Mindful Speaking Part 5: Empathy
October 16, 2023
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position.
TRANSCRIPT
Mindful speaking part five is empathizing.
And empathizing is when you are feeling the feelings of the person that's talking to you. You're experiencing what they're saying from an emotional kind of point of view. Something like ninety three percent of communication is nonverbal.
And that nonverbal piece is not only body language, which is something that's sort of obvious to us, but it's also emotional language. It's the emotions coming through that if you're not paying attention, you may not notice, because emotions will be shown in a person's face, in their tone of voice, in their eyes.
And if you're not paying attention to them, you won't see that. If you are generously listening and they are talking to you, you're just gonna start to feel their feelings.
And this is different than sympathizing.
Sympathizing is more kinda you take it on. Empathizing is when you are able to reflect back to the person how they feel. So I can imagine it must feel this way or what I'm hearing when I'm listening to you is this.
You're sad or you're frustrated. I can hear the frustration in your voice. These are things that when you reflect back to another person, they, again, are going to experience that you're really hearing them. And when you really hear them and you've reflected back, then they may be hearing themselves for the first time.
And that can help them clarify. It can make a difference in terms of them, moving forward, even coming up with their own solution. The other thing about this is that sometimes we get it wrong. So you may reflect back to someone that you can hear that they're frustrated, and they might say, no.
I'm not really frustrated. I'm actually really angry. And then you wanna reflect back that. That's important in all of the mindful speaking is that don't get committed to your point of view or your thoughts about what someone is saying.
Always be in a mode of inquiry so that they can clarify or correct something that you may be misspeaking or miss misobserving. That can have people feel less alone. It can have people feel like they have someone in their life that understands them, and that will build a better, stronger relationship, and it will repair trust and build trust and respect in your relationships, like all of the moves in mindful speaking.
Speaking.
