Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Developing Empathy Through Understanding and Connecting with Others

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

—Stephen R. Covey

Here is a joke I came across a long time ago.

Once upon a time, a disciple asked, “Master, is half the holy life associating with people?”

The master replied, “No, the whole of holy life is associating with people.”

This joke probably started as a misreading of a famous Buddhist story in which the Buddha told Ananda that friendships with “admirable people” are not half of holy life, but the whole of holy life. Over time, however, I found the humorous apocryphal version to be deeply insightful. In the context of emotional intelligence, I think that associating with people is where the proverbial rubber meets the road (“Hi rubber!” “Hello road!”).

So, congratulations on completing the intrapersonal intelligence chapters of this book, and welcome to interpersonal intelligence—black-belt territory.

Empathy, the Brain, and Monkey Business

I find it very funny that one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience was accidentally made when somebody picked up food in front of a monkey.

A group of neurophysiologists at the University of Parma, Italy, placed electrodes in a monkey’s brain to record neural activity.¹ They found that some neurons fired every time the monkey picked up a piece of food. As part of the monkey business of science, researchers sometimes had to pick up food to give to the monkey, and when they did, they were surprised to find those same neurons fired in the monkey’s brain. Further investigation revealed the existence of something called “mirror neurons.” These are brain cells that fire both when the animal is performing an activity and also when it watches another animal perform the same activity. Not surprisingly, evidence was later discovered that strongly suggested the human brain contains these mirror neurons as well.

Some scientists suggest that mirror neurons form the neural basis of empathy and social cognition. The scientific evidence backing that claim is not (yet) conclusive, but either way, mirror neurons offer a fascinating glimpse into the social nature of the human brain. It is as if the brain was designed with other people in mind (excuse the pun), right down to the level of individual neurons.²

Another fascinating glimpse into empathy at the neural level is revealed by the way the brain reacts to the pain of other people. When you are given a painful stimulus, parts of your brain nicknamed the “pain matrix” light up. If, instead of receiving the painful stimulus, you observe a loved one receiving it, your own pain matrix still lights up.³ In a very real way, in your brain, you are experiencing their suffering. You do not necessarily experience the same sensory input, but you share a similar affective experience. This is the neural foundation of compassion. The very word compassion comes from the Latin words for “suffering together.” Even without us putting in any effort, our brains are already pre-wired for empathy and compassion, at least for loved ones.

Brain Tango

There is a fascinating relationship between self-awareness and empathy. If you are strong in self-awareness, you are also very likely to be strong in empathy. The brain seems to use the same equipment for both tasks. Specifically, both qualities seem to have a lot to do with the part of the brain known as the insula. The insula is related to the ability to experience and recognize bodily sensations. People with very active insulae, for example, can become aware of their own heartbeats. What is really interesting is scientific evidence suggesting that people with active insulae also tend to have high empathy.⁴

How does that work? The work of famed psychologist John Gottman and his collaborators offers an interesting hint. Gottman is famous for his pioneering work on marital stability and relationship analysis. His expertise is legendary, and he is reputed to be able to accurately predict if a marriage will end in divorce within ten years just by observing a fifteen-minute conversation between the couple. Much of Gottman’s research work involves getting a couple into a room, hooking them up to equipment that records their physiological signals, and getting the couple to talk to each other (for example, about a topic on which they disagree) while being videotaped. Later, each spouse also watches the video separately and rates how he or she felt during each stage of the conversation. These experiments yield a treasure trove of data, with a videotape of each conversation, first-person ratings of how each participant felt during the conversation, and physiological data.

In an interesting experiment, Gottman’s collaborator, Robert Levenson, had a third subject (let’s call her the “rater”) view some of the videos from above and rate how one of the subjects in the video felt at each stage during the conversation.⁵ In this experiment, the empathy of the rater was measured: the more accurately the rater rated the feeling of the subject, the more empathy she demonstrated. The most interesting part of this experiment concerned the rater’s physiological signals, which were also measured during the session. The finding: the better the rater’s physiology matched the target’s, the more accurately she rated the target’s feelings.

“Really? What gives you the idea that my husband is capable of empathy?”

In other words, empathy works by having you physiologically mimic the other person. The word Daniel Goleman uses to describe this phenomenon is entrainment.⁶ He also calls it an “emotional tango.” Entrainment is the reason empathy is so closely related to self-awareness: the brain uses its self-awareness equipment for empathy. In fact, you can even say that empathy relies on self-awareness, and if our self-awareness is weak, our empathy will be weak too.

