Cognitive Empathy as a Final Point of Your Soft Skill Journey
The technique that allows us to lift the veil of another person’s consciousness, to understand what cannot be understood
Our journey began with an attempt to understand ourselves, initially from a biological perspective, then moving to the tools that help us navigate this world — a world of other people.
Last time, we explored the significance of others in the first 25 years of our lives, emphasizing how much what we learn from others defines us.
In a way, for many, other people are everything they know and all they have.
But what happens after the first 25 years?
Do other people become unimportant?
Throughout our lives, we grow up in a society that tells us that one day we will become adults — strong and independent — thereby nurturing the idea of self-isolation.
This is one of the strongest misconceptions I’ve ever encountered.
People
Let’s consider a typical situation.
After university, we go to work.
Not only do we have to go out of our way to find this first job, but who makes the decision to hire us?
Yes, usually it’s some uncle or aunt figure.
Moreover, you become dependent on this person for the next few years, and sometimes even decades, as not everyone dares to make a change.
In fact, the role of other people in our lives multiplies, only we don’t realize this, preferring to wear the mask of adulthood and seriousness imposed by society.
Especially amusing are those who loudly claim they built their career all by themselves.
Face the truth, it’s other people, usually in higher positions, who sympathized with you and your efforts in one way or another, allowing you to climb a step higher.
Exploring in solitude
The situation becomes more complex in fields where you need to spend a long time learning independently.
Programming is a very good example, especially in the early and middle stages of a career, and in some companies, even at senior levels.
In these cases, companies may not prioritize your communication skills as much as your ability to produce software code.
This is further fueled by the enormous demand for specialists, driven by unending technological progress.
You spend hundreds of hours communicating with a computer one-on-one, reading materials online, perhaps some books, watching instructional videos.
And then, one fine day, you successfully pass an interview for a salary two or even three times higher than your current one.
This inflates your ego to incredible proportions.
But answer these questions:
- Who invented the computer?
- Who created programming languages?
- Whose materials, books, and videos did you watch?
And the icing on the cake: who hired you for the job you so desired?
Success
Other people are everything for which we live this life, one way or another.
They fill our consciousness.
What is success?
We invented it ourselves, but only other people can assess it.
Only by helping others, solving their problems (yes, for money), can we achieve what others call “success”.
If you were the last survivor in this world, even your unique talent for reproduction would become useless.
At this point, we come to the realization of the importance of the ability to interact with other people.
In the international context, there are concepts such as soft skills and hard skills.
- Hard skills are specific to a particular profession, like the ability to write code in a specific programming language.
- Soft skills, on the other hand, are applicable to all professions. These are about effective communication, interactions with people, how pleasant it is to interact with you, how open you are to external influences, and how you perceive them.
As you may have guessed, we will focus more on soft skills.
Soft Skills
I’ve explored various interpretations of this term, but I’ve never encountered an explicit mention of the word “Empathy.”
This ability allows us to understand another person’s feelings, whether we realize it or not. There are two types of empathy:
- Emotional — the most common, where our emotional state reflects that of another person. Common examples include sympathy or pity, and feeling joy for someone else.
- Cognitive — when you consciously, i.e., intellectually, understand why a person feels the way they do, grasp their perspective, even if you don’t agree with it. It’s about identifying yourself as another person.
The main distinctive feature of cognitive empathy compared to emotional empathy is control.
It’s like self-reflection, but on a higher level.
You ask the same questions, but about someone else:
▪️ “Why do they feel this way?”
▪️ “Why are they doing what they’re doing?”
The degree to which you understand yourself directly reflects how well you can understand another person.
Even if you’ve figured yourself out, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to understand someone else.
A tremendous moral shift and motivation are required to start solving not just your problems but also those of others.
Stop judging, stop saying: “if it were me…”, stop attacking.
Sometimes, there’s no need to solve anything…
Often, it’s enough just to listen. To empathize.
To place your consciousness in the realm of the other person’s thoughts. To imagine their thoughts as your own.
To understand how what you want to say would be perceived by this consciousness.
Support
You want to support someone…
But do you know what support really is?
