How does active listening build empathy?
One of the most powerful ways to grow empathy is through active listening—fully focusing on the person speaking and showing that you value what they’re saying. When we truly listen, we go beyond simply hearing words. We pick up on tone, emotion, and even what’s left unsaid. This builds trust and rapport, which are the foundation of any strong relationship.

Good listening skills help us understand not just the facts, but the feelings behind them. In mindful listening, you’re fully present in the conversation, setting aside distractions and judgment. This kind of attention lets others know they are heard and respected, which naturally deepens the emotional connection between people.

by Megan Malone

When you can easily put yourself in another person’s shoes, that can quickly escalate to prioritizing their comfort or approval over your own needs or other factors.

Empathy—the ability to relate to the emotional experiences of others—is a workplace superpower. A survey of 900 US employees revealed that empathetic leadership results in more innovative and engaged teams, less turnover, higher productivity and more positive work experiences. With workplace burnout at an all-time high, empathy is an essential ingredient that organizations can’t afford to lose.

Senior Rabbi Angela Buchdahl speaks about the war on empathy and the painful way the Jewish community has become divided since October 7.

"This war has tested our empathy. All of us. I see the ways that my fear has disabled my empathy response. I still struggle to find the emotional bandwidth to read the tragic stories coming out of Gaza while my extended family is still held captive, while calls to 'blacklist Z1on!sts' or to 'globalize the 1nt!fada' still ring around the world, and even this city. But who do we become when we harden our hearts?"
 

When someone is struggling, we want to show we care. We might say, “I feel bad for you,” or “I understand how you feel.” Both come from a place of compassion, but they aren’t quite the same. Empathy and sympathy are often used interchangeably, but understanding the difference can transform the way you connect and show up for others — at work, in friendships, with family, and in your own mental health journey.

In this blog, we’ll explore what each term means, whether you can have one without the other, and how both can strengthen your relationships and emotional intelligence.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl leads the largest synagogue in New York City. But she says she’s never been so afraid to talk about Israel. That’s because she thinks that compassion for people suffering on either side of the war in Gaza has come to be seen as disloyal and even threatening – a zero sum empathy calculus that also applies to ideological battles fought in our country every day.

Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained a rabbi, a journey she describes in her new memoir “Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging.”

We talk to her about why knowing what it feels like to be an outsider has helped her enable connection among people with disparate views and what happens when we become incapable of empathy.

With the rise of AI across all facets of design, empathy remains the UX designer’s superpower. Designers have a unique capacity to represent the people that products are being built for, using a sharp eye and creative skepticism to craft interfaces. The process of questioning ideas with an open mind, and reflecting from diverse perspectives, is what helps us cut through complexity and develop a deeper understanding of what users truly need.

Join our three-day course at the University of Leicester to master empathy teaching in healthcare. Boost patient care, overcome barriers, and lead with compassion.

Who is the course for?

This course is for educators, trainers, clinicians, and others involved in healthcare teaching or supervision. It is particularly relevant for those designing or delivering curricula in medical, nursing, or allied health education.

By the end of this course, participants will:

• Comprehend different approaches to teaching empathy
• Deliver confident and effective instruction on elements of empathy teaching
• Grasp the variety of methods and assessment approaches needed for empathy education
• Provide instruction on empathy topics
• Recognise the essential elements of a successful empathy teaching

Being nice comes at a price, and it can make you wonder: Can someone be too empathetic to lead?

Empathy—the ability to relate to the emotional experiences of others—is a workplace superpower. A survey of 900 US employees revealed that empathetic leadership results in more innovative and engaged teams, less turnover, higher productivity and more positive work experiences. With workplace burnout at an all-time high, empathy is an essential ingredient that organizations can’t afford to lose.

The recent Seattle IT Learning Conference saw a standout presentation that's been the talk of the town.

A team known for its expertise in service design delivered a session titled "Empathy by Design: Crafting Human-Centered AI Experiences," which has gained momentum and led to an encore due to popular demand.

