8 Tips to Level Up Your Empathy Skills
Empathy has become a major buzzword in some circles of study over the past few years, whether in the context of youth development, designing products that actually meet the needs of a group of people, or developing ourselves and the way in which we interact with the people around us.
Though there are a number of soft skills that can boost our performance and interactions in our daily lives, empathy is arguably one of the most important skills you can learn, whether for business and career objectives, building strong relationships, or to just live a more positive and content life.
With that said, here are my 8 tips to supercharge your empathy skills:
1. Make no assumptions
In assuming that something is true of someone or that we undoubtedly know what someone’s intentions are, we act based on incomplete information. Making assumptions of what someone may mean by a statement or assuming the reason behind a person’s behavior prevents you from fully understanding them and their true motivations.
Instead, ask confirming questions in a non-accusatory way, for example, “What did you mean by that?”, or “What led you to respond that way?” Whether their response is honest or not, you’ll gain some level of understanding of the person by reading their body language, tone of voice, and choice of words.
This idea also includes avoiding speaking in absolutes, such as statements like “We all know that…” or “It’s obvious that…”, because these statements are often not true of everyone being considered. Use tempered phrases instead, such as “Some of us are aware that …” or “Many of us have …”, to make sure you don’t assume everyone else’s knowledge and that your statements don’t unknowingly become condescending.
2. Make “benefit of the doubt” the default
Many of us have (see how that works?) heard of the phrase “give the benefit of the doubt”, and it works beautifully in this context. Keeping in line with the idea of cutting out assumptions, choose to err on the positive side of your understanding of a person. If you don’t know for sure what the case may be, lean your perspective towards casting the person in question in a positive light. For example, if a friend is unreachable for days by phone, it doesn’t serve you well to conclude that they must be upset or ignoring you, because any of a number of things could have occurred that led them to be unresponsive at that point in time.
In a common situation in today’s society, many people make conclusions of a person’s intent and meaning based on written messages (i.e. texting, social media posts, email) without taking the time and effort to make sure that their conclusion is absolutely correct. If reading a message triggers a negative response, consider all of the possible intentions behind it. What might the person actually mean? Why might they have said what they said? Start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and exhausting the positive possibilities before moving to the negative ones.
3. Seek to understand before you label, judge, or condemn
Understanding is the key to empathy. If we don’t fully understand a person, their story, their experiences, their hardships as well as their triumphs, how can we possibly judge them? We don’t expect federal judges to draw conclusions without weighing all of the possible evidence and the circumstances surrounding the events of a case, so given that we probably don’t have all of the information concerning any individual person’s life, how can we possibly judge anyone? Seek first to understand, because in the process of gaining understanding, you will equip yourself with the compassion, grace, and mercy needed to enhance your interactions with humankind as a whole.
4. Ask “why”, even when you think you know the answer
This point was briefly mentioned above, but in asking “why” we allow other people to teach us about theirselves and the way that they think. Getting into the habit of asking “why” keeps us from jumping to conclusions and making assumptions, and in turn leads us to a better understanding of the other person and society in general.
5. Learn the lingo of emotional description
Learning to accurately express your own emotions is crucial if you want to build your empathy skills. There is a whole range of emotions out there beyond the commonly-clung-to realm of “good, bad, happy, sad,” that many people use to describe emotions. Do you feel happy, or do you feel ecstatic? Do you feel sad, or do you feel irritated? There are many very specific words to describe exactly what you are feeling, and if you can identify and articulate those emotions within yourself, you’re a huge step closer to being able to identify and articulate those emotions in someone else.
This idea is very much like trying to speak German (or any foreign language) without having a vocabulary of German words. As you learn more words and their proper usages, you gain the ability to both communicate effectively and understand the language. Think of it as the “language of emotions”, and if you become fluent in the language, you’ll be well on your way to becoming more empathetic and more emotionally powerful. Check out this resource to help you get started in identifying more precise emotional descriptors.
6. Replace negative adjectives you use to describe someone with the
word “human”
This is a more nuanced tip that is much more powerful than you might think. The idea here is to replace any negative adjective you use in your daily speech or thoughts to describe a person with the word “human”. For example, “Ugh, I hate it when you do that. Why do you have to be so [human]?” Or another simple but common example, “Wow, that guy is so [human].” In replacing our negative vocabulary with the word “human”, we can essentially train ourselves to instinctively remember the humanity of every person, as well as the fact that everyone has their own quirks, flaws, and shortcomings.
The understanding that this is true of every person allows us to quickly develop our empathy skills, redefining how we look at our fellow human counterparts.
*Note that this trick also works for positive descriptors, but the negative descriptors are more often the ones that hold us back from our fully emotionally intelligent potential.
7. Be honest with yourself and others
Being honest with others, in turn, often leads others to be honest with you. However, if you aren’t honest with yourself, it becomes very difficult for you to be honest with other people. This may commonly take the form of hiding or rationalizing thoughts, actions, or feelings. For example, when we hear the standard “How are you?”, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves and the other person, the response “Fine” is often enough not the most accurate answer. As it happens, we may not be ready to deal with whatever may be going on in the back of our mind, or we may fully convince ourselves that everything really is fine, knowing deep down that it may not be the case.
In either situation, honesty allows us to acknowledge, process, and learn from events and feelings fairly quickly, rather than suppressing them to be dealt with at a later point in time. As it pertains to empathy, living from a mindset of honesty allows us to better understand our own emotions, and in understanding our own emotions, we are better able to understand those same emotions when they occur in others.
8. Remember that a person’s behavior is heavily impacted by events that have happened to them in the past
Finally, our last tip to build your empathy skills is to keep in mind that the life of every person you see has been heavily shaped by the events that they have experienced — whether for better or for worse. For example, many kids who go on to join gangs do so because they want to fit in somewhere, to feel like somebody cares about them, to feel valued as a member of a community, to prove themselves to someone that they care a lot about, or a host of other reasons.
If we were to look at these members of society at face value for where they are now and what they do today, it would be similar to a person trying to understand the Mona Lisa while standing less than an inch away from the painting. In that moment, they would be so zoomed-in and focused on the small portion of the painting that they could see, but the painting itself couldn’t possibly make sense if they couldn’t see the literal big picture. We get the same idea if a person reads only the last chapter in a book and tries to make conclusions about the overall story. Everyone has a story — even you — and if you want to really understand another person, you’ll have to start at chapter one.
Thanks for reading, and I hope these tips help you tremendously in your journey to become emotionally powerful and intelligent. Empathy is such an important life skill, and it is absolutely one that can be learned by anyone. Be sure to share this article with your friends and family to help them grow as well!
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