Dec 7, 2021
Why compassion eats empathy’s lunch.
Growing through my early twenties I worked to become a more empathetic person so that I could be a good leader. From everything that I had experienced, read, and listened to you needed to be an empathetic person to be successful.
I am a natural consumer of content and have an innate desire to continuously learn about new topics, skills, and information that I think will help me better a better version of myself moving forward. My wife gave me the very apt nickname of ‘the hobby hopper’ where I would learn 80% of something, just enough to be dangerous, then move onto the next thing where I could deep dive into the next passion project. However the one theme that stood the test of time since I’d say about jr. high is that I wanted to be a leader to help people.
I thought being an empathetic person was good enough until I listened to the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner talk about compassion.
He’s the one who really elevated my understanding that to be a good leader you need to step your game up. You need to go from empathetic to compassionate if you really want to excel. He did it through the retelling of a story originally spoken by the Dalai Lama.
He explains empathy is only feeling what another living thing is feeling, and compassion is putting yourself in someone’s shoes so that you may alleviate their suffering.
To illustrate this difference, live this reality for a moment.
You are walking along a mountain path and find a person who is trapped beneath a boulder, that is compressing their chest. They are having trouble breathing, gasping for air, calling for aid.
The empathetic response is place yourself under a similar boulder, feel their pain and helplessness.
The compassionate response is knowing what they are going through (because you have the ability to empathize) and then doing all that you can to alleviate their suffering, by removing the boulder from their chest.
Compassion = Empathy + Action
As a leader it isn’t good enough to know or be familiar with the struggles of those around you. You must be a proactive participant in those struggles and be the front runner in alleviating roadblocks, emotional hurdles, and red tape for your organization to succeed. I hope that in building my startup Cheers I am able to lead compassionately to build trust & respect from those I interact with but ultimately build a great company.
Go forward and be compassionate, the world will be a better place because of it.
