According to Merriam-Webster, empathy is defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
There are three types of empathy: cognitive, where you take on the viewpoint of another person; emotional, where you are able to feel for the other person; and compassionate, which is a mix of the two. Empathy can be expressed via body language, too. An often-overlooked fourth category of empathy is motor empathy, where one repeatedly mirrors another’s actions.
Empathy is a vital part of our society, and many global organizations tout the importance of empathy when it comes to being an effective leader.
Post-Covid-19’s Lack Of Empathy
The technology world is struggling seriously with empathy when it comes to the end user because of Covid-19. Product design used to involve countless user interviews and days of shadowing. The pandemic has rendered a lot of these practices obsolete.
This lack of empathy extends beyond end users, too. Colleagues are empathizing less with each other due to extended remote work. It’s hard to understand someone’s home situation when working with them remotely, and the expectation for everyone to be constantly available has increased. With the work-from-home privilege more common than ever, it’s also more common for the 5 p.m. end to the work day to be pushed later and later.
Covid-19 is also putting a strain on manager-subordinate relationships. It’s harder for some managers to appreciate the struggles parents have when juggling remote work and child care.
In industries like healthcare and teaching, roles where empathy is of utmost importance, it’s harder to coach employees when it comes to empathy for those they work with — and it’s harder to communicate that empathy remotely.
Creating Empathetic TechnologyTo combat this, many organizations are investing in ways to make technology more empathetic. Verywell Mind compared online therapy providers based on their empathetic approaches. And products like Empathy.com aim to offer companionship during these trying times of great loss.
Organizations hoping to develop more empathetic technology should take inspiration from the Russian doll model, which asserts that in order to learn empathy, an organism must experience the emotion they are trying to empathize with, rather than just imitate it. In addition, Stanford Medicine Center asserts that empathy should be based on peace, green-living and health. These theories can be applied to various aspects of technology design, from ideation to implementation.
For instance, in product design, you must consider certain ethical aspects of your design, like whether or not your gamification features are too addictive or sticky. When looking at product design from a green perspective, you need to consider whether or not your product requires too much energy for the sake of security. Empathy mapping is a widely used technique in the modern design thinking world. It’s primarily about visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an effort to better empathize with end product/service users.
In his article entitled “A Personal Journey Through User Experience,” Dr. Marc Hassenzahl describes the importance of finding a distinction between “sober and elegant ‘tools’ and gimmicky ‘toys’— the latter supposedly bloated with useless functionality and ornament.” In doing so, user experience designers can check whether or not the end user can achieve their objectives without friction.
The Future Of Empathy In Tech
I was recently asked which business leader, past or present, I would want to invite to dinner. My answer was Steve Jobs, who I believe was a pioneer in empathetic technology and optimized user experience. During dinner, I would ask him how we can make new iterations of the iPhone even more empathetic.Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Defined by Merriam-Webster as “something that causes strong feelings of worry or anxiety,” stress has been rising in Americans for years. But now it seems to have become the prevailing emotion of the 2020s.
In a survey earlier this year by the American Psychological Association, 84 percent of adults reported feeling at least one emotion associated with prolonged stress in the preceding two weeks. The most significant sources of anxiety were the future of the nation, the coronavirus pandemic, and political unrest.
For businesses, this environment has accelerated a dramatic change: Market winners and losers are being decided based on empathy—companies’ ability to put themselves in customers’ shoes and show, in every interaction, deep and genuine concern for their wants, needs, and priorities.
PERMENENTLY CHANGED CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS
To be sure, customer experience (CX)—how a company engages with customers at every stage of the buying journey—already had become an essential business priority in a digital age that has given consumers unprecedented choices and power. But making customers feel trust and delight on an emotional level has gone from being an aspiration to an expectation in the last year and a half.
A recent report by contact center technology provider Talkdesk shows that most consumers have higher expectations of companies they do business with today than before the pandemic.
In the retail sector specifically, according to the study, 58 percent of retail customers said their expectations of their preferred brands have increased in the last year. “Ease, speed and ability to transition across channels of choice during interactions rate among their top priorities,” the report said.