One important implication of this insight is that, oftentimes, practices that develop self-awareness also simultaneously develop empathy. For example, bringing mindful attention to your body (for instance, using the Body Scan exercise in Chapter 4) is known to strengthen the insula, and by doing so, it improves both self-awareness and empathy at the same time. Two for the price of one!

Empathy Is Not Psychologizing or Agreeing

Empathy is often confused with something called “psychologizing,” or speculating in psychological terms or on psychological motivations, often in an uninformed way. For example, let’s say you are explaining your problems to your boss, and midway through, your boss interrupts you to explain how your problems have to do with your presumed childhood issues and some other things he might have read about in pop psychology. He is psychologizing, not empathizing. When we psychologize, we are actually dismissing the problem, not understanding it. Unsurprisingly, psychologizing has been linked to mediocre performance in managers. I imagine that managers who psychologize routinely may start growing pointy hair like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. If, instead, your boss listens intently to you with his full attention, tries to understand what your problem means to you at both a cognitive and a visceral level, and does all that with kindness, he is empathizing.

“I’m demoting you because you have unresolved issues with your mother.”

Empathy does not necessarily mean agreeing. It is possible to understand another person at both an intellectual and a visceral level with kindness, and still respectfully disagree. Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Disagreeing with empathy is a lot like that. It is the mark of a developed mind to be able to understand and accept another’s feeling without agreeing to it.

That insight suggests that it is possible to make tough decisions while still being empathetic. In fact, in many situations, the best way to make tough decisions is with kindness and empathy. In a business setting, if we have to make a decision that hurts somebody’s interest, it is easy to tell ourselves not to bring empathy to the situation, because if we do, we will just make it hard for ourselves to make our tough, but necessary, decision. I found this to be suboptimal. If we make tough decisions without empathy, we can more easily achieve what we want in the short term, but we also create resentment and mistrust, which hurt our own interests in the long term. If instead we treat the affected people with kindness and empathy, we create trust and understanding. With that, we may become more able to skillfully negotiate and manage their concerns. With enough trust and understanding, we may even be able to find creative ways that either solve everybody’s problems or at least mitigate some concerns in some major way. In sum, tough decisions still need to be made, but if people trust you, feel that your heart is in the right place, and understand that you are doing this for the greater good, you are more likely to win their cooperation. Better still, once trust is established, it becomes a foundation upon which you can build a strong long-term working relationship. Hence, you win in both the short and long term.

A great example of making difficult decisions with empathy is found in Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence:

Consider how employees were treated when plants closed at two companies. At GE, workers had two years’ notice that the plant would be closed, and the company made an intense outplacement effort to help them find other jobs. The other company announced the closing with just one week’s notice, and made no effort to help workers locate other employment.

The results? Almost a year later, the majority of the former GE workers said it had been a good place to work, and 93 percent lauded the transition services offered them. At the other company, only 3 percent said it had been a good place to work. GE preserved a large pool of goodwill, while the other firm left a legacy of bitterness.

When we lay people off, we are subjecting them to one of the most painful experiences in their lives. Yet it is possible to do even that with empathy, and even under those painful circumstances, trust and goodwill can be created. Some people call it “being tough without being an SOB.”

How to Increase Empathy

Empathy increases with kindness. Kindness is the engine of empathy; it motivates you to care, and it makes you more receptive to others, and them to you. The more kindness you offer to people, the better you can empathize with them.

Empathy also increases with perceived similarity. The more we perceive somebody to be just like us, the more we empathize with him or her. There is a fascinating study by Andrea Serino and team, aptly titled I Feel What You Feel If You Are Similar to Me, which hints at how powerful the perception of similarity can be for empathy.⁷ The study is based on the discovery that watching a video of your own body being touched can temporarily increase your sensitivity to touch. For example, if your cheeks are electrically stimulated at an intensity just below what you can perceive (called “subthreshold tactile stimuli”), you probably will not feel it. But if it happens at the same time you see a video of your cheeks being touched, you probably will feel it. In other words, watching your cheeks being touched makes you more sensitive to feeling your cheeks being touched. This mechanism is called “visual remapping of touch,” and it also works if you observe a video of another person’s face being touched instead of your own face. Amazing stuff.

