3 Tips to Help You Engage in Empathy

This month, I attended a narrative medicine workshop with people from Finland, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S. As we analyzed work from artists, authors, poets, and movie directors, we embraced vulnerability, took risks, and processed emotions and viewpoints of strangers we had just met. We differed in age, gender, race, ethnicity, geographic location, occupation, marital status, and level of education; yet, the empathy invoked in our small group sessions connected us in unpredictable ways.

The dictionary definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Psychologists consider empathy to have cognitive, emotional, and compassionate components.

Nearly 30 years ago, mirror neurons were first described in macaque monkeys. Italian researchers showed that when an object was grasped, neuronal activation occurred not only during the direct experience of grasping but also during observation of another’s experience. This mirroring has been documented with emotions as well, indicating a response in the brain to observing another’s feelings such as pain, disgust, or pleasure.

In Mindset: The New Psychology for Success, Carol Dweck outlines the advantages those with a growth mindset have over those who view challenges and intelligence through a fixed framework, “The hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”

Can beliefs about empathy make a difference also? Schumann and colleagues found that those who believed empathy could be developed put forth more effort to be empathic when they were in challenging situations than those with fixed beliefs. Malleable beliefs resulted in more interest in improving one’s own empathy, more willingness to help cancer patients in-person, greater effort when responding to a person with conflicting views, and more time spent listening to stories from those of a different race.

Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychology professor, states in his book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World: “Even if we have evolved to care only in certain ways, we can transcend those limits. In any given moment, we can turn empathy up or down like the volume knob on a stereo: learning to listen to a difficult colleague, or staying strong for a suffering relative...Depending on their experiences and choices, each one can travel quite a distance along (this) range.”

Many fill gyms, schedule trainers, and persevere through strength training to build muscles. What if people committed time to “strength training” for empathy? Here are three tips to add empathy practice into your routine:

Practice listening.

In a world filled with distractions, listening attentively can seem like a cherished art. The nonverbal cues such as eye contact that one conveys as part of listening are difficult with mobile devices in hand and schedules robust with multi-tasking. Yet listening empathically requires even more than simply attention. In order to attempt to understand another’s experience, a person has to be willing to let go of one’s own view for a moment to be completely open to another’s. There is mindfulness in absorbing this moment of listening without judgement or crafting a response.

Engage in arts and literature.

Reading texts and deciphering what the storyteller is trying to convey through perspective, diction, voice, and temporal nature requires close observation. Entering into the lives of characters and stepping into a world different from our own is the magical world of fiction. Additionally, traveling to faraway places or entirely different circumstances in movies and theater helps to see things from an alternative lens. Raymond Mar and colleagues found that people who read more fiction were associated with higher empathy scores. Rita Charon and her colleagues founded the field of narrative medicine twenty years ago with the idea that by paying close attention to the stories told in the humanities, physicians would learn to “listen radically” and be more holistic in their observations of patients’ stories.

Seek out friends with different thoughts.

There is abundant research that shows diverse perspectives in professional settings build stronger outcomes and economic profitability. What about growth in personal lives? Tribalism in the world today has people surrounding themselves with friends who think like they do. Though this is validating and comfortable, looking at life from different angles forces analysis of situations from a variety of perspectives. Expanding exposure to friends with different ideas introduces conversations and experiences that allow one to stand in someone else’s world...and practice empathy.