need to feel your suffering to have empathy, there are a million reasons why I cannot empathize with you. I’ve never been abused or cheated on. I’ve never lived as anything but a white person. I’ve never been on death row. So while I may pity or sympathize with you, or even have compassion for you, according to this idea of engagement, I cannot have empathy because I haven’t experienced ‘your suffering.’ I doubt that whomever coined this definition meant it in the literal sense, but it’s resulted in massive confusion and a setup for empathy to fail when it cannot be produced, much less produce action or behavior change.

Let’s try it with the slight change in semantics - feeling with another. See that we’re missing a piece of the puzzle? You might be thinking this doesn’t make sense. That’s because we need the next piece of data in order to see if empathy will be triggered. What is the emotion the other is feeling? Go back to our scenarios - we can feel terror or invalidation that one feels when abused or cheated on. We can feel humiliation, fear and injustice that one feels when being discriminated against. We can feel loneliness, worthlessness and disconnected without being imprisoned.

So all you have to do to empathize is get to the emotional state of another, to feel that emotions with them. Not their experience, but the emotions attached to it. Call it up. Remember a time you felt grief or loss or fear or resentment. It’s much easier to do and imagine this with positively charged emotions like love, excitement, joy...we don’t need to do as much work to call up the emotion to stand in another’s shoes. But for the hurtful states of being, it takes a little digging.

As I say often, you can see how empathy is a learnable communication skill just like writing or speaking or presenting. Because we humans deal in a fairly finite set of emotions, it’s easy to feel extreme grief, joy, anger, shame with someone no matter what triggered theirs. Next time you’re faced with someone who’s lost a parent and you never have and you think maybe it’s best that I avoid her because I don’t know what to say, get with the feeling! When have you experienced extreme debilitating grief? That’s it. That’s empathy. Let yourself feel it, then contact them and simply listen and BE there. No need to do anything but listen.

Thought 2: Empathy to Action is most often small, and starts with ourselves. The first order of business if you want experience empathy to action is to begin with yourself. Making a conscious effort to feel with yourself. Have you ever heard the expression “we’re all spiritual beings having a human experience?” But we tend to completely ignore that we have a ‘self’ that we need to listen to and feel with on the daily. We’re on auto-pilot for the most part - asleep while our body, mind and spirit are hard at work trying to get our attention.

It is empathy to action to sit with yourself. Quietly. To talk with yourself. Most of us, sadly, are hopelessly out of touch with ourselves in an empathic sense. How do you communicate with yourself? Do you look? Listen? Feel? When you need sleep or connection or quiet or nutrition or to cry like a baby, do you do it? Do you allow it? Things like learning to ask for help, regularly visiting yourself and knowing deeply who you are/and aren’t, knowing how to set boundaries with yourself and others, creating an optimal physical environment for you to be in (and I’m not talking about spending money or plush digs…I mean simple things. A scent you like, colors that elevate your energy, materials like wood or metal or glass or stone or plants, decluttering…They require no riches at all and can make enormous difference). Most of us don’t have a regular practice of listening to ourselves, let alone listening without judgement. Remember that 90% of our self-talk is hurtful, not helpful. So you can start right now being an empathy to action vehicle by empathically listening to yourself on a regular basis.

Now, thinking about empathy to action in the outward, or other-focused way, It’s important to note that ‘action’ is rarely the grandiose type like donating a million dollars or volunteering somewhere - those are noble explicit actions - but they occur at a fraction of the frequency of the subtle, tiny, implicit actions. And these are the ones we remember. The ones we go to our deathbed being grateful for. Like having the courage to call the friend who lost her parent and just listen. In your head, you can be thinking anything you like - I feel stupid, am I helping, what should I say, am I putting my foot in my mouth? You don’t have to literally bring up the feelings you’re calling up in order to feel her grief - keep that and your own thoughts about it in your head. Recall the last time you grieved or felt a loss. Sit in that emotion, and listen. You need no other words than that on the other end of the phone. Even if it’s awkward, you may simply say one line - I’m calling to see how you are right now. Not ‘how you are…’ which is obviously very loaded, or even how you are today, bc that couldn’t changed 100 times. But how are you right now, and listen for their emotional state. Then, you may need to shift into calling up others to empathize. Fatigue, confusion, overwhelm...whatever the person mentions, get with it and be an empathic witness.

Taking a moment to register the feelings is the key. Dismissing empathy as feelings without action is an excuse not to do it. We don’t love getting into the emotional weeds because it’s uncomfortable. It’s part of the shield we use to not get into looking at ourselves, which is what’s required to really be other oriented.

Learning to listen empathically  is empathy to action - and it receives no credit. Bc it’s not sexy or quantifiable. Listening is doing. And  it’s what’s best about the human species, in my opinion.