Serino’s study explored the question of whether this visual remapping of touch works better if the face you see being touched belongs to someone you consider to be similar to you. In the first experiment, they used faces from each participant’s own ethnic group versus those from another ethnic group (in this case, Caucasian versus Maghrebian). Fascinatingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out to work measurably better for faces belonging to each participant’s own ethnic group.

The second experiment used faces from the leadership of each participant’s political party versus those from the opposing political party (all from the same ethnic group). Results show this visual remapping to work measurably better if the face comes from one’s own political party! This is jaw dropping. The mere perception of whether or not a person shares your political beliefs can measurably affect how you respond to him at an unconscious, neurological level.

Hence, to become more empathetic, we need to create a mind that instinctively responds to everyone with kindness and an automatic perception of others being “just like me.” In other words, we need to create mental habits.

Creating Desired Mental Habits

The practice of creating mental habits is based on a simple, intuitively obvious yet profoundly important insight. The Buddha describes it this way:

Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind.⁸

In other words, what we think, we become.

The method itself is simple; invite a thought to arise in your mind often enough, and it will become a mental habit. For example, if every time you see another person, you wish for that person to be happy, then eventually, it will become your mental habit and whenever you meet another person, your instinctive first thought is to wish for that person to be happy. After a while, you develop an instinct for kindness. You become a kind person. Your kindness shows in your face, posture, and attitude every time you meet somebody. People will become attracted to your personality, not just your good looks.

The informal way to practice is simply to generate these thoughts every time you meet people. However, there is also a formal, systematic way of doing it, which many people find highly effective. We call it the Just Like Me / Loving Kindness practice.

Just Like Me / Loving Kindness Practice

There are two separate practices for seeing similarity and offering kindness. The first is a practice called Just Like Me, in which we remind ourselves how similar other people are to us, thereby creating the mental habit of equality. The second is a popular practice called Loving Kindness Meditation, where we create good wishes for others, thereby creating the mental habit of kindness. We combine both practices into one.

In class, we often do this exercise in pairs with participants sitting facing each other. For our purpose here, instead of finding somebody to sit down facing you, simply visualize somebody you care about in your mind while doing the exercise.

I urge you to read the scripts for Just Like Me and Loving Kindness slowly and with generous amounts of pause.

JUST LIKE ME AND LOVING KINDNESS MEDITATION

Setup

Sit in a comfortable position that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time. Start with 2 minutes to rest the mind on the breath.

Bring to mind somebody you care about. Visualize him or her. If you wish, you may use a photograph or video of that person. Just Like Me

Now, read the script below slowly to yourself, pausing at the end of each sentence for reflection:

This person has a body and a mind, just like me.

This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.

This person has, at some point in his or her life, been sad, disappointed, angry, hurt, or confused, just like me.

This person has, in his or her life, experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.

This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.

This person wishes to be healthy and loved, and to have fulfilling relationships, just like me.

This person wishes to be happy, just like me. Loving Kindness

Now, let’s allow some wishes to arise.

I wish for this person to have the strength, the resources, and the emotional and social support to navigate the difficulties in life.

I wish for this person to be free from pain and suffering.

I wish for this person to be happy.

Because this person is a fellow human being, just like me.

(Pause)

Now, I wish for everybody I know to be happy.

(Long pause) Closing

End with 1 minute of resting the mind.

Whenever we’ve asked participants how they felt during the exercise, the most common response has been “happy.” They discovered that being on the transmitting end of kindness is a calming and happy experience, often at least as good as being on the receiving end. This seems a little counterintuitive, but it makes sense once you remember we are highly social creatures and even our brains are pre-wired to be social. Given how social we are and how social we need to be to survive, it makes sense for kindness toward other people to be intrinsically rewarding to ourselves; it is probably an important part of our survival mechanism. One study even suggests that performing one kind act a day over just ten days can measurably increase your happiness.⁹

In other words, kindness is a sustainable source of happiness—a simple yet profound insight that can change lives.

“Are you sure this is how you’re supposed to do this Just Like Me exercise?”

How to Save Your Marriage and Other Relationships

One of the best things about the above practice is it can be used in any situation to heal relationships. I’ve found it extremely useful for dealing with conflicts. Whenever I have a fight with my wife or a co-worker, I go to another room to calm down and after a few minutes of calming down, I do this exercise in stealth. I visualize the other person in the next room. I remind myself that this person is just like me, wants to be free from suffering just like me, wants to be happy just like me, and so on. And then I wish that person wellness, happiness, freedom from suffering, and so on. After just a few minutes of doing this, I feel much better about myself, about the other person, and about the whole situation. A large part of my anger dissipates immediately.

