Danish children are exposed to lessons as early as preschool that are specifically designed to foster feelings of empathy and understanding.
The Atlantic reports a program called Step by Step presents young students with pictures of kids showing a range of emotions and helps them identify these feelings, talk about them and respect them.
Anti-bullying programs teach students to care more about each other, the CAT-kit program helps students develop empathy and emotional awareness and classroom teachers group students of mixed abilities to encourage collaboration, teamwork and respect across differences.
These one-to-one empathy sessions support; well-being, healing, practicing to be a better listener and supporting you in creating empathic environments in your relationships, family, school, work, communities and beyond.
This video teaches you self-love, self-empathy, self-nurturing as an essential attitude for change through Gendlin's Focusing. Fathers Pete Campbell and Ed McMahon of Biospiritual Focusing, www.biospiritual.org, created this exercise for bringing a Caring Feeling Presence to your own inner woundedness..."Imagine you have found an infant deserted on your hospital's stairway...show it, through your body, that it is totally safe and completely wanted..." Find your own Inner Nurturer and Inner Woundedness and bring them together. Sign up for free e-course on Gendlin's Focusing and Rogers' Empathic Listening at www.cefocusing.com.
It's easy to fall into the trap of "fixing" rather than listening — or judging rather than empathizing — when people come to us with heavy emotions or problems.
When we miss opportunities for empathy, misunderstandings are common, people might feel unheard or invalidated, and often, feelings are hurt. This can strain relationships.
Empathy is an important skill for leadership, relationships, and mental wellness.
But what is empathy? And how do we get better at it?
Empathy is listening to understand, taking the perspective of another, staying out of judgment, and recognizing emotion in others & communicating that (thanks Brené Brown!).
And importantly, empathy is a skill that can be learned!
At Stanton House, we believe that empathy is one of the most important skills any great leader can develop. It is a powerful contributor to the employee experience; improving communication and productivity and increasing employee engagement and retention.
We believe it is important for every organisation to foster a culture of empathy and inclusion. In this paper, we share the details of our own internal initiative, The Stanton House Empathy Series. We hope that by doing so, business leaders, hiring managers and talent partners will gain some deeper insight and practical suggestions for developing empathy across their teams.
If you are interested in using our concept, content and materials, please reach out to our Learning & Development Partner, Esther Boffey. We are happy to share more detail with you.
Jackie knows that organizations can foster more empathy through cultural transformation and systems change from within, not training from the outside. So they created a new leadership model in District 4 and launched internal Innovation Teams, as well as the first employee engagement survey in the 160-year history of the police department. Top of the list in responses was a desire for increased community engagement, removal of tedious and repetitive paperwork, and a focus on officer mental health.
The result of the culture shift: Use of force decreased, citizen complaints were down, and officer transfers increased back into District 4. Now, three of the five districts are using the program.
You’re a highly empathic person. You fully and intently listen to others. You tend to focus on others’ emotions, often feeling them more so than your own. In fact, it’s like you feel someone else’s pain deep inside your bones.
It’s that visceral.
And you frequently find yourself utterly exhausted because tending to others comes more naturally to you than tending to yourself, according to Joy Malek, a marriage and family therapist who specializes in working with people who are intuitive, empathic, creative and highly sensitive.
The empathic process is a noteworthy style of communication. I developed an empathic process as a viable way for two people in a relationship, as well as families, to build a new pattern of dialogue that is both healthy and successful for everyone.
The empathic process Find a neutral location, preferably the kitchen, which is the heart of the house and a place where alchemy happens, rather than someone’s office, bedroom, or place of power.
Learning the Empathy Circle Practice Learn to take part in an Empathy Circle. Participants will learn about the process of an Empathy Circle by experiencing it. An Empathy Circle is a structured dialogue process that effectively supports meaningful and constructive dialogue. The practice increases mutual understanding and connection by ensuring that each person feels fully heard to their satisfaction. The practice is the most effective gateway practice for learning, practicing and deepening listening and empathy skills, as well as, nurturing an empathic way of being. For more see: https://EmpathyCircle.com
lack of empathy could signal an outsized propensity for cruelty. Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor of developmental psychopathology and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the neuroscience of narcissism and psychopathy and the reasons someone might lack the ability to care. His book is “The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.”
