The 6 Habits of Highly Empathetic People
Empathy is a personality trait that refers to our ability to feel and understand what another person is experiencing. It’s part of our social intelligence. Freud and Hobbes, for example, demonstrated that we are selfish and individualistic. But that’s not all we are: it’s what neuroscientists, biologists and psychologists have proven in recent years.
In the book “Empathy – Why It Matters and How to Get It”. The author talks about how it is possible to expand the look on the other through empathy, by teaching us how this can benefit everyone and make the world more humanized. For Krznariz, our cognitive capacity for empathy develops during childhood. However, like many human skills, the level of empathy varies from individual to individual.
In the book, it is mentioned that highly empathetic people usually have 6 habits:
1.Activate your empathetic brain
The capacity for empathy is part of our genetic heritage and can be amplified throughout life.
2.Take the imaginative leap
It is necessary to humanize the other. For this, we can, for example, imagine what the lives of all those with whom we come across in our daily lives are like, or the lives of those on whom our actions depend. Discovering what we have in common with someone, even a stranger, is yet another way to connect with each other’s emotions.
3.Seek empathetic experiences
Those who are willing to immerse themselves in empathy experiences end up being able to put themselves in the other’s shoes more easily. In addition to everyday conversations or watching a movie, traveling and relating to other people and cultures are crucial for empathetic development.
4.Practice the art of conversation
Conversation and empathy go hand in hand. However, for conversations to be truly rich, one must go beyond trivialities and delve into important topics.
5.Travel on your couch
Several films and books go beyond the borders of the screen and the printed page, bringing out the Homo empathicus that lives within us. These are opportunities to get in touch with realities that we may never know directly. Thus, they can serve as vehicles for an empathic transformation, through the adoption of the different perspectives described in them.
6.Inspire a “revolution”
Certain people manage to create waves of collective empathy, capable of transforming history. Empathy must go beyond the scope of private life and also gain importance in public life. Poverty, violence, inequality and environmental degradation are some of the current problems that can gain a lot from the creation of a culture of empathy.
In this era of the “new normal”, markedly digital and technological, empathy is one of the skills most valued by people and organizations – daily tested in terms of their abilities to solve real problems for real customers. In fact, it is a challenge that leaves each of us with the same mission: to recover our Homo empathicus.