The next time you get into conflict with someone you care about or someone you work with, I suggest doing this practice. It may do wonders for your relationships. I reckon this practice is a major reason being married to me does not totally suck.

Traditional Practice of Loving Kindness

The Loving Kindness practice above is our adaptation of an old practice called Metta Bhavana, or Loving Kindness Meditation. The traditional form of the practice is a little more structured and moves at a slower pace (which is funny, since I am an engineer and my adaptation of it is to make it less structured).

Like every other meditation practice, the traditional Metta Bhavana starts with a few minutes of resting the mind. Once some mental calmness is established, you invite a feeling of kindness toward yourself. To do this, quietly repeat these phrases to yourself:

May I be well.

May I be happy.

May I be free from suffering.

After a few minutes of this, invite a feeling of kindness toward someone you already like or admire, someone for whom it is easy to create loving kindness. If you like, you may use the above phrases for that person. May he or she be well, happy, and free from suffering.

After a few minutes of that, do the same for a neutral person, or somebody you do not particularly like or dislike, or whom you may not even know particularly well. A few minutes later, do it toward a difficult person, or somebody you dislike or who creates a lot of difficulty in your life. May he or she be well, happy, and free from suffering. Finally, extend the feeling to all sentient beings. May all sentient beings be well, happy, and free from suffering.

One of the best things about this traditional form is that by the time you get to the difficult person, your mind has already marinated in loving kindness, making it easier for you to break your mental habits about that particular person. For example, if your mental habit is to naturally generate a feeling of dislike every time you think of Rick, and you use Rick as the object of Metta Bhavana every day, after a while, your mind may start to associate Rick with a positive feeling since every time you think of Rick in that meditation, your mind has been soaked in loving kindness. After a while, you may find yourself no longer disliking Rick, and you may have to find a new difficult person for Metta Bhavana. (Eventually, you may even run out of people you dislike, which can be annoying for the purpose of this meditation, but is not a bad problem to have, really).

Feel free to use this traditional practice if it works better for you.

Bringing Out the Best in People

In the previous sections, we learned practices for developing foundational empathy skills. In the next few sections, let us focus on practices that help us facilitate the growth of others and bring out the best in them.

Establishing Trust Is Good for Work

Empathy is nice, but it is not just nice; it is also essential for helping you succeed at your work, especially if your work involves building a team or coaching, mentoring, and caring for others. There is one basic ability that enables you to be highly effective at those activities, and that is your ability to establish trust. Trust me on that one.

Empathy helps us build trust. When we interact with empathy, we increase the likelihood that people feel seen, heard, and understood. When people feel those things, they feel safer and more likely to trust the person who understands them.

Key thinkers on effectiveness at work have trust as the foundation of their practices and approaches. For example, Marc Lesser, an accomplished executive coach, suggests the coaching /mentoring cycle to involve these steps:

1. Establish trust.

2. Listen (by “looping” and “dipping”).

3. Ask probing and open-ended questions.

4. Provide feedback.

5. Partner to create options and practices.

The most important step is the first step, establishing trust. Trust is the foundation of a coaching /mentoring relationship. It is very simple: for you to work with your mentee, he must be open to you. The more he opens himself up, the more effectively you can work with him, and the more he trusts you, the more likely he is to be open. It is that simple. If there is no trust, this mentoring relationship will just be a waste of time (unless you are having doughnuts during your mentoring conversations, in which case the doughnuts make up for some of the time wasted, but this is not a suggestion to replace trust with doughnuts).

Similarly, trust is the essential foundation of a highly effective team. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni describes five ways a team becomes dysfunctional in the form of a pyramid.¹⁰

The five dysfunctions, in order of causality are:

1. Absence of trust: People do not trust the intentions of their teammates. They feel the need to protect themselves from each other and tread carefully around others on the team. This leads to the next dysfunction.

2. Fear of conflict: Without trust, people are unwilling to involve themselves in productive debates and conflicts, the type of good conflict that focuses entirely on resolving issues without involving character attacks or hidden personal agendas. Without such healthy conflicts, issues stay unresolved or are unsatisfactorily resolved. People feel they have not been properly involved in decisions. This leads to the next dysfunction.

3. Lack of commitment: When people feel their input has not been properly considered and that they have not been properly involved in decisions, they have no buy in. They do not commit to the final decisions. Ambiguity about priorities and directions festers, and uncertainties linger. This leads to the next dysfunction.