Guest: Dr. Helen Riess is the Director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, founder of Empathetics, Inc., and author of a book called The Empathy Effect.

The grief that attended American political activist Charlie Kirk’s murder was not solely poured out by the political right. Liberal commentators also participated; journalist Ezra Klein expressed grief in an essay for The New York Times (“I was and am grieving for Kirk himself”), while Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew stated that “we have to have empathy for other people in our society.”

Kirk would likely be surprised, and perhaps a bit put off, by this display of empathy by his opponents: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy I prefer more than empathy.”

Lights, Camera, Empathy!
The Empathy Project brings together leaders in medicine, education, entertainment, and technology to promote empathy in medicine. The project creates engaging, Hollywood-quality short films that train healthcare providers to be more humane and help empower patients to be effective participants in their own care.

Earlier this month, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, she delivered a sermon as a call to empathy. She said empathy for others is not a betrayal of one's own side, but a reminder of shared humanity—a message that resonates in times of political violence, rising antisemitism, and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

CFOs face more scrutiny than ever before, from investors, boards, and regulators demanding not just flawless numbers but strategic clarity and trust. But here’s the catch: the most powerful skill driving that trust and influence isn’t found on a balance sheet. It’s empathy.

Despite its reputation as a “soft” skill, empathy is fast becoming the ultimate leadership edge for CFOs navigating volatility and complexity. According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, employees rank empathy alongside transparency and ethics as top leadership traits—yet many finance leaders still emphasise precision over people. In a world that demands rapid decisions and resilient strategies, CFOs who lead with empathy don’t just manage numbers—they unlock human insight, elevate trust, and drive long-term performance. For CFOs, mastering empathy is no longer optional; it’s a strategic imperative.

Empathy forms the heartbeat of therapeutic work. It’s the act of entering another’s emotional landscape — not to fix, but to understand. As Carl Rogers described, it’s the ability “to sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality.”

In supervision sessions, I often tell trainees that empathy is not agreement. It’s attunement — a capacity to sit beside someone in their truth. Whether your client is grieving, angry, or numb, empathy is the bridge that says, “You don’t have to be alone in this.”

Two years ago, I wrote "Artificial Empathy: A Human Construct Borrowed by AI." Back then, the idea that a machine could convincingly simulate compassion felt speculative. Today, we might call it empirical. A meta-analysis in the British Medical Bulletin found that in text-based clinical settings, chatbots are consistently rated as more empathic than physicians. That’s not a headline for artificial intelligence (AI) marketing; it’s a shift in how we manage and measure care.

For more content follow me here:

X - @VivekGRamaswamy
Instagram - @vivekgramaswamy
Facebook -
Truth Social - @VivekRamaswamy
Rumble - @VivekRamaswamy

A new review released in Biological Psychiatry discusses how empathy, while normally viewed as a positive trait, can actually have negative impacts on mental health. The review integrates human and animal research, explaining how excessive empathy can result in overwhelming emotional states collectively referred to as “empathic distress.”

A generally higher degree of emotional resonance can elevate one’s susceptibility to distress and psychiatric illness like depression, anxiety, burnout, vicarious trauma, internalizing disorders and PTSD.

International collaborations sound impressive on paper – but most fail to move beyond initial enthusiasm and a signed memorandum of understanding. Jeremy Howick shares lessons from building a global network focused on empathy in healthcare.

As the founder of the UK’s first empathy centre, focused on improving healthcare outcomes through greater understanding of patient perspectives, I am keen to seek out international best practice in this area. 

What started as a conversation with a colleague about working with the other empathy specialists around the world has transformed, two years later, into a global network of 13 centres across five continents.

For years, empathy has been the soft skill many leaders paid lip service to but struggled to operationalize. Customer experience executives put it in presentations. HR leaders championed it in onboarding. Marketers wrote about it in brand manifestos.

But Zurich’s new 2025 Addressing the Empathy Gap study reframes empathy as something much more tangible: a measurable lever with direct impact on customer behavior and company revenue. And this time, the evidence comes at scale.