According to a McKinsey report in August, e-commerce sales continue to experience huge growth, with online penetration remaining approximately 35 percent above pre-pandemic levels and e-commerce logging more than 40 percent growth over the past 12 months.
This means that retailers truly can no longer ignore that the line between digital and in-store experiences for consumers has rapidly disappeared and consumers no longer differentiate where and when they had an experience with a business, just how it felt.
Even the most eternal optimist would have a hard time believing the stressed-out climate will subside anytime soon, so businesses need to be planning for 2022 and beyond with one thing in mind: How can we forge a memorably positive emotional connection with customers and consistently deliver a consistently delightful, empathy-driven experience? Here are three ways to get there.
STEPS TO EMPATHY-DRIVEN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
1. Make customer empathy the company’s central cultural value.
Many businesses still operate in silos, but, as described above, customers no longer do. Thus, companies need to shed old ways of how the business has been structured and organized and adopt new ones based solely on how customers see and work with them. Everyone on every team in every department must have a clear understanding of their role in providing a holistic, empathy-driven experience and how each channel and touchpoint integrates to make that happen.
As part of the effort to cultivate human experience as a core value, every individual in the company should be able to see, hear, and feel the customers’ experience—not just a select few whose “job” it is.
Finally, companies must ask themselves if they have the right leaders for this time. Does the CEO grasp where to prioritize investments to drive the experiences customers are demanding? Do executives across the C-suite have the right levels of empathy, authenticity, and emotional intelligence? In today’s world, leaders must make decisions with their hearts as much as their heads. “Soft skills” are the new hard skills.
2. Focus on human experience as much as data.
Understanding customers on a deeper level—who they are, what their lives are like, and what their motivations are for using a product or service—has become harder as customer experiences have become less human and more digital. Companies are trying to build deep connections with perhaps millions of people they may never actually see.
As a result, most businesses have turned to collecting and analyzing data—clicks, sales conversion statistics, email response rates, survey responses, etc.—to try to glean customer insights.
But while quantitative methods can help uncover trends and patterns, (for example, that 65 percent of web page visitors are leaving without going beyond the home page) they tell only half the story: Data can provide the “what” behind customer behavior but not the “why.” It is devoid of color and context—the many nuances around customer experience that can come only from observing and interacting with customers first-hand.
Interaction with real customers must be combined with companies’ data-centric processes to inform every aspect of product design, creation, and support.
3. Take advantage of technology.
Technology exists—video, live interviews, and other research studies—to continually see and hear what customers are thinking. Companies should leverage this technology to build a feedback loop that drives the brand forward from the customer’s viewpoint—a virtuous circle in which one desirable outcome from human insights leads to another and drives continuous improvement.
In a product or app launch, for example, this can include live customer interviews before design starts, quick validation of prototypes and sketches, continuous verification during development to validate decisions and reveal problem areas, and post-launch gathering of insights to reveal any issues that weren’t found earlier.
By following these three steps, businesses can make customer empathy part of their brand’s lifeblood. In these times, there may be no greater differentiator.
Empathy is often viewed as a form of compassion or something that makes individuals feel good about themselves rather than a means of making policies. After two years of struggling against employee burnout caused by the pandemic, empathy is becoming increasingly important in corporate culture.
The fuzziness of home and work life has been one of the major challenges, leading to a rise in loneliness and depression. Startups, predominantly owned and run by young people, are demanded to be the leading example of companies that humanize their employees. So, how can empathetic culture drive startup development?
Why Empathetic Culture?
COVID-19 has tested everyone’s endurance. Businesses are losing talent in vast numbers either due to layoff or voluntary resignation. Many employees are emotionally and physically weary, resulting in workplace burnout, a WHO-defined syndrome defined as continuous job stress that has not been effectively handled. According to the Harvard Business Review, the duty to address burnout has been passed from the individuals to the corporation.
Lack of boundaries, increased financial stress, and concerns about job security have all contributed to a drop in mental health and anxiety. In a global survey conducted by Qualtrics, two-fifths of respondents (41.6%) claimed their mental health has deteriorated since the onset of COVID-19, while 57.2% indicated increased woe.