4. Avoidance of accountability: When people have no buy in about decisions, they avoid accepting accountability. Worse still, they do not hold their teammates accountable to high standards. Resentment festers, and mediocrity spreads. This leads to the final dysfunction.

5. Inattention to results: The ultimate dysfunction of a team. People care about something other than the collective goals of the team. Goals are not met, results are not achieved, and you lose your best people to your competitors.

It all begins with trust. The absence of trust is the root cause of all other dysfunctions. Specifically, the type of trust Lencioni talks about is what he calls “vulnerability-based trust.” That is when team members trust the intentions of each other enough that they are willing to expose their own vulnerabilities because they are confident their exposed vulnerabilities will not be used against them. Hence, they are willing to admit issues and deficiencies and ask for help. In other words, they are able to concentrate their energies on achieving the team’s common goals, rather than wasting time trying to defend their egos and look good to their teammates.

“Actually, Dave, we were kind of hoping we could go back to when you didn’t feel so open about exposing all your vulnerabilities to us.”

This vulnerability-based trust is the same type of trust Marc Lesser talks about as being the foundation of an effective mentoring/coaching relationship. Once you learn to establish this type of trust, you can become effective not just as a team leader but also as a mentor and coach.

Start with Sincerity, Kindness, and Openness

Many years ago, I had a manager, John, whom I like and respect a lot. John and I became good personal friends. John left the company we worked for under very unpleasant circumstances, which were very unfair to him, in my opinion. When a new manager, Eric, came in to replace John, I was not happy. Emotionally, I felt resentment toward Eric, but cognitively, I knew it really was not Eric’s fault. So I decided to dissolve all my resentment toward him. By then, I was already a seasoned meditator, so I knew precisely which tool to use: empathy.

Eric was already an acquaintance of mine and I occasionally worked with him on small things, so I knew he was not a bad person. In fact, cognitively, I suspected (correctly, it turned out) that he was a good person, and all I had to do was convince my emotional brain. So during our first one-on-one meeting with him as my manager, I made sure to only talk about personal stuff and to do so with kindness and openness. We exchanged life stories and aspirations. I asked him how he wanted to save the world. The purpose of doing all that was to allow both my cognitive brain and my emotional brain a chance to know Eric as a human being, and to associate him with his inner goodness, so that every time I saw him, my emotional brain would react with, “This is a good man. I like him.”

It worked like a charm. Eric earned my trust immediately by reciprocating my sincerity, kindness, and openness. Better still, I found him to be a very good and admirable person. He had, for example, spent much of his youth doing peace-building work in third-world countries, something he hardly ever talks about but which I enormously respect. By the end of our first conversation, my emotional brain was placated and my thinking brain got to tell my emotional brain, “See? I told you he is a good person!” My resentment toward him completely dissolved.

Within the space of a single one-hour conversation, Eric and I established a strong foundation for mutual trust. We had a very positive and productive working relationship for the rest of the time we worked together, and I am happy to call him my friend.

(True story, names have been changed to protect me.)

The moral of the story is to always have doughnuts at meetings. No, I am just kidding. The real moral of the story is that trust has to begin with sincerity, kindness, and openness, so it is optimally productive to start every relationship that way, both in work and in life. Whenever possible, begin by assuming that the other person is a good person and deserves to be treated as such, until proven otherwise.

The other lesson is that it is useful to always engage the other person as a human being. When establishing trust, I find that my cognitive brain is usually easy to deal with—the hard part is placating my emotional brain. To placate the emotional brain, I must recognize that the other person is a human being just like me. The other person is not just a negotiating opponent or a customer or a co-worker; he is also a human being, just like me. When your mind can operate at that level in every situation, especially in difficult situations, you create strong conditions for mutual trust.

Dr. Karen May, Google’s vice president of leadership and talent—and the most empathetic person I have ever worked with—offers two additional tips for building trust:

1. Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt: Most people do what they do because it feels like the right thing at the time, based on what they want to accomplish and the information they have. Their reasons make sense to them, even if their actions do not make sense to us. Assume that they are making the right choice, even if we do not understand it or might make a different choice ourselves.

2. Remember that trust begets trust: One way I can build trust with you is to assume that you are trustworthy and to treat you that way. When you feel that someone trusts you, it makes it easier to trust them back, and vice versa.

“Will it work even with mothers-in-law?”