This week, members of the University of Colorado School of Medicine Class of 2026 became new medical students, entering medicine at a critical and often tumultuous time.
“The current state of the world can be characterized by polarized beliefs, inequitable treatment, violence, and legitimate concerns about the state of our democracy,” said Brian Dwinnell, MD, FACP, associate dean of student life in the CU School of Medicine, Friday morning to the assembled Class of 2026. “Understanding the social and personal influences on an individual's health has never been more critical. Despite the technological advances in diagnosis and treatment, the power of empathy has never been greater.”
Love alone is not enough to sustain a satisfying relationship.
Empathy is the crucial ability to understand your partner's thoughts and feelings.
Empathy is oxygen, essential to keep love alive and thriving.
When it comes to the survival of intimate relationships, no matter how much love there is between you and your partner, there’s no guarantee that you both will be able to make your love last—even if you think you’re "soulmates." In fact, without empathy, the love in your relationship will end up like "love" in tennis—one big zero.
But there’s a down side to empathy that doesn’t get much attention.
If you empathize too much, it can exhaust you. Which is one reason people in helping professions such as psychotherapy, nursing, and social work often experience burn out. Over time, feeling what others are feeling can deplete you, eventually tapping you out and leading to negative emotions and even challenges to your mental health. Consistently high levels of empathizing with others can also lead to apathy if you do not set healthy boundaries.
Empathy can also lead to divisiveness, which sounds contradictory because it’s such an essential skill for building trusting relationships. But since empathy helps us connect to others’ suffering, it can be limiting because it causes us to strongly identify with particular people and groups. An article in Forbes about the dark side of empathy reports that,
On this week’s episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, co-hosts Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt talk with Arianna Huffington, CEO and founder of Thrive Global, and Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys. The group discusses workforce wellness, how empathetic culture drives innovation, and the reasons empathy has become a go-to topic in boardrooms and conference spaces. Huffington and Bates also share details of their companies’ partnership—and how they’re putting A.I. to work for call center reps, helping them reduce stress before it swamps their productivity.
How do we build a skill like empathy between colleagues from diverse backgrounds? What about colleagues who sit on opposing ends of the political spectrum or hold different religious beliefs? In order for our workplaces to heal and move forward, we need to teach the skills that allow empathy to flourish and connection to naturally progress.
Why is empathy worth cultivating in workplace culture? Empathy is fundamental to a foundational understanding of the requirements for others' success—customers and our colleagues alike.
Roots of Empathy Founder/President describes what empathy means and why it is so important.
Mary Gordon is an award-winning social entrepreneur, educator, best-selling author, parenting expert, and child advocate who has created an international children’s charity, Roots of Empathy (ROE). To learn more about Mary Gordon's work, visit our website:
Empathy in business is more than just a trend praised by influencers and self-help gurus. This powerful concept, when used strategically, helps retailers and companies plant seeds for a continuous bumper crop of loyal brand ambassadors while also growing business.
Here are 3 strategies rooted in empathy to benefit your customers and business equally.
Empathy in business, what is it? Empathy is the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of another person and comprehend their point of view. Applying empathy in business means you can genuinely relate to customers, teammates, or partners because you’ve had similar experiences—directly or indirectly.
A better understanding of customers translates to better service and sales, resulting in company growth; it’s a win-win.
So, a few months ago I decided to visit an Empathy Circle Cafe and do a series of Monday Street Prophets diaries on the process. What started out as just fact finding has now changed as I’m having a new bit of optimism and idealistic enthusiasm that I once had when I was just starting out on my political adventure and wrote that optimistic blog post about Empathy, Politics, and Activism #1 a long time ago.'