Increase Employee Engagement
Do you know that empathetic leaders tend to have positive impacts for employees in terms of engagement? This is why the empathetic culture needs to be implemented top down. According to recent research by Catalyst, 61% of respondents with highly empathetic senior leaders report being inventive at work either frequently or always, compared to those with less empathetic ones.
Meanwhile, 76% of those who work with highly empathetic senior leaders say they are engaged, unlike 32% of people who work with less empathetic bosses. These findings have underlined that empathy can be a key strategy for responding to crises, development, and a crucial factor for creating inclusive places of work in which everyone can connect, contribute, and succeed, not merely as a business strategy.
If you’re looking to embrace empathy in your startup culture, here’s how to do it right:
Have the Right Mindset
The first step in implementing a culture of empathy in your startup starts with the right mindset. This means that everyone should be on the same boat when it comes to realizing the importance of having an empathetic culture. As a leader, you can clarify some common misunderstandings about empathy, such as empathetic culture being only a gimmick. Clearly show that you are committed to empathy through your actions as a leader. If employees see you actualizing a culture of sympathy, they will come to the right mindset on how important this is.
Utilize Data to Track Progresses
Now that digitalization is inseparable from business operation, why not use it to enhance empathetic culture at your startup? You can track employees’ progresses and bottlenecks using a series of data-driven metrics. Data is essential for empathy since it allows you to identify any empathy gaps and potentials. The implementation of empathy may be broken down into smaller pieces: empowerment, value, belonging, reassurance, honesty, cooperation, and ethics.
Doing this can make arranging metrics easier. If you are distributing an employee survey, make sure it includes clear questions regarding empathy and this is to be done regularly instead of semiannually or annually.
Keep it Simple but Significant
Empathy is not always about large movements; but rather a series of small-scale compassion and understanding approaches or low-cost, high-impact activities. For example, if you are financially earning more than your employees, you can casually buy them a few pans of pizza when the monthly salary payment is still far ahead.
This small gesture shows an empathy that those who earn more actually care about those who earn less without looking too intimidating, thanks to the magic of food. Aside from activities that involve money, caring is a form of empathy as well. Making a unique greeting card for employees during their birthdays and sending it to the teamwork group so others can say congratulations can be one of the simplest, no cost gestures.
Caring for the people in your startup should be a priority. Mental health, stress, and burnout are collective responsibilities for the company to deal with, thus empathetic culture is about caring and making it actionable for everyone. Failure to use empathy results in less creativity, lesser engagement, and lower loyalty, which can be the start of a downfall. After all, business development can be easier to achieve when the people in it are happily engaged.
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“Empathy is one of the values we’ve had from our founding.” That’s what Chelsea MacDonald, SVP of people and operations at Ada, a tech startup that builds customer-service platforms, told me when we first got on the phone for this story in June. When the company was in its early stages, with about 50 people, empathy was “a bit more ad hoc,” because you could bump into colleagues at lunch. But that was pre-pandemic, and before a hiring surge.
Now, MacDonald says, empathy is built on communication (as many as five times a week, she communicates in some way to the entire company about empathy), through tools (specifically, one that tracks whom people communicate with most and who gets left out), through intimacy (cultivated through special-interest groups) and through transparency (senior leaders share notes after every meeting). At various points in our discussion, MacDonald describes empathy as “more than just, ‘Hey, care about other people’” and “making space for other people to make mistakes.”
She was one of a dozen executives whose communications directors reached out when I tweeted about the office trend of “empathy.” Adriana Bokel Herde, the chief people officer at the software company Pegasystems, told me about the three-hour virtual empathy-training session the company had created for managers—and how nearly 90% had joined voluntarily.
Kieran Snyder, the CEO of Textio, a predictive-writing company, said the biggest surprise about empathy in the workplace is that it and accountability are “flip sides of the same coin.” “We had an engineer give some feedback that was really striking,” she told me. “She said that the most empathetic thing her manager could do for her was be really clear about expectations. Let me be an adult and handle my deliverables so that I know what to do.”
All of these leaders see empathy as a path forward after 17 months of societal and professional tumult. And employees do feel that it’s missing from the workplace: according to the 2021 State of Workplace Empathy Study, administered by software company Businessolver, only 1 in 4 employees believed empathy in their organizations was “sufficient.”