Three Assumptions

Whenever I chair a meeting, I like to begin with a practice I call the Three Assumptions: I invite everybody in the meeting room to make the following assumptions about everybody else:

1. Assume that everybody in this room is here to serve the greater good, until proven otherwise.

2. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that none of us has any hidden agenda, until proven otherwise.

3. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise.

I find that when you begin a meeting with these assumptions, there is a greater sense of trust in the room. I recommend this simple practice as a way to foster trust within your team. Do this at every meeting, and you may find your team members gradually gravitating toward mutual trust.

Empathic Listening

If you have been practicing Mindful Conversation (the looping and dipping thing from Chapter 3), you may by now be skilled at listening mindfully and enjoying admiration from your peers for your listening prowess. It is time to go one up from here, Grasshopper. Let us now up-skill ourselves from mindful listening to empathic listening, and become able to listen for feelings.

Empathic listening is a very powerful skill. During one empathic listening exercise in Search Inside Yourself, I played the role of a participant to fill a vacancy. As part of the exercise, I listened for my exercise partner’s feelings as she spoke, and then I told her what I thought she felt. After I was done, she started to cry. I asked her what happened, and she said she had not felt this understood in a very long time. That was when I realized the power of empathic listening. People thirst for others to understand their feelings, and when somebody does, it touches them so deeply that they sometimes cry. Imagine how much good you can do for people if you are skillful at listening empathically.

In Search Inside Yourself, we practice empathic listening as a formal Mindful Conversation exercise (from Chapter 3) with one important change. In Mindful Conversation, the listener doing the looping begins her feedback with “What I hear you say is…” In this exercise, the listener doing the looping will begin her feedback with “What I hear you feel is…” This requires the listener to listen for feelings and then to give feedback about feelings.

FORMAL PRACTICE OF EMPATHIC LISTENING

This is a Mindful Conversation exercise (see Chapter 3), but instead of listening for content, you listen for feelings.

Get in pairs and take turns being the speaker and the listener. As usual, the speaker begins with a monologue. If you are the listener, after the speaker’s monologue, you loop about what you heard the speaker was feeling. In other words, instead of starting your looping with, “What I hear you say is…” start with, “What I hear you feel is…”

Suggested topics for monologue:

• A difficult work situation or a conflict you are having with a boss, co-worker, or person who reports to you

• A time when you could feel someone else’s pain, or when you wanted to but were unable to

• Any other topic with emotional “juice”

Meta-Conversation

After each of you has taken your turn being the speaker and listener, have a meta-conversation about how the conversations went.

In class, after we complete this exercise, we deliver the punch line: We never explain to the class how to do empathic listening. We assume people already know how.

And it works. Usually, after we deliver the punch line, folks in the class become pleasantly surprised by how well they listened empathically without any instruction. They discover for themselves that empathic listening is an ability we are born with; it is part of the standard package that comes installed as part of our social brain. The only thing we have to do is improve it with practice.

Specifically, there are four things we can do to strengthen our ability for empathic listening.

1. Mindfulness: With mindfulness, we become more perceptive and receptive.

2. Kindness: When we are kind, we can listen better to feelings.

3. Curiosity: Practice wondering what someone might be feeling when you hear their stories.

4. Practice: Just do a lot of empathic listening. The more you do it, the better you become, especially when you practice it in conjunction with mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity.

Given those insights, below are some suggestions for how you can practice empathic listening informally in an everyday setting. Note that the informal practice is a little trickier than the formal practice. In formal practice, we get to create an artificial environment to talk about how well we are listening to each other’s feelings, but in natural conversation, we do not usually say, “I’m going to tell you what I heard you feel, and you let me know how well I’m doing, yeah?” That is a little awkward. Hence, for the informal practice, I suggest that you focus more on your own inner qualities involved in empathic listening, tread lightly in giving feedback, and feel free to stay close to your own comfort zone. Remember that people generally do not like to be told how they feel, even if you are right (you can try this one at home if you need confirmation: “Clearly you’re feeling hurt.” “I am not!”). So, ask about feelings, or at least remember to start with “This is what I hear” and give the speaker a chance to correct you if you haven’t got it exactly right. Your empathic listening will get better with practice, even if you stay well within your own comfort zone, as long as you put mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity into your effort every time.

