6 ways to teach yourself empathy

6 ways to teach yourself empathy

When was the last time you took a walk in someone else's shoes?

All of a sudden, the word “empathy” is on the lips of scientists and business leaders, education experts and political activists. Empathy is not just a way to extend the boundaries of your moral universe. According to new research, it’s a habit we can cultivate to improve the quality of our own lives.

But what is empathy? It’s the ability to step into the shoes of another, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our own actions. That makes it different from kindness or pity. And don’t confuse it with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” Empathy is about discovering those tastes.

The good news is that empathy can be learned. In my new book, Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (Random House), I’ve honed six key habits that highly empathic people (HEPs) bring into their daily lives. So what does it take to teach yourself empathy?

Habit 1: Switch on your empathic brain

The recent big buzz about empathy stems from a revolutionary shift in how scientists understand human nature. The old view that we are essentially self-interested creatures is being nudged firmly to one side by evidence that we are also Homo empathicus, wired for empathy, social cooperation, and mutual aid.

Over the last decade, neuroscientists have discovered that 98% of us have the ability to empathise. They have also identified a ten-section “empathy circuit” in our brains which, if damaged, can curtail our ability to understand what other people are feeling. Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to care for each other, just like our primate cousins. And psychologists have revealed that we are primed for empathy by strong attachment relationships in the first two years of life.

A good way to start switching on your empathic brain is simply to make a mental note every time you notice an instance of empathic thinking or action in yourself or others. Maybe you will spot your boss managing to see someone else’s point of view, or observe empathic cooperation between your children. Think of it as becoming an “empathy detective”.

Habit 2: Make the imaginative leap

Highly empathic people make a concerted effort to imagine themselves in other people’s situations, like an actor who occupies the personality of their stage character. Making this imaginative leap can be boosted by “empathic listening”. “What is essential,” says Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and founder of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), “is our ability to be present to what’s really going on within – to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment.” HEPs listen hard to others and do all they can to grasp their emotional state and needs, whether it is a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer or a spouse who is upset at them for working late yet again.

We all know, instinctively, that empathy is a great tool for maintaining healthy relationships. Just think of all those times you’ve been arguing with your partner and thought, Why can’t she understand what I’m feeling? What are you asking for? Empathy of course. You want them to step into your shoes, if only for a moment.

That’s why it’s worth practising empathic listening in your relationships. Next time things are getting tense with your partner, focus intently on listening to their feelings and needs – without interrupting (and this might just induce them to return the favour). You might even ask them to tell you about their feelings and needs. It’s amazing how doing this can prevent a niggling annoyance from turning into resentment or a full-scale argument.

Ultimately, most of us just want to be listened to and understood.

Habit 3: Seek experiential adventures

So you think ice climbing and hang-gliding are extreme sports? Then you need to try experiential empathy, the most challenging – and potentially rewarding – of them all. HEPs expand their empathy by gaining direct experience of other people’s lives, putting into practice the Native American proverb, “Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him.”

The writer George Orwell is an inspiring model. After several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma in the 1920s, Orwell returned to Britain determined to discover what life was like for those living on the social margins. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat, and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result, recorded in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, was a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. He not only realised that homeless people are not “drunken scoundrels” – Orwell developed new friendships, shifted his views on inequality, and gathered some superb literary material. It was the greatest travel experience of his life. He realised that empathy doesn’t just make you good – it’s good for you, too.

We can each conduct our own experiments. If you are religiously observant, try a “God Swap”, attending the services of faiths different from your own, including a meeting of Humanists. Or if you’re an atheist, try attending different churches! Spend your next holiday volunteering in a village in a developing country.

Next time you are planning a trip, don’t ask yourself, “Where can I go next?” but instead “Whose shoes can I stand in next?”

Habit 4: Practise the craft of conversation

Highly empathic people have an insatiable curiosity about strangers. They will talk to the person sitting next to them on the bus, having retained that natural inquisitiveness we all had as children, but which society is so good at beating out of us. They find other people more interesting than themselves but are not out to interrogate them, respecting the advice of the oral historian Studs Terkel: “Don’t be the examiner, be the interested enquirer.”

Curiosity expands our empathy when we talk to people outside our usual social circle, encountering lives and world views very different from our own. Conversations with strangers can really help challenge our assumptions about people, so we get beyond our snap judgments about them based on their appearance or accent. It’s also a great cure for the chronic loneliness that affects one in four Westerners. No wonder happiness guru Martin Seligman identifies it as a key character strength that can enhance life satisfaction.

Cultivating curiosity requires more than having a brief chat about the weather. It involves talking about the stuff that really matters in life, like love, death or politics. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with one stranger every week. All it requires is courage.