Companies know they must start thinking seriously about addressing their empathy deficit or risk losing workers to companies that are. Still, I’ve also heard from workers who think it’s all nonsense: the latest in a long string of corporate attempts to distract from toxic or exploitative company culture, yet another scenario in which employers implore workers to be honest and vulnerable about their needs, then implicitly or explicitly punish them for it.
If you’ve read all this and are still confused about what workplace empathy actually is, you’re not alone. Outside the office, developing empathy means trying to understand and share the feelings or experiences of someone else. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is more one-directional: you feel sad for what someone else is going through, but you have little understanding of what it feels like. Because empathy is predicated on experience, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate. At best, it’s expanded sympathy; at worst, it’s trying to force connections between wildly different lived experiences (see especially: white people attempting to empathize with the experience of systemic racism).
Applied in a corporate setting, the very idea of empathy begins to fall apart. Is it bringing their whole selves, to use an HR buzzword, to work? Is it cultivating niceness? Is it making space for sympathy and allowing people to air grievances, or is it leadership modeling vulnerability? Over the course of reporting this story, I talked to more than a dozen people from the C-suites of midsize and large companies that had decided to make empathy central to their corporate messaging or strategy.
Some plans were more fleshed out and self-interrogating. Some thought an empathy training available to three time zones was enough. Others understood empathy as small gestures, like looking at a co-worker’s calendar, seeing they’ve been in meetings all day, and giving them a 10-minute pause to get water before you meet with them.
But where did this current push for workplace empathy begin? According to Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and author of the upcoming book Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, it sort of started with, well, him. In the fall of 2020, he’d been hearing a similar refrain from businesses: everyone was tired. Tired of the pandemic; of stalled diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts; of their bosses and their employees.
When he looked at the 2020 State of Workplace Empathy Study, then in its fourth year, the reasons for that exhaustion became clear. People were tired because they were working all the time, and trying to sort out caregiving responsibilities, and dealing with oscillating threat levels from COVID-19. But they were also tired, he believed, because there was a generalized empathy deficit.
That “empathy deficit” became the cornerstone of Taylor’s State of Society address in November 2020. “Much of the resurgence of DE&I programming in the wake of the George Floyd killing was supposed to encourage open conversation and mutual understanding,” he said. “But it often bypassed empathy. Well-meaning programs devolve into grievance sessions … rather than listening and trying to relate.”
SHRM is an incredibly influential organization, with more than 300,000 members in 165 countries. So while it’s not as if empathy efforts were nonexistent before, Taylor’s speech encouraged them. Even if members weren’t there to listen to his words, his message—and the data from the study—began to filter into HR departments, leaving a trail of optional learning modules and Zoom trainings in its wake.
The backlash started shortly thereafter. Taylor acknowledges as much. “I see these companies jumping on it,” he told me. “But it’s not an initiative. It’s not a buzzword. It’s a cultural principle. If you make this promise, as a company, if you put this word out there, your employees are going to hold you to it.” He adds that empathy should go both ways: “There’s an expectation that employees can mess up; employers should be able to mess up too.”
In the case of employees, many are frustrated by perceived hypocrisy. (All employees who spoke critically about their employers for this story requested anonymity out of concern for their jobs.) One woman told me her company, Viacom, has been doing a lot of messaging about empathy, particularly when it comes to mental health. At the same time, it has switched to a health plan that’s more restrictive when it comes to accessing mental-health professionals and care.
(Viacom attributes the change to a shift in policy on the part of their insurance provider and says it has worked to remedy it.) Other employees report repeated invocations of empathy from upper management in staff meetings, but little training on how to implement it with those they supervise. As one female employee at a performing-arts nonprofit told me, “In a one-on-one meeting with my boss where I was openly struggling and tried to discuss it, I was told that mental health is important, but improving my job performance was more important.”
A customer-service representative for a fintech company said empathy had been centered as a “core value” of the organization: something they were meant to practice with one another but also with customers. To quantify worker empathy, the company sends out customer-satisfaction surveys (CSATs) after each interaction. It found that dips in CSAT scores, which were measured by an automated system, reliably happened when a customer had a long hold time, which had little to do with whether the representative modeled empathy. Yet employees were still promoted based on these scores.