INFORMAL PRACTICE OF EMPATHIC LISTENING

Preparing for the Conversation

The qualities that are most conducive to empathic listening are mindfulness and kindness. If you have time to prepare for the conversation, prime the pump for these qualities, first with a few minutes of Mindfulness Meditation (see Chapter 2). When your mind is in that mindful state, you will be more able to pay attention to feelings, both your own and the other person’s. You will also be more able to listen without judging, which allows you to become more open to what you will hear. If you have more time, do a few minutes of the Just Like Me / Loving Kindness exercise from earlier in this chapter toward the other person. Putting yourself in this frame of mind makes the other person more receptive to you, and you more receptive to him or her. During the Conversation

Begin the conversation by thinking to yourself, “I want this person to be happy.” When listening, practice Mindful Listening (see Chapter 3). Remind yourself to listen for the other person’s feelings. Be curious about what he or she may be feeling. Give him or her generous amounts of airtime.

If it is appropriate for the situation and you are comfortable doing so, you may ask the other person how he or she is feeling. If the situation warrants it and you are comfortable doing so, you may tell him or her (gently and with kindness), “I hear that you are feeling…” Generously allow him or her to respond. If you are right about what he or she felt, he or she may feel touched that you understood and may let you know. If you are wrong, allow him or her to tell you so, and listen in a kind and open manner. Meta-Conversation

If it is appropriate for the situation and you are comfortable doing so, at the end of the conversation, you may initiate a meta-conversation by asking, “Was this conversation helpful to you?”

Praising People Skillfully

Besides listening to people empathically, something else you can do to bring out their best is to praise them. First and foremost, always praise authentically (or, never praise falsely)—if your praise is not genuine, it will be sniffed out and you will lose credibility. However, even when your praises are genuine, you need to learn to praise skillfully. It turns out that you can undermine people by praising them, even when you are doing it with the best of intentions!

In studies by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, fifth-grade students were given a problem-solving task engineered to guarantee high performance, and the students were praised for their success.¹¹ Some students were praised for their intelligence (“person praise”: “You must be smart at these problems”), some were praised for their effort (“process praise”: “You must have worked hard at these problems”), and the remaining students, the control group, were simply told their scores were very high. Later, on a subsequent set of harder problems, those praised for being smart performed significantly worse than the other groups, while those praised for their effort significantly outperformed the other groups. Being praised for being smart is bad for you.

The explanation offered by researchers in these and related studies is that when a person is given person praise, it reinforces a “fixed mind-set,” or the belief that our success is due to fixed traits that are a given. People in this mind-set worry about their traits. They also worry about how adequate or inadequate they might be. When they fail, they attribute it to personal inadequacy. They are afraid to take risks when failure may show them to be inadequate. In contrast, when a person is given process praise, it reinforces a “growth mind-set,” or the belief that our qualities can be developed through dedication and effort, and therefore that success comes from dedication and effort. This creates a love of learning and resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.¹²

Thus, when giving feedback, it is best to do so in a way that encourages a growth mind-set. It is better to structure feedback around effort and growth than by labeling the person.

Simply put, it’s better to praise people for working hard than for being smart. Oh, and thank you for reading this book. You must have worked hard at it. Good effort!

Political Awareness Is Empathy++

Now that we have learned empathy skills for one-on-one interactions, it is time to up our game to a more difficult skill: the ability to read an organization’s emotional currents and power relationships. The common name for this skill is “political awareness.”

Political awareness is one of the most useful skills you can equip yourself with in any organization. Happily, this skill is not foreign to a practitioner of empathy because, in a sense, political awareness is the generalization of empathy from an interpersonal level to an organizational level. Daniel Goleman describes it this way:

Every organization has its own invisible nervous system of connection and influence.... Some people are oblivious to this below-the-radar world, while others have it fully on their own screen. Skill at reading the currents that influence the real decision-makers depends on the ability to empathize on an organizational level, not just an interpersonal one.¹³

Another way to look at it—in “plain vanilla” empathy—you understand the feelings, needs, and concerns of individual people. In political awareness, you understand the feelings, needs, and concerns of individual people and how those feelings, needs, and concerns interact with those of others and how that all weaves into the emotional fabric of the organization as a whole. There are a lot more variables to understand in political awareness, but the basic skill required is the same.

If you understand people and you understand the interactions between them, you will understand the whole organization. That is political awareness.

Practices for Political Awareness

On top of the (plain vanilla) empathy practices already mentioned in this chapter, there are other useful practices for developing political awareness. My wise friend Marc Lesser recommends the practices below based on his many years of experience being a CEO and executive coach.