Habit 5: Travel in your armchair

If all of this is sounding a bit strenuous, you can always throw a little “armchair empathy” into the mix. This is about reading books and watching films that catapult our imaginations into other people’s lives that are vastly different from our own. Think of a movie like City of God, which reveals the violent world of two boys growing up in the shantytowns of Rio. Or the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, with its classic line, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” In fact, there has been an avalanche of recent neuroscience and psychology research showing that entering other people’s lives through books and films is one of the best ways of learning to empathise.

It isn’t always easy to find the most inspiring and powerful empathy books and films, which is why – alongside my new book – I’ve just founded the world’s first online Empathy Library at www.empathylibrary.com. You’ll find the very best novels, non-fiction, kids’ books, feature films and video shorts all about empathy.

Habit 6: Inspire a revolution

Empathy isn’t just something that happens between individuals. It can also flower on a mass scale and start shifting the contours of society itself. Many of those who took part in the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring were motivated by empathy – empathy for those whose lives had been ravaged by the financial crisis, or who had suffered police brutality. An important way to boost your empathy levels is to join with others to take action on empathy-related issues that matter to you – whether it’s child poverty or the fate of future generations whose lives will be affected by our addiction to high-carbon lifestyles. Even taking part in your local choir or playing five-a-side football are ways to engage in communal activities that break down the barriers between people and promote a more empathic world.

Empathy will most likely flower on a collective scale if its seeds are planted in our children. That’s why HEPs support efforts such as Canada’s pioneering Roots of Empathy, which has benefited over half a million school kids. Its unique curriculum centres on an infant, whose development children observe over time in order to learn emotional intelligence – and its results include significant declines in playground bullying and higher levels of academic achievement.

So now you’ve got some ideas for growing your empathy, let me leave you with a question. Who in your life do you need to develop more empathy with – and how might you go about doing it?

Everyone a Teacher – Inspiration from Ashoka U’s Education Track

By David Castro, Ashoka Fellow

Imagine…
A conference room is filled with diverse leaders poised to create the future of learning—deans of major university schools of education from across the nation, researchers, school leaders, faculty, entrepreneurs and education innovators.

Building on weeks of preparation, these leaders spend several days engaged in patient, reflective dialogue surfacing the deep framework underlying education policy, theory, curriculum and school design—a dialogue leading to profound questioning, exploring new boundaries and setting forth new visions for positive change.

It really happened.

Toward Educating Changemakers
I’m describing the Education Track at Ashoka U’s February 2015 Exchange, where an inspiring “team of teams” met for three days in Washington, D.C. As the snow fell and the temperature outside plummeted, dozens of focused experts generated their own light and heat exploring possibilities. What would happen if universities preparing teachers and school leaders transformed our education systems so that they strengthened support for changemaker education?

Changemaker… What does this mean?

Changemaker is Ashoka’s word describing a person prepared for meaningful engagement in the future, an environment that no longer embraces rote repetition or learning divorced from action. We know that those prepared only with ideas from the past, and only for what exists now, will struggle to make a meaningful contribution in the future. As a world community, we cannot afford to lose this opportunity for full, impactful engagement. When one is diminished, so are we all. The emerging world is calling forth our proactive response—indeed, our creative leadership. The future is not a mere extension of the past. It invites us to meet the opportunities and challenges that confront human communities around the world with bold innovations and universal connections.

Empathy-Empowered

As the seasoned educators on this track reminded one another repeatedly, Ashoka’s vision for changemaking centers on empathy: the new foundation of creative human engagement in building our shared future. Empathy-inspired change brings forth a world in which we recognize and value the light of the soul in one another. Empathy means that we feel a deep sense of care and concern for others. It means that we demand the liberation of our collective well-being and positive potential.

The Ashoka U Education Track participants maintained a strong grip on reality. They fully recognized the gap, the challenging chasm between Ashoka’s compelling vision of a world transformed by empathy and the realities encountered on the front lines of the education field. The educators of teachers, counselors, school leaders and policymakers are pragmatic. They focused on the sometimes harsh conditions within existing systems and their many entrenched problems: inequality, insufficient resources, stifling bureaucracy, oppressive governance and restrictive testing regimes. Too often the existing systems suppress innovation and creativity. This leads to professional burnout and early departure from promising careers. Too many talented innovators give up.

Nevertheless, Ashoka’s education-track participants were able to dream wide awake. They felt called to innovate and create, to explore education’s new frontiers and their own highest aspirations. Like so many of the world’s most impactful social entrepreneurs, they believe that education is the most powerful resource for positive change in the service of social equity and increasing human freedom.

