When I was growing up, I was taught to be empathetic. Whether it was meeting someone for the first time or trying to deepen an existing relationship, I attempted to focus my attention on them. Using empathy, for me, involved trying to understand how that person was feeling in their current situation. Based on what I was witnessing, I made adjustments to my behavior and feelings to be in tune with their persona. By meeting the other person on their turf, I hoped to connect by being in touch with what they were feeling.
Recently, though, I’m discovering the concept of empathy feels overly simplistic and misleading. In fact, I consider it to be a red herring. Why? Because trying to “read” what other people have going on seems pretentious. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t really feel what they feel or understand what they have been through. In fact, getting it wrong runs the risk of alienating the other person and coming across as manipulative. And, casting attention on the other person gives me an excuse to avoid being vulnerable and putting my true self out there. Overall, I feel like it prevents me from being authentic.
So, what should I do? As I sat back to think about it, I decided to take a page out of my working life. I’ve spent a great deal of time developing process improvements. As I sat down and contemplated the way I use empathy, holes in the process immediately jumped off the page. Each of these holes creates an opportunity to do things better.
Now, I needed ideas. I turned my attention toward searching what is going on in the world of empathy. I was curious to see what was out there on the topic and how it could help me think about things differently. In 2020, finding information is super easy and I found some pretty interesting things.
Filet the Fish
My research began with a trip over to Google Trends. The term “empathy” shows a steady positive trend line in Search since they started tracking data back in 2004. In fact, the results have more than doubled. Digging into the results, the topic clearly is a great muse for writing a book. For example, here is a list of the 81 Best Empathy Books of All Time. If there are 81 best books, I wonder how many not-so-good books exist on the topic of empathy.
On the flip side, I found many people dealing with the failures of empathy. Too many times, apparently, empathy gets mixed up with sympathy and comes across as hollow and lacking substance. For example, I found this excerpt from a recent book on the subject to be particularly enlightening:
We have a tendency to underestimate the richness and variety of other people’s minds while not depreciating our own, which can lead to misunderstandings and even dehumanization. And though our intuition can sometimes reveal important insights into another person, we may rely too heavily on correspondence bias or stereotyping to truly get the picture.
Social-psychologist Nicholas Epley from his book, Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.
The Bait
Empathy, for me, takes advantage of my need to problem solve. My wife points this out to me more often than should be necessary. When she brings up something that is troubling or disturbing to her, I quickly move into problem-solving mode. I take my collected experience and throw out my witty advice about how I would extricate myself from her current situation.
She doesn’t want me to solve her problems. Rather, she desires for me to get in touch with her emotions. She is hoping I will validate her feelings and let her talk things out. To come to her level and listen to what is going on and abstain from judgment. She may appreciate questions, but I am sure she is not looking for platitudes or my helpful advice. That is the empathy trap for me: I empathize long enough to figure out how to insert myself into the situation or conversation.
Besides my wife, I am sure I do this with many others. As I empathize, instead of listening, my thoughts move into their heads and my feet into their shoes. That is the exact opposite of how empathy is supposed to function. If I do manage to get to empathizing, I take their emotions and paint them with my bias and subjectivity. My inclination is to take their emotions and fit them into my perspective so I can solve it or bring them to my line of thinking. It’s totally self-centered and the antithesis of empathy.
My approach tends to keep things at the surface level. It feels like I am trying to be discussing meaningful things, but the conversation never gets to a level of authenticity, vulnerability, and true connection. This lack of connection makes many of my conversations feel sugarcoated. I am trying to say something but there is no real substance. It’s not necessarily fake or a lie, but I fail to share ideas in a meaningful way with people I meet. Without substance, the friendships I want aren’t happening.
Reeling in my Empathy
It’s not empathy’s fault. I’ve been using it wrong. The way I have been using it focuses on me and things under my control. Instead, it should push me to become more selfless and compassionate. Unless I am really careful, empathizing starts with my point of view, i.e. “what do I think about what you are thinking or saying?” This trap plasters all of my bias, subjectivity, and coloring of the facts into someone else’s head and heart. Then, from all that, I think I can understand how the other person feels and somehow magically relate to them. That’s not possible for me. There have to be more constructive ways to interact with people.
My plan is to recenter the approach, just like when I get off the path with my GPS. If I want to set aside my bias, opinions, and background, I need to suspend judgment and listen to others. As I have been building this fishing theme, this is the perfect place to bring it home. My strategy needs to identify plenty of opportunities to cast out and see what I can reel back in. The good part is that God willing, I have enough water in front of me to create abundant space for practice.
The Switch
What am I doing instead? I have been focused on listening to people’s words for clues about what they are really getting at. Instead of using my focus to come up with my next thing to say, I focus on the comments being made and what their body language is trying to say. From there, I can use their cues to create real, shared dialog.
I know it’s not always going to work, but I want to eliminate the guesswork of forecasting people’s feelings and actions. Forecasting does not seem to work for meteorologists and my empath skills do not seem much more accurate than most weather reports. Instead, if I cannot make a connection with someone, I move on to other spots.
The key, I have found, is to just listen to the clues people leave in their conversation. From those clues, I try to draw out their thoughts and feelings. When I really hit it off with people in conversation, it feels natural and I’m amazed by how much I get to know about the person. I realize how interesting and exciting it is to learn more about them. It’s energizing to find places where we don’t agree or have similarities and we can actually learn from one another.
The dialog feels almost effortless. I forget about trying to guess their reasons for saying things or otherwise trying to fit inside their head. The ideas just naturally materialize. Rather than spending time guessing about emotions, I now spend my effort on casting in different areas until I find that perfect fishing spot. Then, when I find it, I can relax and see what I can catch. I have plenty of more fishing holes to explore.
When I was a kid, our Dad took us fishing – even a few years to South Florida into the 10,000 islands. I remember one time, when we really wanted to catch fish, he hired a guide.
Did you catch a lot of fish on that trip?