Thought 3: Be a platform. This one’s under the radar and less direct, so stay with me here.
Are you someone who has a platform? You don’t have to be a celebrity or a textbook mentor or role model to have a platform, just someone who other people look to for advice.There are millions of you out there and you know who you are - people ask you for feedback, your thoughts and opinions on things. If you’re one of those people, you have an obligation in my mind to be a platform. And the beauty is that you can and should use this platform for yourself as well.

When you encounter people who politically, religiously, morally, ethically, aesthetically, financially, do not mesh philosophically with you - for whatever reasons - you can get curious about that person and listen without judgement. Listen just for curiosity. Now’s a good time to insert another definition - empathic witness. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times. What do I mean by it? An empathic witness is someone who listens without judgement. There’s no agenda but to understand the other person. They show compassion and care without necessarily trying to fix or change anything. So back to the person who you morally disagree with - you can listen empathically so you can relay what you learned about that person and what they had to say/what they believe - maybe what goes into their thoughts, their decision making, their morals or ethics, their convictions - what drives their behavior. So that other people will hear them through you, because you already know they’re going to listen. You have that credibility conferred upon you - that’s what I mean by be a platform.

I’ll give you an example. Recently, on the religious front, I’ve connected with a few people who are very deeply religious. Both Christians, both highly familiar with the Bible and live by it, quote scripture, etc. Before In Kind was born, I would not have been interested in engaging with these people, simply because they live by a different set of beliefs and rules than I do. I thought I would not be able to understand or even get curious about the origins of their thoughts or decisions or behavior. It was radical and rigid and far from my perceptions of how to live life. Or so I thought. Because In Kind is a massive classroom in personal growth for me, I am taking more steps in the direction of empathy by learning to be an empathic witness to everyone who comes to this table. Every One. In both cases, the container of listening with no judgement - only to understand - has opened up a new way of thinking for me. About God, organized religion, and faith-based life. It previously terrified me to find myself in conversation with an intensely religious person - of any faith - as if it would somehow taint or rub off on me. The truth is that it did rub off, but in a most surprising way. It illuminated again how alike we all are as humans. The action that was produced by feeling with these two other men is that I’ve been exploring my thoughts about God, religion, beliefs, the role of faith, heaven and hell and a host of other concepts I thought I’d resigned myself to “knowing the truth” about. I’m not so sure now, and I’m taking baby steps to learn more, and to talk about it in my circles which, as you can guess, are likeminded people who share my general morals and ethics. So you see the ripple effect - the scaling of empathy. Micro to macro, right under our noses. There’s an eloquence to it.

I feel incredibly willing and genuinely curious about how I can feel with them instead of labeling and assuming and closing off someone who is just reading from different books than I do - quite literally. I was putting my moral convictions in front of - in the way of - whatever they had to say. Dismissing them, which is the ultimate action that results from judgement. A great example of someone who does this with exceptional skill is Howard Stern. Whatever you think about his communication style or his demeanor, he routinely has people on his show who he philosophically disagrees with and through that, it’s a path from empathy to action bc you can get people to first understand someone who you think you don’t fundamentally want to hear from or bother with and you can potentially take action to understand further. It may spark you to have conversations with others, do some research, or change your attitude or behavior. These may seem small and subtle- but they add up There’s a reason Howard has been interviewing people since the 1980’s - incidentally I believe his SiriusXM show stops this very month Dec 2020.

Ok, to summarize:

Thought 1: Empathy is feeling with another. A learnable communication skill that involves identifying someone’s emotions - not their experiences - and calling up those emotions in yourself so you can feel with them. 

2: Empathy to Action is most often small, and starts with ourselves. Listening IS doing - it’s majorly and inherently active. Listening to yourself and others is one of the greatest actions you can take

3. Be a platform. As an empathic listener, you can scale empathy by helping others listen to opinions and people they wouldn’t otherwise

Think of today as the preamble. There’ll be much more to come on empathy to action - this is the nuts and bolts starting point. In case you were wondering, is it selfish to focus on myself, and first, in developing my empathy skills? The answer is a hard no. I always loved the line in the airplane safety instructions that says, ‘Remember to put on your own mask before assisting others.’ Why? Because we’re no help to others if we are not calm and secure first! How can we strive to understand others when we don’t understand ourselves? I want to put it on billboards as a metaphor for global empathy! We all know people who we consider tireless givers - seemingly ultimate empaths - but notice that often they’re the same people who we would do anything to get them to accept help or treat themselves to something or show themselves more kindness -  just once! Empathy to action isn’t about martyrdom - that’s not what we’re going for here. It’s not valiant or reverent to ignore yourself. Help yourself before you help someone else. I promise the reciprocal benefits await. 

Thanks for listening.