Transcending the Past and Present

A high point in the three-day dialogue came as the participants described the potential for education systems that lead everyone—every single learner—to become a teacher.

Think about that. A striking idea. What would it really mean for every learner to become a teacher? It’s an inspiring thought that goes to the heart of education-system transformation. Our policymakers often seem to think about schools as if they were dysfunctional achievement factories; they sometimes behave as if children were best understood as data points on abstract academic assessments, disembodied scores that can be improved and quality-tested. In this way, policymakers risk dedicating schools to the stunted mission of merely increasing GDP, as if the value of individual lives could be adequately measured only by increasing traditional measures of efficiency, productivity and competitiveness: dollars without sense. Our children are not widgets.

In contrast, the Everyone a Teacher vision strives toward a new ideal, one premised on empathy and passionate, creative engagement among community members who value one another as human beings, as ends in themselves. The capacity to teach requires every learner to have full social and emotional engagement. It calls for self-awareness, sensitivity and deep understanding inspired through loving relationships that seek to help others achieve their full potential, their highest and best selves. At its best, teaching combines empathy and changemaking. Ashoka’s education leaders forged practical collaborations and concrete action steps. These included ambitious objectives such as developing curricula to include empathy and collaborative leadership skills, creating the time and space for system-reform dialogues, while inviting cross-system collaborations that bridge institutional silos, opening universities and schools to expansive community and civic engagement.

It will be thrilling to encourage and support this work. Ashoka U’s university members—a widespread network of organizations and leaders in higher education across the United States that now extends into Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom—serve as a powerful community, a dynamic tribe extending social innovation, social entrepreneurship, innovation and changemaking into the greater universe. Together, these institutions do not merely have the potential to tip the world; they are already tipping it as you read these words. The education leaders and changemakers now joining the movement have both their minds and hands focused on these active transformational levers within the global system of education.

Everyone is a teacher.

Get ready. Our world is about to learn something new.
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David Castro is an Ashoka Fellow. In addition to being the founder and CEO of the Institute for Leadership Education, Advancement and Development (I-LEAD), he is the author of Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul, his groundbreaking work on collaborative leadership for the common good, highly congruent with the Everyone a Teacher movement.

Empathy Heroes: 5 People Who Changed the World by Taking Compassion to the Extreme

Ever heard of “empathy marketing”? It’s the latest business buzzword. The idea is that if companies can look through their clients’ eyes and understand their desires, they will be better able to tailor their offerings and gain a competitive advantage.

To me, this is stepping into someone else’s shoes just to sell them another pair.

I believe that the best use of empathy is not in the commercial world but in the social one, where it allows us to challenge prejudices and create political change.

And if you look through history, there are some extraordinary figures who have harnessed this power by engaging in what I think of as “experiential empathy.” This is where you don’t just imagine someone else’s life (a practice technically known as “cognitive empathy”) but try to live it yourself, doing the things they do, living in the places where they live, and knowing the people they know.

You might also call an experience of this nature an “empathy immersion.” It’s like empathy as an extreme sport—one far more exciting and adventurous than ice climbing or sky diving.

So here is my top-five list of people who took empathy to the extreme, showing how it can transform the social and political landscape. If you like these characters, you’ll find more on each of them in my new book Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It.

1. St. Francis of Assisi: Learning from beggars

In the year 1206, Giovanni Bernadone, the 23-year-old son of a wealthy merchant, went on a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He could not help noticing the contrast between the opulence and lavishness within—the brilliant mosaics, the spiral columns—and the poverty of the beggars sitting outside. He persuaded one of them to exchange clothes with him and spent the rest of the day in rags begging for alms. It was one of the first great empathy experiments in human history.

This episode was a turning point in the young man’s life. He soon founded a religious order whose brothers worked for the poor and the lepers, and who gave up their worldly goods to live in poverty like those they served.

Giovanni Bernadone, known to us now as St. Francis of Assisi, is remembered for declaring, “Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.”

2. Beatrice Webb: From comfort to the sweatshop 

In the early 20th century it became popular for writers and would-be social reformers—among them Jack London and George Orwell—to spend time living down and out on the streets of East London to experience the realities of poverty among the homeless, beggars, and unemployed. The forgotten figure who started this tradition was the socialist thinker Beatrice Webb.

Webb was born in 1858 into a family of well-off businessmen and politicians. But in 1887, as part of her research into urban poverty, she stepped out of her comfortable bourgeois life and dressed up in a bedraggled skirt and buttonless boots to work in an East London textile factory. The account of her adventure, Pages From a Work-Girl’s Diary, caused a sensation. It was unheard of for a member of respectable society, especially a woman, to have firsthand experience of life among the destitute.