The central tension emerges again and again: “There’s an irony, because there’s the equity that you want to present to employees—while also giving special consideration and solutions for specific situations,” Joyce Kim, the chief marketing officer of Genesys, which provides customer service and call-center tech for businesses, told me. “Those two are often incongruent.”
Put another way, it’s hard, at least from a leadership perspective, to cultivate equal treatment for everyone while also making exceptions for everyone. If you allow an employee to work different hours, have different expectations of accessibility or have more leeway because of an illness, how is that fair to those who don’t need those things? How, in other words, do you accommodate difference while still maximizing profits?
What companies are trying to do, at heart, is train employees to treat one another not like productivity robots, but like people: people with kids, people with responsibilities, people shouldering the weight of systemic discrimination. But that runs counter to the main goal of most companies, which is to create and distribute a product—whether that’s a service, an object or a design—as efficiently as possible. They might dress up that goal in less capitalistic language, but the end point remains the same: profits, the more the better, with as little friction as possible.
Within this framework, the frictionless employee is the ideal employee. But a lack of friction is a privilege. It means looking and acting and behaving like people in power, which, at least in American society, means being white, male and cisgender; with few or no caregiving responsibilities; no physical or mental disabilities; no strong accent or awkward social tics or physical reminders, like “bad teeth,” of growing up poor; and no needs for accommodations—religious, dietary or otherwise. For decades, offices were filled with people who fit this bill, or who were able to hide or groom away the parts of themselves that did not.
The women and people of color who were admitted into these spaces did so with an unspoken caveat that they would make themselves amenable to the status quo. They didn’t bring their “whole selves” to work. Not even close. They brought only the parts that would blend in with the rest of the workforce. If you were sexually harassed, you didn’t make a fuss about it. If someone used a racial slur, same deal. If there were Christmas celebrations that made the one Jewish employee feel weird, that person was expected not to make waves. Bad behavior wasn’t friction, per se. But a worker whose identity already created a form of friction complaining about it? That sure was.
Historians of labor have pointed out that this posture was particularly prevalent in office settings, where salaried workers were often saturated in narratives of a great, unified purpose. If employees took care of the company, and flattened themselves into as close to the image of the ideal worker as possible, the company would take care of them, in compensation and eventual pension. Which is one of many reasons that white collar office workers have been resistant to unionization efforts, which felt, as sociologist C. Wright Mills has noted, like a crass, almost hysterical form of office friction.
Machinists and longshoremen were laborers and had no recourse other than the big stick of the union to advocate for themselves. Office workers could solve conflict man to man, boss to employee, like, well, the white gentlemen that they were—or at the very least pretended to be.
This mindset began to erode over the course of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s—first, when massive waves of layoffs and benefit cuts destabilized the myth of the benevolent parent company. But the white maleness of the culture also began to (very gradually) shift in the wake of legal protections against discrimination related to gender, age, disability and, only recently, sexual orientation.
White male workers remained dominant in most industries, particularly in leadership roles. But they began to lose their unquestioned monopoly on the norms of the workplace. Some changes were embraced; others, especially around sexual harassment and racial discrimination, were changed via legal force.
The overarching goal of HR departments in the past, going back to the field’s origins in “scientific management” of factory assembly lines, was keeping employees healthy enough to work efficiently. After 1964, their task expanded to include compliance with legal protections, in addition to the continued work of keeping employees healthy and “happy” enough to do their work well. “Unhappiness,” after all, is expensive—according to a Gallup estimate from 2013, dissatisfaction costs U.S. companies $450 million to $550 million a year in lost productivity. Unhappiness, in other words, is friction.
But as the workplace continues to diversify, how do you maintain the worker “happiness” of a bunch of different sorts of people, from different backgrounds, with different cultural contexts? There are some obvious fixes: continuing to erode the power of monoculture (in which one, limited way of being/working becomes the way of being/working to which all other employees must aspire); recruiting and retaining managers who actually know how to manage; creating a culture that encourages taking time off. But usually, the proposed solution takes the form of the HR initiative.
