Each of us urgently needs to be noticed, understood and supported. But at the same time, we live in such a rhythm that we don’t even have time to just be attentive to each other. How to develop an interest in others and the ability to recognize their emotions?
In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, there is one powerful line: “You can’t really understand a person until you get into his point of view … You have to get into his shoes and walk in it.” And we actually know how to do it.
Neuropsychologists say that 98% of people have innate empathy skills — they can imagine themselves in the place of others and look at the world through the eyes of others. The difficulty, however, is that in everyday life most of us do not use this empathic apparatus to its full potential.
Emotional deafness?
In the morning, hurrying to work, you can calmly run past an old woman tormented with a cart at the steps of an underpass, or go to a news site and scroll through a message about the deadly tsunami in Indonesia with a bored look.
This kind of empathic failure can also happen in close relationships, such as when you yell at your six-year-old in annoyance or get angry that your wife asked you to wash the dishes, forgetting that she already has most of the household chores.
However (good news!) almost anyone can learn empathy; it’s not much harder than learning how to drive a car or how to cook soup.
To begin with, it would be a good idea to assess your ability to empathize. Neuropsychologist Simon Baron-Cohen developed the «Reading Emotions from Facial Expressions» test. A research participant is shown 36 photographs of eyes, each accompanied by a list of four emotional states. You need to choose the most appropriate state.
The average test result is 26/36. This means that most of us, with due effort, are surprisingly good, although not perfect, at understanding other people’s emotions. However, there is no limit to perfection: there are a number of techniques that allow you to develop the ability to empathize.
Actively listen
“The key to successful communication is our XNUMX% presence in the here-and-now, the consequence of which is the ability to understand what exactly is happening in the soul of the interlocutor,” writes Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and author of the idea of “non-violent communication1.
By carefully listening to the interlocutor (whether it be a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer, or a husband who is annoyed by your irregular working hours), we thereby let him know that we see his problem and accept his point of view.
Let the person finish, then refrain from the urge to immediately begin to answer: repeat to yourself (and sometimes out loud) everything that you just heard. This will let the other person know that you heard him. It is this communication technique that is called radical (and also active and empathic) listening.
Active listening works great in conflict resolution: Marshall Rosenberg showed that in an employer-employee conflict, if each of the participants in the discussion literally repeats what was just said to him before speaking himself, conflict resolution is twice as fast.
Looking for a person
The next step to sharpening empathy has its roots in Buddhist practices: spend the day thinking about every person who has a hand in your daily life.
The driver of the train you take to work; the worker who laid the tiles that you walk on from the subway to the office; the little Filipino who sewed buttons to your shirt under slavish conditions; Ceylon planter who grew the tea you are now brewing — your life is inextricably linked with the lives of other people unknown to you.
Spend the day asking yourself how they live, what they dream about, what they aspire to. Brecht has a poem, «Questions from a Reading Worker,» which begins in a completely empathic spirit: «Who erected the seven gates of Thebes? The names of the rulers are named in the books. Did the lords hew stones and move rocks? 2
Open up to the unusual
We need to regain that curiosity about everything in the world that we all had when we were children, and which modern life so successfully destroys in us. Here, however, it is important not to go to the other extreme. When communicating with people, remember that your task is not to interrogate, but to question, so be friendly and unobtrusive, do not turn into an investigator.
Empathy is the key to healthy human relationships. As Daniel Goleman, who coined the term emotional intelligence, said, “Without empathy, we are all deaf.” And, since everyone can master empathy, try it too — and go to the world you know, full of the unfamiliar and unusual.
1 M. Rosenberg “The language of life. Nonviolent Communication” (Sofia, 2009).
2 B. Brecht “Poems. Stories. Plays” (Fiction, 1972).