“My own investigations into the chronic poverty of our great cities opened my eyes to the workers’ side of the story,” she wrote in her autobiography. Her empathy immersion inspired her to campaign for improved factory conditions and to support the cooperative and trade union movements. She later became a leading figure in the socialist Fabian Society and co-founded the London School of Economics.

3. John Howard Griffin: Crossing the racial divide

In 1959, the white, Texas-born Griffin decided to get a taste of what reality was like for an African American man living in the segregated Deep South. He dyed his skin black with a combination of sun lamps and pigment-darkening medication, and then spent six weeks traveling and working in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Nobody ever suspected his deception.

It was an eye-opening experience. Working as a shoeshine boy in New Orleans, he was struck by how white people stared through him without acknowledging his presence. He experienced the everyday indignities of segregation, such as walking miles to find a place to use the toilet, and was subject not just to racist verbal abuse but to the threat of physical violence.

He wrote about his experiences in the monthly magazine Sepia, which had sponsored his experiment, and later in his best-selling book Black Like Me.

Today it might seem condescending or unethical for a white man to speak on behalf of other racial groups, but at the time most African American civil rights activists saw his work as necessary because it was so hard to get their own voices heard. Griffin gained widespread attention for the cause of racial equality, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

At the heart of his book is a resounding message about the value of empathy: “If only we could put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustices of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”

4. Günther Walraff: Two years as an immigrant worker

In 1983 the German investigative journalist Günther Wallraff embarked on what may be the most extreme empathy immersion of the 20th century when he spent two years undercover as a Turkish immigrant worker.

Wearing dark contact lenses, a black hairpiece, and having perfected a broken German accent, he threw himself into a succession of backbreaking jobs, such as unblocking toilets on building sites that were ankle-deep in urine and shoveling coke dust at a steel factory without a protective mask, which left him with lifelong chronic bronchitis. What struck him most, he later wrote, was not the 19th-century working conditions but the humiliation of being treated as a second-class citizen by “native” Germans.

His book about the Apartheid-like conditions experienced by foreign workers in Germany, Lowest of the Low, sold more than 2 million copies in 30 languages. It led to criminal investigations of firms using illegal labor, and resulted in improved protection for contract workers in several German states. Walraff’s work demonstrates the unique power of experiential empathy for uncovering social inequality—an approach followed by later investigative reporters such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

5. Patricia Moore: A product designer from all ages

Today, one of the leading exponents of experiential empathy is the U.S. product designer Patricia Moore, whose specialty is using empathy to cross the generational gulf. Her best-known experiment was in the late 1970s when, aged 26, she dressed up as an 85-year-old woman to discover what life was like as an elder. She put on makeup that made her look aged, wore fogged-up glasses so she couldn’t see properly, wrapped her limbs and hands with splints and bandages to simulate arthritis, and wore uneven shoes so she hobbled.

For three years she visited North American cities in this guise, trying to walk up and down subway stairs, open department store doors, and use can openers with her bound hands.

The result? Moore took product design in a completely new direction. Based on her experiences, she invented new products for use by elders, such as those thick rubber-handled potato peelers and other utensils now found in almost every kitchen, which can easily be used by people with arthritic hands. She went on to become an influential campaigner for the rights of senior citizens, helping to get the Americans with Disabilities Act enacted as law.

Her latest project is designing rehabilitation centers for U.S. war veterans with missing limbs or brain injuries so they can relearn to live independently, doing everything from buying groceries to using a cash machine. Her whole approach, she says, is “driven by empathy, an understanding that one size doesn’t fit all.”

How to be practice experiential empathy

What lessons should we draw from such inspiring lives?

Few of us are going to dress up as an 85-year old or spend years masquerading as an immigrant worker. But we can all practice experiential empathy in other ways. You could take part in Live Below the Line, an anti-poverty campaign where tens of thousands of people each year live for five days on $1.50 a day, which is the amount that more than 1 billion people on the planet have to live on. Next time you go on a two-week vacation, sure, spend some time lying on the beach in Mexico the first week, but why not volunteer as a teacher at a local school in the second one?

And if a “wealth swap” isn’t your thing, try a “God swap”: If you believe in a particular religion, spend a month going to the services of different religions, including a meeting of humanists.

These are all ways of getting a little experiential empathy into your life. Doing so will not only expand your own worldview and imagination, but enable you to use empathy to create social justice. And that’s a whole lot better than allowing this powerful form of human understanding to become just another tool of the marketing industry.