I like to call empathy “the great connector”. Here’s why: humans are such that, when shown empathy (and its cousin, compassion), they tend to respond to that person with more trust and openness – a sense of ‘safety’, if you will, that their emotional experience is being recognized. There’s a general evolutionary theory about why this is so, which posits, in a nutshell, that way back when we all lived in tribes, empathic response to one another further ensured the tribe’s survival as individuals were looking out for one another’s well-being in this way and thereby able to tend to one another in supportive ways. At any rate, it is true that expressing empathy toward someone else tends to both tamp down the intensity of the emotion they are experiencing, and deepen the rapport, which opens the door further to being able to influence someone. Of course, this can be misused to manipulate or mislead another – but for the sake of this essay, let’s focus on the power of using empathy to build strong connections both personally and professionally, and thereby have relationships that are more collaborative and fruitful. Expressing empathy doesn’t mean you know exactly how someone feels (I never say that to a person, as it can be off-mark and even feel dismissive), but that you, as one human to another, recognize the emotion being conveyed. An additional benefit of expressing empathy is that one sometimes one has the opportunity to broaden another’s ‘repertoire’, if you will, of the variety of human emotions; many people kind of conflate various emotional experiences through the funnel of just one or two general emotions – anger, for instance – which doesn’t accurately reflect the more fine-tuned variance of human emotion. It is said that to be psychologically healthy, we need to be able to identify with the plethora of specific emotions in order to navigate and process them in a healthy way. Empathy is, importantly, to be distinguished from sympathy: sympathy is ‘feeling sorry for’, while empathy is recognizing and reflecting another’s emotion. This is an important distinction, lest one decide to “not show empathy” to another because that other has done something repugnant or is off-putting. But if we want to be effective communicators, helpers, and influencers, expressing empathy is a tool in the toolbox we can’t afford to be without. It also, as a byproduct, builds our own finesse with recognizing emotions in ourselves. It’s free to do, it’s not complicated, and continues to be, to put a hard shine on it, a ‘survival tool’ for the species. Try expressing empathy in a specific way today with someone you love – it can be as simple as “You seem very frustrated”, or “You’re really disappointed in that, it seems”, and see what happens. Practice it often, and notice its immediate and long-term benefits.
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