Experience shows that most people simply don’t understand this concept.
Many offer support in a way that makes you want to push them away or worsen the situation.
The worst example might be: “Look! Many people have it 300 times worse than you!”
This doesn’t work. It diminishes the person’s feelings and position, making them seem insignificant or trivial.
Life’s challenges, like everything in this world, are relative.
What is a nightmare for one person might be a minor issue for another, something they’ve experienced many times.
Sometimes, this relativity correlates with age, but often it does not.
Parents often exploit this with their children.
Because all children’s problems are trivial, right?
This leads to the development of an inferiority complex, insecurity, and a belief that a child cannot solve real problems because only adults have significant problems, correct?
The ability to put yourself in the shoes of a child with an immature psyche, to understand their feelings and support them appropriately, perhaps just by giving them a hug, is true cognitive empathy. Perhaps its highest form.
And the most challenging elements:
- Being able to remain silent even if you were right, even if you warned them.
That’s in the past, it no longer matters. Are you ready to offer support now, no matter what?
- Stop equating everyone with yourself; other people have different genetics, different neural connections.
No matter how minor or severe, sadness is not alleviated by the fact that something was said before, that someone was warned, especially the realization that someone is cooler than they are.
Often, the person who thinks they are cool now was once just as pitiful and helpless in the face of a different problem in the past.
And even if you learn to put yourself in the place of one person, it doesn’t mean you’ll be motivated enough to repeat the trick with another.
How to develop this skill?
The main driver of progress in my life has been the desire to solve problems.
Primarily, my own.
I didn’t want to live my old life, which constantly tries to drag you into a maelstrom of depressive stagnation, away from your dream and the life you want to lead.
From childhood, I’ve always seen one thing:
How people avoid solving problems: they evade, hide, silence them, or pretend they are meant to be.
But always, without fail, unsolved problems return and strike back with tenfold force.
Even as a child, I was astounded by such folly in humanity.
Thus, I developed a policy of zero tolerance for unresolved problems.
I wasn’t like this from childhood, but it took only a couple of life lessons for me to end this once and for all, even before entering full-fledged adult life.
Personal life
All the examples I’ve provided above, I have experienced them both in my personal and professional life.
I constantly transfer skills from one area to another and vice versa. As you remember, soft skills are applicable in all areas of life.
For the first time, I fully empathized with the thoughts of another person a few years ago.
It was my wife.
Before this, we had solved many problems, but at some point, I realized that just becoming a better version of myself was not working anymore.
If you are the only one growing and your partner isn’t, it’s a problem that will eventually lead to the loss of everything you’ve worked so hard for.
At this point, many people start to endure, have children, or simply part ways.
And the latter is not the worst option.
However, all these are manifestations of what I talked about earlier: avoiding, distracting, or masking problems.
Even if you part ways, the suffering may go away, but does it solve the problem that lies within one of you?
And you can comfort yourself by thinking that the problem isn’t with you, but is that really the case?
As always, I chose the most unusual way out of all:
To simply and plainly start talking.
Talk about problems, about feelings, try to open up so that the other person can trust you.
They shouldn’t fear you, see you as a threat, or as someone who might judge them.
Soon, not only was I initiating these conversations, but my wife began to start talking first.
At that moment, you realize that it was all worth it, the first point where you get the result of your actions, feedback.
After going through hundreds of such cycles, on various topics and in different situations, what once seemed like a dead end started to become clear.
Not just our common problems, but also each of our individual problems.
Only when you solve your personal problems in your mind, or most of them, are you ready to open up and share with others, to help.
To start your path to success.
This was the first practical case of applying empathy in my life.
Professional area
At that time, personal problems were distinct from professional ones. I sincerely believed that these two areas should be maximally separated.
Basic politeness, a little technical preparation, and a desire to solve problems were enough to build an extremely successful career within my home country.
But the world within one country is very limited and narrow, even a very large country.
Across its expanse, the culture is the same, both personally and professionally.
And most employers take advantage of people’s attachment to their place of residence.
This leads to the absurd yet business-attractive concept of a “local labor market”.
