I was reflecting on the importance of communication, and I have a new realization about communication and empathy.
The age old fool’s wisdom, “know your audience and their needs” is as true as it ever has been, but it could use a tweak. Audience seems to suggest passive people, and audience is singular.
Know my fellow participants and their needs.
Today, with a physically and virtually very connected world, my fellow participants are the most diverse they have ever been.
I am passionate about quite a few issue. I feel these issues are very important to my well being, and the well being of many people. If I want to impact these issues well, I need to communicate successfully.
I do not consider myself to be good at communicating. The reason only now seems obvious. I often lack awareness and empathy. I am lucky that I have a good sense about who I will work well with, and I am sincere, so many people see beyond my faults.
But this will not get me the results I desire. I have to grow to be more empathic.
I have acknowledged a problem. How will I become more empathic?
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Empathy is a hard thing to pin down.
One approach would be to reflect on the values associated with empathy like: humility, tolerance, and respect. I think just acknowledging the validity of another’s perspective and being willing to change your position is valuable.
Reverse all decisions you make, and observe their effects on you.
If it’s unpleasant or uncomfortable, then it’ll likely be that way for those you’ve targeted your response towards.
Just remember… for all their supposed strength, people are quite fragile.
The masks that people wear hide everything, including the damage done to them.
In the end though, it’s a lot more of an art than a science. Be prepared to make mistakes.
Thomas, that is great advice. Some of it sounds like the golden rule which Confucius presented as “What you do not want others to do to you, do not do to others.”
I also appreciate my brother Dylan’s advice, because being empathic involves going beyond not doing to others what I do not want others to do to me.
Wow, I really appreciate my brother’s post titled Rawls
Two Moral Powers:
“Ultimately, I’m trying to believe that everyone can have the two moral powers John Rawls refers to in most of his works: the capacity to have, revise and pursue a conception of the good, and a capacity to act on and apply a sense of justice.”
Without believing people have those two moral powers, what would be the point in being empathic.
Another thing is to gain experience with diverse people, actions, and places.
Don’t see what the big deal with cotton subsidies is? Go visit Africa.
Don’t see what the big deal is when calling immigrants felons? Go visit Mexico.
Don’t understand why people don’t get the latest feature? Visit with your closest web-enabled Aunt Tillie.
Additionally, there’s an important element of empathy which requires listening to other perspectives, not just hearing them.
To hear someone means that your aural senses are stimulated and that you are aware of that stimulation.
To listen means to grasp at understanding and communication. To actively listen means to acknowledge the existence, presence and contribution of someone else… as being as important or moreso than your own contributions.
It’s a very tricky task to ride the balance between having an ego and presence of mind while also being egoless and accepting… yet empathy flows from that. In order to listen, you must be present; to be present you must have an ego; to listen means to accept that another ego exists and is worth attending to and the result is bilateral empathy.
Or something.
Ya feel me?
When people talk about empathy I wonder whether they mean an abstract ethical process, an unconscious quasi-biological process, or some combination of the two.
We have a lot of primate communications protocols hard-wired into our brains (or most of us do — when those systems aren’t working right you get dysfunctions like autism and Asperger’s syndrome). Sometimes I think what people mean by empathy is this monkey-brain resonance between us as social animals. But we also have an awareness of right and wrong and the happiness and sorrow of people who we never interact with. If I hear in the news about the unnamed victims of an earthquake halfway around the world, is it empathy I feel for them or something else?
It’s probably wrong to think of our monkey skills and our abstract ones as separate things. We are often able to project images of people and the world in our minds and interact with those in a semblance of the way we interact with the here-and-now. So maybe I do feel empathy for the earthquake victims I picture as I hear the news.
This is interesting as armchair psychology but it could also have bearing on the distributed projects we work on. Is the empathy we feel for colleagues in meatspace different from what we feel for colleagues we never see in person? Can a richer form of virtual interaction (reading each others’ blogs, Flickr photos of the office dog, team-building exercises in Warcraft) crank up the empathy among distributed collaborators?
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