Maybe you were born with it,
Maybe you learned it in the early stages of life,
but one things is for sure, it is not a skill, and more so an attribute.
Many people have this attribute, few know about it, and even fewer ever use it for what it’s worth.
This attribute is known as Empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. With it, you can conquer almost all emotions.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is not just hearing someones story and feeling bad for them from a place of opposition, but actually feeling their pain, seeing their struggle, and understanding them whole heartedly, and also seeing their strengths, their triumphs and their victories. Really, it’s understanding people on an emotional level.
As compared, Sympathy would be just feeling bad for someone, or understanding what they do instead of how they feel. You might feel compassion, but that doesn’t mean you feel what they feel.
Empathy is the number 1 reason I am a Life Coach.
How can it conquer emotions?
With empathy comes the ability to stay level headed. When another person might push your wrong buttons at first, you’ll be able to stay cool knowing what their situation is, and how they feel at that moment. You can be peaceful like a monk by putting empathy to use.
Ever since I started studying empathy, and how I could use it, my emotional perception of the world has changed. When someone cuts me off on the highway, “They must be running late for work.” When someone snaps at me during a normal conversation, “They must have had a hard day at work.” I can always find myself in the other person’s shoes when I use empathy, and if I can’t well that’s because I didn’t get enough information yet.
You can use empathy to connect with people in a way that you never have before. With the ability to feel their emotions on topics about them. This is what true friendships are about. This can spawn a healthy relationship from nothing.
In the business world, empathy is almost necessary. You need to know your customers every move. You need to think like your customer, know your customer and feel what your customer feels. 90% of buying decisions are an emotional response. If you know your customer’s emotions, well I think you get the point.
So the question remains, where does empathy come from?
Where does empathy come from? (pg 98 Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman) psychiatrist Daniel Stern studies attunement
Many scientists believe that empathy is gathered in very early childhood from the relationship between the mother and her baby. The most developed relationship you’ll ever see is between a mother and her newborn child. When a child expresses an emotion, a mother can pick up on it, and usually mimics it without even realizing. Daniel Stern calls this process “Attunement” When a baby coos, a mother might coo back. When a baby laughs a mother laughs. When a baby cries in pain, a mother runs around in a circle like a frantic chicken. haha you get the point. A mother feels her babies every need in the pit of their stomach through empathy and act on it.
A child with a lot of empathy passed down from their mother will show empathy to other babies. When another baby cries, the first baby will hand them a blanket, or try to comfort them.
Before babies know that they are their own body and emotions, they don’t know exactly which emotions are theirs and which are the other babies. They feel what the other baby feels.
Emotions develop first, which is seen in evolution, and in newborns at the bottom region of the brain known as the amygdala which is attached almost directly to the spinal cord.
Once the child reaches early toddlerhood, around the age of 3, they branch out of the full empathy stages. They realize that their emotions are theirs, and then show varying amounts of empathy usually based on how much empathy their parents have for them.
In other words, empathy is passed down from your parents. If you didn’t have parents, or home life was insecure and variable, you probably don’t have empathy. And that’s not your fault.
Another reason you wouldn’t have empathy is because you can’t feel your own emotions. If you don’t feel your own emotions, you won’t be able to feel or understand someone else’s. This is known as Alexithymia.
If one of those two reasons is true, people who know you well will know that, and feel empathy towards you, so it’s okay!
Empathy is the number one thing I learned about this year, and has changed my life. It’s one thing to use it without realizing you are, but it’s a whole other thing when you realize you have it, and can use it to help a ton of people. That’s why I am a Life Coach.
Do you have empathy? Do you feel it was passed down from your parents? What can someone do if they feel they don’t have empathy? Comment Below!