One key to holding things together and moving through our uncertain times is empathy — empathy for both yourself and those you lead or support professionally and personally. Knowing and using empathy in your daily life can promote a better you and grow and strengthen relationships with friends, coworkers and any team that you might lead.

Empathy Vs. Sympathy

To begin, it’s important to understand what empathy is and means. In general, empathy is the ability to understand or feel what someone else is experiencing from within their frame of reference. It’s the capacity to place yourself in another’s position.

Empathy can be misunderstood or confused with sympathy. However, they don’t carry the same meaning, and sympathy isn’t necessarily effective in the world of work. Sympathy involves feeling and understanding from your own perspective and experience. Empathy involves sensing, imagining and/or understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling and why that is going on for them. The difference between sympathy and empathy is astutely portrayed in this clip from RSA Animate, which narrates an excerpt from Dr. Brene Brown’s TED talk on empathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

Components of Empathy

Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman have identified three specific components of empathy: cognitive, emotional and compassionate. Learning these three types of empathy and using them with your friends, coworkers and others will help you build stronger relationships and trust.

Cognitive: This is simply knowing/understanding how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. It’s sometimes called perspective-taking.

Emotional: This is when you feel physically along with the other person, almost as though their emotions were contagious.

Compassionate: With this kind of empathy, we not only understand someone’s predicament and feel with them, but can be spontaneously moved to help.

“Empathy is simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of you’re not alone.”

– Dr. Brene Brown

Empathy at Work

A 25-plus year dental career taught me these fundamentals of empathy, which I still apply and use today, nurturing the type of care that I provided as a practicing periodontal dental hygienist. Working through the fear, unknowns and discomfort of sometimes extreme pain required empathy for the type of care that I wanted to provide for my patients. Cognitively, I grew to understand how they were feeling by observing behaviors and body language. Emotionally, at times, the physical pain (unless controlled by pre/post-operative medications and local anesthesia) was real for both of us. Compassionately, I worked one step ahead to provide the best experience and outcome possible. I saw the total care outcome in patients who came back, completed care, and gave me hugs and thanks.

Unfortunately, empathy appears to have declined significantly over the past few decades in the U.S. For example, a University of Michigan study analyzed data on empathy from almost 14,000 college students. Gathered between 1979 and 2009, the study found a 48% decrease in empathetic concern and a 34% decrease in perspective-taking (i.e., cognitive empathy). We don’t know yet if our collective, worldwide experience with COVID-19 will change our use of empathy for better or worse.

Increasing Empathy

So how can you access and raise your level of empathy and lead/connect with people more effectively?

• Commit to growing empathy as a foundational component of your personal brand.
• In conversations, pause, breathe and take the time to actively listen to what someone is really saying, not just their words.
• Clarify and ask gentle questions until you understand where someone is coming from.
• Listen patiently, without trying to jump in and problem-solve right away.
• Practice finding new perspectives by deliberately trying to understand the other person’s point of view.
• Be strategic in what you say and how you say it, noting the effect you have on others. Adjust your approach as needed to establish more rapport.

Learning to lead with empathy takes practice, awareness and educating yourself about other people, along with understanding your own biases. It doesn’t happen overnight.

How can using empathy be more effective for you? Do you need help bringing more empathy to how you lead or to your leadership team? Let’s chat.