1. Maintain rich personal networks within your organization, especially with allies, mentors, and groups who will support and challenge you. To do this, care about people, help people, and nurture relationships. Pay attention to one-on-one relationships, as well as relationships with key groups—your team, other management teams, customers, stakeholders, etc.

2. Practice reading the underlying currents of your organization. Understand how decisions are made. Are decisions made by authority or consensus? Who are most influential in making them?

3. Distinguish between your own self-interest, the interest of your team, and the organization’s interest—everyone has all three of these interests. It is very important to understand which is which.

4. Utilize your self-awareness to better understand your role in the web of personalities and interactions. Make frequent use of empathic listening to understand how people feel about situations and about each other.

Here is an exercise to help you increase political awareness.

POLITICAL AWARENESS EXERCISE

You may do this as either a writing exercise or a speaking exercise. If you do this as a speaking exercise, you may speak to a friend.

Instructions

1. Think of a difficult situation from your present or past, when there was some conflict or disagreement, something real, something that has some meaning and potency for you.

2. Describe the situation as though you are 100 percent correct and reasonable. Do that either in writing or by talking about it in a monologue.

3. Now describe the situation as though the other person is (or the other people are) 100 percent correct and reasonable. Do that either in writing or by talking about it in a monologue.

If you did this as a speaking exercise with a friend, discuss the contents of your monologues in a free-flow conversation.

The main purpose of this exercise is to practice seeing the perspectives of different players (in this case, yourself and another party) objectively. You may notice that the instructions were worded very carefully. The key learning point (that is, the kicker) is the insight that the stories in steps two and three can very often be precisely the same story. In other words, conflict does not always arise because one side is wrong or unreasonable. It is entirely possible for both sides to be 100 percent correct and 100 percent reasonable and still have conflict.

There are many reasons why this can happen. One common reason is that people implicitly value different priorities. For example, one engineer might place higher priority on meeting the delivery schedule, as she might think it is better to deliver a promised product on time even if it means cutting down the number of features. Another engineer might place higher priority on completeness of delivery, as he might think it is better to give the customer everything he was promised the first time, even if it means delivering late. In this case, they may each be correct and reasonable, and still they may get into an unending disagreement, unless each is able to understand and internalize the other’s implicit priorities.

Another common reason is that we have incomplete data, which happens a lot in real life, and we all have our own reasonable ways of filling in the missing pieces. For example, let’s say we are presented with a large business opportunity that can easily double or triple our revenue in a few years, but it requires us to make a large investment that exceeds our current net assets. Is this opportunity so compelling we have to do it, or is it so risky it will bankrupt us? Nobody can possibly know for sure, because nobody can know in advance how many new customers it will actually bring in each year. We can only give our best guess. In such situations, it is possible to have huge disagreements in which both sides are correct and reasonable. These disagreements will remain unresolved until people assume that the other is reasonable and become open to each other’s implicit assumptions.

The more often you are able to see how each side in a disagreement is correct and reasonable, the more often you will be able to understand differing perspectives objectively and the more accurate your political awareness will become.

This reminds me of a joke: Two guys had a major disagreement they could not resolve, so they decided to consult a wise guru. The first guy presented his argument to the guru, and the guru nodded his head and said, “Yes, you are right.” The second guy presented his diametrically opposing argument to the guru, and again the guru nodded his head and said, “Yes, you are right.”

A third guy watching the entire exchange got a little bit annoyed and asked the guru, “Wait, something is wrong. They cannot possibly both be right at the same time.” And the guru nodded his head and said, “Yes, you are right.”

Mental Habits for Highly Empathetic People

Empathy comes preinstalled in our brains; we are all hardwired to be empathic. However, the main takeaway of this chapter is that empathy is something you can improve with practice, and most of that practice involves mindfulness and creating mental habits that are conducive to empathy.

Chief among those mental habits is kindness. Having the mental habit of kindness means that every time you interact with a human being, the thoughts in your mind that arise habitually and effortlessly are, “This person is a human being just like me. I want him or her to be happy.” Having this mental habit makes you more receptive to other people, and them more receptive to you.

Another mental habit is being open to understanding how other people can seem reasonable, at least from their own points of view, even when you disagree with them. Having this mental habit enables you to view social interactions with more clarity and objectivity.

If you practice mindfulness frequently and foster the above mental habits, you will have a very strong foundation for empathy. If, on top of that foundation, you also practice a lot of empathic listening and pay frequent attention to people, you will eventually develop strong empathy that extends to political awareness.

And that is no monkey business.