Take the 2010s push for “wellness,” which manifested in the form of mental-health seminars, gym memberships and free Fitbits. You can view these initiatives as part of a desire to reduce health-insurance premiums. But you can also see them as a means of confronting the reality of a workforce that, in the wake of the Great Recession, was anxious about their finances and careers, particularly as more and more workers were replaced by subcontractors, who enjoyed even fewer protections and privileges.
Or consider the push for DE&I programs in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. These initiatives aim to acknowledge a perceived source of friction—the fact that a company is very white, its leadership remains “snowcapped,” or the workplace is quietly or aggressively hostile to Black and brown employees—while also providing a proposed solution. The corporate DE&I initiative communicates that we see this problem, we’re working to solve it, so you can talk less about it.
Wellness and DE&I initiatives are frequently unsatisfying and demoralizing, particularly for those workers they are ostensibly designed to benefit. They often lean heavily on the labor of those with the least power within an organization. And they approach systemic problems with solutions designed to disrupt people’s lives as little as possible. (A three-hour webinar will not create a culture of inclusion.) But the superficiality is part of the point.
Contain the friction, but do so by creating as little additional friction as possible, because a series of eruptions is easier to contain than a truly paradigm-shifting one that threatens the status quo and, by extension, the company’s public profile and profitability. According to a 2021 SHRM report, in the five years since DE&I initiatives swept the corporate world, 42% of Black employees, 26% of Asian employees and 21% of Hispanic employees reported experiencing unfair treatment based on their race or ethnicity.
The ramifications of racial inequity (lost productivity, turnover and absenteeism) over the past five years may have cost the U.S. up to $172 billion. But instead of acknowledging what it is about the company culture that makes it difficult to retain diverse hires, or what might have to change to recoup those losses, companies blame individual workers who were a “bad fit.” DE&I initiatives don’t fail because there’s a “diversity pipeline problem.” It’s because those in power aren’t willing to relinquish any of it.
A similar contradiction applies to the rise of “corporate empathy.” At its heart, it’s a set of policies, initiatives and messaging developed to respond to the “friction” of a workforce unsettled by the pandemic, a continuing racial reckoning and sustained political anxiety, capped off by an uprising, on a workday, days after most of the workforce had returned from winter breaks. Many empathy initiatives are well-intentioned. But coming from an employer, they still, ultimately, say: We see you are breaking in two, we are too, but how can we collectively still work as if we’re not?
Therein lies the empathy trap. So long as organizations view employees with different needs as sources of friction, and solutions to those needs as examples of unfairness, they will continue to promote and retain employees with the capacity to make their personalities, needs and identities as frictionless as possible. They will encourage “bringing the whole self to work,” but only on a good day. They will fetishize “sharing personal stories,” but only when the ramifications don’t interfere with the product or create interpersonal conflict. This is what happens when you conceive of empathy as allowances: Those who would benefit from it become less desirable workers. Their friction is centered, and their value decreases.
Our society is built around the goals of capitalism—and capitalism, and the ethos of individualism that thrives alongside it, is inherently in conflict with empathy. The qualities that make our bodies, selves and minds most amenable to those goals are prized above all else, and it is HR’s primary task to further cultivate those qualities, whether through “enrichment” or “wellness,” even when the most significant obstacle to either is the workplace itself.
Why do the declarations of empathy feel so hollow? Because growth and profit do not reward it. Companies, HR professionals, managers, even the best trained can do only so much. A large portion of the dissatisfaction that employees feel is the result of actively toxic company policy, thoughtless management and executives clinging to the status quo. But a lot of it, too, is anger at systems that extend beyond the office:
The fraying social safety nets, the decaying social bonds, the frameworks set up to devalue women’s work, the stubborn endurance of racism, the lack of protections or fair pay for the workers whose labor we ostensibly value most. We don’t know how to make people care about other people. No wonder workplace initiatives can feel so laughably incomplete. How do you cultivate a healthy workplace culture when it’s rooted in poisoned soil? “It’s not just a workplace empathy deficit,” Taylor told me. “It’s an American cultural deficit.”
Empathy can be best defined as the trait or skill of understanding, sharing, recognizing, and even feeling the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of those around you or those who you see. It is often a crucial skill in developing healthy relationships, moral or ethical decision-making, prosocial behavior, and compassionate attitudes.
