Empathy is a skill not a trait
It requires practice
When say that someone is empathetic we often take that to mean that they treat other people with compassion and kindness.
There is an implication of being a “good person” ie, that empathy is both a characteristic of who they are as a person and that it also describes their treatment of other people as being beneficial.
The trouble with the first part of this definition is that it implies that someone is either empathetic or not, that it is a trait that is inherent to the person.
We talk about someone “being” empathetic rather than someone “practicing” empathy. So that when we try to develop that ourselves and it feels odd or we don’t do it well, we tick that off to us “just not being an empathetic” person and give up.
If instead we view empathy as a skill, then when we first decide we want to exhibit more of it and we find it difficult or uncomfortable that is more normal since it’s a skill we have not practiced. And like any other skill we start off not being good at it but with more and more practice we can get better.
The key to shifting our thinking is to realize that the second part of the above definition is also incorrect: Empathy is about understanding not about action.
Our understanding of a situation is separate from the actions we take based on that understanding. We can be empathetic in the actual sense of understanding other people and then use that understanding to be more effectively cruel or more effectively kind.
The more common usage of the word “empathy” as a synonym of compassion, of being “nice”, gives us too much credit. We feel sorry for someone else and take that to mean that we are trying to understand and help them.
This view is too focused on our own feelings and the effect we imagine our actions have on the other person as opposed to the actual effect we may be having on that person. Thinking about someone else is rarely the same thing as considering someone else.
Most of the time when we are supposedly showing “empathy” towards someone else our attention is on the feelings that person generates in ourselves. We are not only not considering what is best for that person, we’re not even really considering them in any way at all.
We need to shift our view away from empathy as being about our interactions with other people and towards it being our understanding of other people.
Empathy is the step before taking action towards another person so that our judgement on what to do can be based on a true objective understanding of that person rather than on our feelings about them.
This understanding is normally not neutral nor objective and unless we develop self-awareness (another skill not a trait) it ends up being a product of our own emotions and insecurities.
Empathy requires that we compensate for these emotions so that we can make a more clear headed determination as to what is going on with the other person.
This doesn’t mean “putting yourself in their shoes” ie, it doesn’t matter what we think we would do in thier situation.
It is not saying “this is what I would feel in this situation and so that must be what that other person is feeling”.
Instead we use our learned experience and understanding to help us come up with a model for what another person may be feeling. We pay close attention to the actions of the other person to determine what they are actually feeling and how that feeling may be driving them.
Literally trying to see things from their perspective of their situation, not our perspective of their situation. This is because if we wouldn’t feel the same emotion as someone else were we in their particular set of circumstances then we would not be driven the same way.
In other words, true empathy requires that we imagine the other person “in their own shoes”: seeing the emotional state that they are in as well as the situation they are in and imagining how the combination leads to the actions they are exhibiting.
Contrast that with us focusing on our own feelings and using that to judge what another person is doing: It is obvious that different people can feel differently about the same things but yet we act like the way we feel about something is automatically the same way someone else feels about it.
So instead we have to imagine “what if I did feel that same emotion as this other person, what would I do?”.
This is because while we do not necessarily feel the same way as someone else about something, we almost always follow the same course of action as someone else who is feeling the same way. Ie, if we are scared or angry or happy, we will tend to behave the same way as someone else who is in the same situation and also feeling scared or angry or happy
Paradoxically this means that the way to build up our empathy, which is really meant to take our focus off ourselves and onto other people, is to first focus on ourselves more thoroughly, to really pay attention to what is driving us.
When we do that, we will inevitably see that not only are our feelings clouding our judgement but that our feelings are not the same as other people and thus the same situation could cloud their judgement in a different way.
If we pay attention to what we are feeling, then we can begin to see how those feelings are driving our judgment.
Then when we are dealing with other people, especially when there is some disagreement or contention, we can remember how our feelings tend to drive our actions, and then imagine what feelings another person must be feeling to be driven to the action that they are exhibiting.
We understand their true motivation.
And by understanding that true motivation, we can more effectively deal with people because we can use levers that are meaningful to them rather than levers which are meaningful to us.
