4 tips to develop empathy.

Among all the capabilities that allow a person to develop as a social being in their environment, empathy is one of the most relevant. Therefore, improving empathy is a necessary aspect for all of us.

Empathy allows us to develop as social beings. In fact, it helps us to understand and communicate with others. It is that ability that teaches us that there are other perspectives besides ours and that each person observes the world according to everything that happened in their life history. In this way, it helps us to establish solid bonds and, somehow, it makes us more cautious when it comes to judging others. For all these reasons, developing empathy is of great importance.

Thanks to it, it will be easier for us to identify how others feel, as well as express what our feelings are. Empathy is an art, a skill that allows us to be in tune with others and strengthen our bonds with them.

Let's delve deeper into this subject.

Sympathize is not empathizing.

First, it is important to differentiate sympathy from empathy, especially based on the more psychological conception of both terms. According to the Houaiss Dictionary, sympathy is the “relationship between people who, having affinities, feel spontaneously attracted to each other”, while empathy is the “identification process in which the individual puts himself in the other's shoes”.

This difference is very relevant, as it is normal to think that we are empathizing with someone when, in reality, we are not. Being kind and caring to others does not make us empathetic. To achieve this, it is important to go further, it is necessary to try to understand the other person from their perspective, not ours.

Improve empathy to resolve conflicts.

Thanks to the emotional and cognitive connection this ability provides, empathy can help us resolve problems peacefully. By understanding others, it will be easier not to get carried away by impulses.

To empathize is to understand, for example, why a person feels unhappy after losing a job or euphoric when he knows he is going to have a child. Relating events to our own experiences is often a good empathy mechanism.

We can do some exercises to develop empathy. These are simple exercises that can help us significantly improve our relationship with the environment.

How to develop empathy?

First, it's important to understand that our personal progress and development can be closely dependent on our emotional intelligence. So, before trying to put these exercises into practice, we should try to understand the importance of developing this kind of intelligence.

Later, we can begin to put into practice the exercises that will be described below.

1. Train the ability to listen.

In order to understand the people we interact with, it is very important to know how to listen. However, listening does not mean understanding the other's words. To truly listen, we must pay full attention to non-literal message and non-verbal communication.

In order to improve listening skill, it is also very important:

Don't interrupt.
Not giving our opinion constantly.
Listen to the message without judging.
Focus on non-verbal communication.
This last point is the most important, as it gives us relatively easy-to-observe clues about what the other person is really feeling.

Pragmatic information – be it gestural information, prosodic information or a person's belief and opinion system – largely determines the way we communicate and the success of the exchange between two people.

For this reason, it is important to try to understand a person's emotional system by interpreting their non-strictly verbal communicative patterns in order to be successful in our empathic practice. So how you say something is often more important than the content of the message itself.

2. Stay calm and choose tranquility.

Learning to remain calm will help us to improve our empathy, as without tranquility the ability to listen can diminish. If we want to improve our listening skills, it is important to start from a relaxed state of mind and open to different possibilities of communication.

In this sense, practices such as breath control and meditation can have many benefits.

3. Bet on patience.

Related to the previous point, patience is also closely linked to empathy. To understand the cognitive and emotional processes of those around us, we need time and we need to use that time patiently.

At first, perhaps unconsciously, we refuse to understand the other, but with patience the chances of being able to do this will be much greater.

4. Ask about emotions, not information.

This point is critical if we are to succeed in developing empathy. As we've seen, empathy can have little to do with the literal message in a conversation. Conversely, it tends to be more related to emotions.

Therefore, the more we care about others' emotions, the more empathetic we can be. For example, when receiving information such as “Yesterday I received a promotion at work,” a person with little empathy or disinterest might ask something like “And what are you going to do now? Will you work at the same time?"

“The most precious gift we can give to others is our presence. When our mindfulness embraces those we love, they blossom like flowers. ”
-Thich Nhat Hanh-

However, a more empathetic person might respond something like, “And how did you feel? I imagine it was amazing! Would you like to celebrate?”. In other words, it would show a greater concern with what the person feels than with the practical aspects of the subject.

After all, communication is not based solely on exchanging words. In fact, communication in words represents a low percentage of what we actually convey. Much less, though it may not seem like it, than emotional communication.