“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
Daniel Goleman
The question comes up again and again in my coaching sessions. “What actually is empathy?” Or: “I have absolutely no idea how my employees are feeling or how they feel.”
When I ask my clients how they are feeling, I usually get blank stares. “Why me? We’re talking about understanding and compassion for others.”
As is so often the case, however, it all starts with you. Because if you can’t perceive yourself and your feelings and are therefore unconsciously controlled by emotions, you have no sense of how you affect others, nor can you actually put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their thoughts or feelings.
Misunderstandings are inevitable.
But what exactly is empathy?
A basic distinction is made between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. In other words, on the one hand, the ability to understand the thoughts of others and, on the other hand, to actually put oneself in the other person’s emotional world and even be able to evoke identical feelings in oneself.
In my view, developing cognitive empathy skills would be sufficient for the business context. Simply being able to change my perspective to that of my counterpart will help me to criticize more sensitively and constructively, to see changes more holistically and to communicate more transparently.
If the boss does not give any thought to how his employees receive criticism, changes and innovations, or simply how they react to him as a person, then it is not particularly surprising that they block him and his plans offensively or subtly, do not go along with them, or simply keep their distance.
The direct and indirect costs to the company are immense.
An example:
An entrepreneur who had been walking around his company for years with a grim look on his face – with or without reason – received sobering feedback one day. An employee survey revealed that the majority of employees were afraid (of him), showed little loyalty to the company and had difficulty staying motivated.
The boss could hardly believe it. From his point of view, the employees were all doing well and if someone didn’t meet the requirements, he thought it was because they were either lazy and/or stupid.
He came to me and told me that he no longer understood the world and how or what he could change. I asked him how HE felt when he walked around his company with a grim look on his face. He looked at me uncomprehendingly and then thought about it. After a while, he said that he always had to think about how he regularly had to clean the floor when he was young and how his critical father always had something to complain about. Because these thoughts were unconsciously present, the feelings of “not being able to do anything right” or of uselessness were automatically added. He was virtually dominated by negative thoughts and feelings without even realizing it.
After an intensive session in which we talked about his unconscious self-talk and negative voices in his head and the impact they had on his self-image and feelings, he realized what all this was doing to him. He understood that he first had to get to know himself in order to understand others better, i.e. to become more empathetic. In short: to get in touch with himself in order to be able to relate to others in an honest and unbiased way.
A few suggestions for this could be
Recognize yourself, your thoughts, fears and worries. Be aware of them. Take your feelings seriously and allow yourself to realize that you are not perfect and don’t have to be. Ask yourself how you feel in the morning and in the evening. If you don’t feel good, unhappy or anxious, investigate where these feelings are coming from and to what extent there are legitimate reasons – or whether they are simply the result of self-talk with yourself.
Simply by practising introspection, you will automatically sharpen your perception of the other person. It will become increasingly difficult to simply dismiss others in conversation, to express unreflected opinions about others, to make decisions without consulting them, etc.
Observe yourself. Where do your eyes look when you talk to someone? What do you perceive? Are you really listening to what they are saying or are you already thinking about your answer? What vocabulary do you use to describe yourself? – What vocabulary do you use to describe others?
- Become a mindful observer of yourself.
- Become a mindful observer of others.
- Be non-intentional in your dealings with others.
- Train your empathy skills by being aware of yourself
- thinking through the consequences of your decisions and whether they are determined by thinking or feeling
questioning your feelings, e.g. what lies behind your anger or fears - learn to reduce stress through sport or forms of meditation
- talk about your feelings
- confide in a trusted setting, a trusted person
- recognize your own patterns and the reactions of others
- can laugh at yourself; recognize both strengths and weaknesses
- take responsibility for yourself and honor commitments
- express your concerns and feelings objectively
- develop a sense of group dynamics and your role in them
- try to find a fair compromise for everyone in the event of a conflict
I would be delighted if you would like to incorporate a few of these suggestions into your everyday life! 🙂