I started out this diary by promising the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I will deliver on that promise, but it is complex and I will save it for next week and the following weeks. Before closing let me mention two good things that came out of my experienc
Enter the digital visit, which, as our discussants point out, offers many advantages and efficiencies but so clearly and literally has increased both the physical distance as well as potentially the existential distance between the dyad of practitioner and patient. I have written in these editorials many times regarding the power of empathy in clinical practice as a force that not only brings a higher level of satisfaction to the encounter, but also may contribute to the healing of illness.
But your experience does not end when the headset comes off. From a sensory perspective, the dangers you faced while embodying a turtle threatened you. As a result, you increased your empathy for loggerheads, your understanding of environmental threats and your motivation to protect the species and its habitat, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
“Plenty of people are moved to tears after experiencing a [VR] boat strike or having to abandon their clutch of eggs,” Daniel Pimentel, one of the study’s co-authors, said in an email sent from a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean. He explained that it is easier for humans to empathize with a single victim rather than a group. “When it’s many, we are less capable of inferring the group’s emotional state, and we can identify less with the collective suffering, which can lead to desensitization.”
Empathy is not a nice to have anymore, it’s now a must. Understand your team members, to enable them to be their best, be more fulfilled, to collaborate better with others. You will find that your team is more invested in the company’s success and in helping other team members because they feel they matter. Not only will it improve efficiency, but it will also improve talent retention, which as we know can be terribly costly and disruptive for any business.
According to Forbes, 76% of millennial employees will leave a company if they don’t feel appreciated, that’s a staggeringly high rate and I can imagine a similar figure will be true for Gen Z employees.
Most companies are focused on short-term gains while forgetting the importance of empathy and leadership in the workplace. As a result, changing jobs has become commonplace - but it doesn't have to be.
Mimi Nicklin, author of 'Softening the Edge: Empathy: How Humanity's Oldest Leadership Trait is Changing our World' joins Bobby to discuss the changing world of work, and how business leaders can adapt to make a more empathetic environment for all going forward.
Despite various definitions and several different mental states related to this notion, empathy generally refers to our capability to connect with one another at an emotional level1,2. Our empathic faculties enable us to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of another. Considered as prosociality drivers, they facilitate coordination and cooperation with our fellows humans.
Our empathy can also be at work outside a strictly human relational frame since we are able to form bonds and emotionally interact with other species. In a recent study, we highlighted the evolutionary component in our empathic preferences toward other living species (i.e., ease to understand their emotions), by putting into evidence their very significant correlation with the phylogenetic proximity with us.
As no cultural factor (e.g., diet, ethics, beliefs, knowledge) was able to explain this phenomenon, the Anthropomorphic stimuli hypothesis was formalized to account for the sharp correlation observed: in all likelihood, the closer another organism is phylogenetically to us, the more it shares with us inherited morphological and behavioral traits (synapomorphies), and the easier it is to perceive it as an alter ego and—really or supposedly—to understand its emotions.
Tapping knowledge for empathy Empathy worked two ways for me. First, it helped me understand Nicholas’ thoughts and point of view. It allowed me to ask myself, “What would I be thinking or feeling if I were him right now?”
Second, it let me express my concern and inquire about his worries. As I listened to Nicholas respond to my questions, I better understood the stress he was under at work and the added stress of being separated from his son.
Defining empathy There are three types of empathy — cognitive, emotional and compassionate — yet they don’t look and feel the same.
Cognitive empathy is what we know about how the other person is feeling, acting and thinking. This is used often in interacting with others, negotiating, and considering differing points of view (perspectives), as well as in motivating others. We can learn what typically motivates APPs, for example, in creating structures for recruitment and retention.
We can learn how patients typically respond to a new diagnosis of cancer to create patient and family education materials. We can learn how different disciplines in the interprofessional team interact with each other to establish team dynamics and rules for engagement. Patients, families and our colleagues all have their own cognitive responses to situations — ie, what they know, how they react and what they are thinking.
Emotional empathy is responding to the “feelings” the other person is experiencing. Acknowledging their feelings is helpful to validate that you are listening and responding to them in that moment.
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