Simply put, empathy denotes an ability to walk in the shoes of another person. It can be a complex trait to develop, and some people may believe that empathy is harmful. After all, feeling the pain of others can become tiring. But in moderation, this skill is a fantastic way to improve yourself while helping others. Here are nine ways empathy helps with inner growth.
1. Empathy Reduces Stress
You may have noticed people who are empathetic seem to experience less stress. Considering how research has shown that stress accuses all sorts of diseases, it raises the question – how does empathy help?
It teaches emotional regulation skills.
Relating to others in positive ways teaches
It engages in our ability to control and handle our emotions in a healthy manner.
It helps us recognize where and when we may be feeling stressed or emotional, thanks to observing and empathizing with our loved ones.
Empathy can be best defined as the trait or skill of understanding, sharing, recognizing, and even feeling the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of those around you or those who you see. It is often a crucial skill in developing healthy relationships, moral or ethical decision-making, prosocial behavior, and compassionate attitudes.
Simply put, empathy denotes an ability to walk in the shoes of another person. It can be a complex trait to develop, and some people may believe that empathy is harmful. After all, feeling the pain of others can become tiring. But in moderation, this skill is a fantastic way to improve yourself while helping others. Here are nine ways empathy helps with inner growth.
As you can imagine, this helps you become an emotionally more stable person in the long run – indeed a fundamental thing to any future growth and maturation you wish to experience!
2. It Improves Your Ability To Communicate
Communication isn’t as simple as an exchange of words. After all, think about the many times you find yourself constantly misunderstood, no matter how hard you try. As it turns out, empathy can teach you how to express yourself better! This outcome is because:
You learn how to see, feel, and think from the other person’s perspective.
You’ll better understand how your words and thoughts may be interpreted by others.
You can tailor your expression of your thoughts and emotions to the individual you’re communicating with, so they can understand you better.
You can limit misunderstandings and miscommunications by seeing how the other person would process information from their point of view.
Indeed, you may notice that all of these positive benefits first require you to listen better and understand the other person before you can explain yourself in a way that truly resonates with them. This is why empathy is so important!
3. It’s Good For General Survival
Historically speaking, being social creatures is the critical reason for our species’ continued survival – and despite how much has changed socially, this hasn’t changed on a fundamental level! Empathy allows us to:
Pick up on nonverbal cues that indicate something is amiss
Tune in immediately to a situation the second someone starts acting strangely
React appropriately to a life-threatening situation you haven’t seen yet, just from the behavior of others in the area
Pay attention to abnormal atmospheres or facial features that suggest something is wrong
These examples may sound dramatic, but they can be applicable in all sorts of places – from recognizing when a bar fight is about to erupt to paying attention to a loved one who seems to be quieter than usual.
No matter which way you slice it, empathy may be the critical thing that saves you or your loved one’s life.
4. It’s Good For Your Health
How are empathy and your physical health related to each other? They’re more intimately intertwined than you might think. Various studies have shown a positive correlation between the ability to handle stress – a source of many health issues – and high levels of empathy.
This is because of empathy:
It encourages us to form close bonds that form the basis of our support network.
Teaches us how to form healthy coping mechanisms when trying to manage stress.
It assists us in paying attention to our bodies as an extension of learning how to observe those around us.
Reduces depression and anxiety levels as we communicate and empathize with our loved ones.
It helps us create healthy boundaries so we can avoid picking up second-hand stress and negative emotions.
Encourages positive thinking and mindsets via reconnecting to the world around us.
This ultimately leads to a better psychological and physiological state, resulting in a much better health and immune system. Not to mention, it’s easier to take care of yourself when you’re mentally and emotionally more stable and healthy!
5. It Can Guide Your Moral Compass
Normally, we learn empathy and emotional regulation in childhood – something that research has shown is important for our development. But that doesn’t mean our journey stops there!
As we grow older and meet new people, we must continue to learn and adapt to the changing world around us – and in this aspect, empathy is an essential tool. For example, it:
It helps us re-evaluate our core values and morals
Shapes and guides how we care for others and how we expect to be cared for
It shows us how to take care of those around us
Encourages us to strive for a better understanding of those we love
In other words, empathy can actually help us reshape our foundational understanding of the world and our relationship with it. This is important, as it can lead to us growing both mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as we strive to meet the needs of our loved ones!
