4 Ways to Develop Your Emotional Empathy
Empathy helps you to discern people’s needs, emotions, values, interests, and overall personalities.
Emotional empathy is the ability to pick up on other people’s emotions and have an appropriate feeling in response. For example, if your friend gets some upsetting news, you feel sympathetic for them and a bit sad yourself. Sometimes people refer to empathy as this ability to feel what another person is feeling. At other times what they mean by empathy is acting on those feelings and showing concern and support.
Overall, empathy helps you to discern people’s needs, emotions, values, interests, and overall personalities. In this post, I have outlined four ways that can be used to develop emotional empathy.
1. Learn to respect the role of emotions
People with more logical, cerebral personalities sometimes look down on emotions and see them as irrational and unnecessary. When a friend or colleague is feeling a strong negative emotion, their first thought isn’t “Oh no! They’re so unhappy. How can I comfort them?” It’s “This is so pointless. Why don’t they pull themselves together and use their brain to work through their problem?” Emotions sometimes can lead people astray, but they can’t be written off entirely…
