PRACTICAL EMPATHY: FOR COLLABORATION AND CREATIVITY IN YOUR WORK (2015)
CHAPTER 9
Where Do You Go from Here?
Explain It to Others
Go Small
If You Do Only One Thing
Secret Agenda
As a good professional, you know to balance your own reasoning and guiding principles with those of your customers, your team, and your organization. However, perfect balance is not feasible all the time. Practicing the empathetic mindset as the years go by will help with your balance. More than any other thing, practice will steadily bring you confidence and experience.
If practice is the key, then demonstrating the empathetic mindset to those you work with is the treasure room. Being the person who plays the role without preaching or persuading is the most effective way of spreading the idea. Here are just a couple of ideas to help you bring the empathetic mindset into your own organization.
Explain It to Others
You can explain the empathetic mindset without persuading. You can even explain it without using words like “empathy,” just in case there’s a chance that those words will turn off your listener.
The empathetic mindset gives you powerful vision. Like a pair of glasses that you put on and take off, you dip into this mindset in order to focus on things—people, specifically. As you uncover their deeper thinking, you add to the reservoir of what you know about reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles that drive different people. This reservoir is not full of answers to your problems, but instead it is full of catalysts to your thinking. It’s like putting yourself in a relaxed frame of mind to allow for that stroke of creativity or insight.
These empathetic reservoirs are not necessarily going to influence the outcome of your decision or the design of a thing you are creating. Instead, the inspiration from these reservoirs guides the direction of your decisions, the flow of a design, and the conceptual basis for an idea. The empathetic mindset is the background and foundation that your professional thinking relies on.
When you explain this to someone else, you may also want to mention that the empathetic mindset is known as cognitive empathy and that emotional empathy is different. Emotional empathy is when someone’s emotion causes you similar feelings and memories. The best practical use of emotional empathy is to notice when it has happened and use that awareness to return your curiosity to what underlies the other person’s behavior. This curiosity is difficult to maintain if you’re distracted by your own emotions and memories.
Additionally, you may want to explain that developing and applying empathy exclusively focuses on people and completely avoids contemplation of solutions. Checking how well a solution might work for a person is a different exercise, one that falls under the category of evaluation. Developing empathy is for the express purpose of generating inspiration.
Go Small
The best thing you can do for yourself is to build your confidence. Confidence doesn’t result if you set big expectations and then have to struggle to achieve them. The aim is that you don’t get to the end of a cycle of listening to people and feel relieved that it’s over. Instead, the aim is that it didn’t take all your energy. Keep it to small sets of two or five or 10 people and keep repeating it every couple of months. Small sets ensure that you won’t dread doing the next set.
An ongoing cycle will let you build a repository of knowledge. Each cycle can be tailored to upcoming efforts, exploring challenges that you expect to face in the near future. If “the near future” is actually closer than a couple of weeks, even just one listening session will help.
If You Do Only One Thing
Mix it up.
Do everything in moderation—and this applies to how you wield the empathetic mindset. You are not expected to embrace everything written here wholesale. Instead, incorporate bits and pieces into your regular work practice. Adapt the ideas that you like and bend them to fit in with other philosophies and approaches you follow. Of course, “everything in moderation” is a guiding principle, which you might not follow. If that’s the case, then go ahead and adopt all of this.
Nothing in this book is meant as canon. None of it is meant to argue that other approaches are not as valid; they are each valid and effective in their own way. Mix them together.
Secret Agenda
Throughout this book, there has been a theme of humility. Self-restraint is key to being able to open up to other people’s thoughts and ideas. But you don’t have to bury your ego entirely—only when you are in the empathetic mindset. It’s not a spiritual practice, but a practical way to broaden your understanding of the people you hope to support. The goal is to make whatever you’re doing work out better for other people. These other people—and the people you collaborate with—will help you explore different paths. The decisions you make as a result of these explorations can be influenced by your own experience and ego, and by the circumstances around you.
As populations around the globe increase and communication technology shrinks distances between everybody, you will find yourself working with a wider and wider variety of people. To collaborate smoothly and to really make a difference for the people you support, the empathetic mindset will help you ensure each other’s success.