6. It Connects You To Others
Ever found yourself just sitting there, unsure as to how to respond to someone else? Empathy is actually a vital and helpful tool in this regard!
How so? Research has shown that empathy is responsible for helping us better understand and respond to a loved one’s actions – both in the present and for potential future actions. Here are a few ways how it mentally preps you and encourages you to form positive relationships:
It helps us feel and better understand what the other person is experiencing.
Teaches us how to reciprocate and make the other person feel seen and heard.
It assists us in forming and nurturing intimate bonds where both sides can feel safe and vulnerable.
It encourages us to listen to those around us truly and really take the time to be there for them.
The final result? We end up learning not just about experiences we couldn’t otherwise have possibly gotten on our own, but also will likely end up with a close and personal relationship with the other person!
Over time, you will likely find that this sort of behavior cultivates deep, intimate connections that can bring you a sense of peace and stability – an incredibly vital foundation for any further inner growth you wish to achieve.
7. It Helps Prosocial Behavior
We are only human, so it’s natural to want close, intimate, and meaningful bonds. In fact, it is hardwired into our very DNA – we wouldn’t have gotten this far without that desire to bond with those around us, after all. As you can imagine, this means that the ability to empathize is crucial. This is because it:
It teaches us how to become more compassionate and caring
It’s crucial to our ability to communicate and connect with others
It encourages us to care for and help each other
Assists us in being kind and understanding to others around us
It tries to make us see things from a different point of view
From there, we then learn how to adjust our behavior and actions to ensure we are doing our best to love and care for those around us. This can then ultimately lead us to create the relationships so fundamental to our emotional and mental wellbeing!
8. It Fights Burnout
There is some irony in how, in an increasingly connected world, we feel even more lonely. And with that loneliness comes all sorts of mental health struggles and burnout as we struggle with work on our own. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A study has shown that those workers who are empathetic actually deal with less burnout – something you might find interesting! Here’s how empathy can help you achieve these outcomes:
It guides us in how we can communicate with those around us.
Assists in the development of soft skills that are crucial to handling conflicts with others.
It teaches us how to ensure both sides feel seen and heard.
It helps us connect and form meaningful relationships with others.
Encourages us to create social networks that can inversely support us in our times of need.
Promotes positive thinking as we pull from the experiences of others around us.
With the development of better communication and conflict-management skills, you may find yourself becoming a more emotionally mature and understanding person as you rise against the challenges life throws at you. And it’s all thanks to empathy!
9. It Improves Your Work
With just how helpful it is when you’re trying to both listen and to be heard, it’s no wonder that empathy forms a core aspect of communication – a vital skill in any team-based work. But there’s more to this than just better communication. Empathy also helps:
Negotiating with others to create a solution that meets everyone’s needs and desires
It makes people feel valued and involved in any project
It makes for a smoother transition and workflow, as you are already paying attention and anticipating the quirks and workstyles of those around you
As you can imagine, these aspects are all super helpful when you’re working on any team-based project. And these skills are transferable too! You can just as easily apply these positive benefits to both your work and your personal life and watch your relationships become better for it! Final Thoughts On Some Ways Empathy Helps With Inner Growth
Empathy is a valuable trait, yet it may seem like it is rapidly declining in today’s world. This can seem discouraging, and some may even worry that being empathetic may open them up to feelings of pain and discomfort.
The lucky truth is that this is not the case. Empathy is crucial for your inner growth and can actually make you stronger, healthier, and more resilient. If you struggle with developing empathy for others, you can speak to a mental health professional for help.
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of emotional states. Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic, and spiritual empathy.
Empathy is generally divided into two major components:
Affective empathy
Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another’s mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion: being affected by another’s emotional or arousal state.
Cognitive empathy
Cognitive empathy: the capacity to understand another’s perspective or mental state. The terms social cognition, perspective-taking, theory of mind, and mentalizing are often used synonymously, but due to a lack of studies comparing theory of mind with types of empathy, it is unclear whether these are equivalent.
Although measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta analysis found only a negligible association between self report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities.
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