No matter how smart a guy from India is, he will never be paid as in the United States.
If this guy wants to see the world or move, life automatically becomes ten times harder for him, simply because airlines don’t have local prices, and no one will discount housing depending on which country you come from.
And when you reach the ceiling of development in your local labor market, you naturally start exploring what lies beyond its borders.
There, you find different people, different rules. Your usual norms and orders don’t work anymore.
You need to consciously understand these people to coexist, and even more so, to compete.
How they work, what they think about, what motivates them…
This is the manifestation of cognitive empathy.
In a multinational team, moving from person to person, the answers to these questions can vary significantly.
If you want to move forward, you need to understand how to effectively distribute the team’s resources, recognize strengths and weaknesses, both your own and of each team member.
It’s a team sport, very similar to any more familiar type, as well as to computer games.
After all, the basis everywhere is people.
Honestly, at the beginning of my journey, I couldn’t even imagine that I would have to become a part-time psychologist to move up the career ladder as a programmer.
Understanding differences
I always thought that honesty and openness are the engines of human relationships.
And this is indeed the case when it comes to people with whom you build the highest level of trust.
Typically, this is your life partner — your spouse, and possibly some very close people — friends/relatives.
It’s important to understand that when you arrive at a new place, among new people, the level of trust is usually close to zero.
In such situations, the aforementioned rule doesn’t work, at least not fully.
My initial problem was that I acted too straightforwardly, often too openly.
People perceive this as a form of pressure.
- I deliberately refused to make work a second family, while paradoxically trying to build work relationships in the same way I successfully built them at home.
But work is not family, especially at the beginning.
And even with our life partners, we were unlikely to be maximally honest and open from the very first day.
- In complex situations, it’s necessary to find such words that make people think they are coming to a decision on their own. Your decision.
- There’s no need to shy away from yielding, playing along, sometimes exaggerating, omitting certain details, or adding something extra.
This is a long-term strategic game, winnable only with intelligence and cunning, using a full set of psychological tricks, while sometimes losing a battle to win the war.
Essentially, this is pure manipulation. However, I see it as the foundation of leadership and mentorship, if used for good and not for personal, selfish interests.
You guide, suggest, nudge people in a direction beneficial for them, for yourself, and for the business.
Conclusion
At this point, there is an intertwining of work and non-work life.
Skills gained in personal life are used to build work processes, while skills from the work environment are used to fuel the eternal flame of the family hearth — a topic we didn’t discuss much, as it’s a subject for another article.
I have no predictions as to when this cycle will end. I sincerely hope it never does, but time will tell.
Developing soft skills is a key aspect of a person’s life.
Cognitive empathy is the final point in this journey. The ability to transfer your mind into the body of another person, merging with their thoughts and feelings.
Even in a strictly technical field, as you move forward, you will inevitably have to interact with people.
The further you go, the more interactions you’ll have in any profession.
Just as this world is not created for “owls,” it is equally not designed for introverts.
We only value something when we realize its loss.
Therefore, many natural extroverts don’t understand the gift they have and fail to use it properly.
They haven’t lost or realized the loss. They’ve always been this way.
Those who have realized this already have an ace up their sleeve.
It’s never too late to change.
Better late than never.
This shift in consciousness helped me start writing this blog.
To begin social activities.
To step out, even if just with one foot, from the dark side of introversion to the bright side of extroversion.
Thanks to this desire for change, despite everything not going according to plan, I have a clear direction for the entire next year, both personally and professionally, though it’s all interconnected now.
In 2.5 months, this has significantly changed my life — it has provided new paths for development, new sources of inspiration, and positive emotions.
Explore this world, embrace new experiences, meet new people, create, share! Even if it’s just your thoughts in the form of text.
Your innate uniqueness is already hidden within you. And other people are the best means to uncover it!
The modern era of the Internet is a paradise for such opportunities, where you don’t necessarily have to meet in person, significantly lowering the entry threshold, even for introverts like me.
You don’t have to create something new from scratch. People rarely do that.
Most successful ideas are just 10% fresh authorial perspective, the rest has already existed before.
Thank you for reading!
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