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Tag: empathy

10 skills hard to learn that will pay you off forever

20/04/2021 /

Fruitful skills at work can sometimes be hard to learn and practice, but they will pay off.

Here’s some tips to boost your work every day.

  1. Time Management: planning is the first step and needs discipline. To do list and scheduling will help you to focus.
  2. Empathy: do you feel what people feel? That’s the key to foster the team spirit in your office.
  3. Better sleep helps, as many medical studies confirm.
  4. Positive self talk: it doesn’t matter what others think of you, but what you think of yourself certainly does. Are you confident enough with yourself?
  5. Be consistent. To mantain a top position you have to work harder.
  6. Ask for help: when you ask people for advice, you validate their intelligence or expertise, which makes you more likely to win them over.
  7. Shut up, if needed,
  8. But also listen.
  9. Mind your business: it will take time, but will surely help the atmospher at work.
  10. And finally master your thoughts, directing them to what you want to do and accomplish.

Read the full article by Rachel Gillett in Insider

Image source: Pixabay (C00)

10 skills hard to learn that will pay you off forever

02/12/2020 /

Fruitful skills at work can sometimes be hard to learn and practice.

Here’s some tips to boost your work every day.

  1. Time Management: planning is the first step and needs discipline. To do list and scheduling will help you to focus.
  2. Empathy: do you feel what people feel? That’s the key to foster the team spirit in your office.
  3. Mastering your sleep: Better sleep helps, as many medical studies confirm.
  4. Positive self talk: it doesn’t matter what others think of you, but what you think of yourself certainly does. Are you confident enough with yourself?
  5. Consistency: to maintain a top position you have to work harder.
  6. Asking for help: when you ask people for advice, you validate their intelligence or expertise, which makes you more likely to win them over.
  7. Shut up, if needed, but also listen
  8. Listening: along with shutting up comes listening
  9. Mind your business: it will take time, but will surely help the atmosphere at work.
  10. And finally master your thoughts, directing them to what you want to do and accomplish.

Read the full article: the 10 tips

 

Image source: Flickr – Raul Pacheco-Vega (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

5 Tips Become a More Empathetic Person

14/11/2018 /

Empathy is the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Highly empathetic persons sense the emotions of those around them, and have the ability to tap into those same emotions within themselves.

Empathy is something we tend to reserve for our personal lives, however, empathy should also be practiced in our professional relationships.

Indeed, business relationships form because of a fundamental trust between you and your network. When you express empathy, you are delivering an experience to people that they’re not just listened to; they’re heard. And because they’re heard, they’re understood. This gives your network a sense of connection and safety directly associated with you, ultimately laying the foundation for them to trust you with their business.

Empathy is a skill, and skills can be learned. In this article are presented 5 tips to develop empathy:

1. (Actively) Listen More Than You Speak

Empathetic persons listen first and only speak after they’ve carefully heard.

2. Express Your Perspective

Put yourself in their shoes, experience the moment as if it were happening to you, and let your emotions guide you.

3. Be Vulnerable

Asking for help shows vulnerability, and vulnerability often leads to that greater sense of connection and relation.

4. Don’t Make Assumptions

When you make an assumption, the understanding you draw is rarely a good match to the problem this person is facing. As a result, the connection you try to make feels forced and unnatural. So don’t rush empathy, and don’t try and empathize before you truly understand the situation.

5. Use Your Imagination

The ability to imagine what someone else is feeling—even if we haven’t experienced it ourselves—is critical to empathy. And one way to develop this skill is to develop your imagination.

Empathy

Image: Flickr – Kaiwan Teanngam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) 

How empathy shapes outcomes of diplomatic negotiations

20/06/2018 /

Why do some peace summits succeed while other fails? In this work of Marcus Holmes and Keren Yahri-Milo, the authors highlight the importance of empathy between leaders. In fact, they first demonstrate that numerous findings suggest that empathy—the ability to understand the cognitive and affective states of others without necessarily sympathizing with them—is required for overcoming long-standing hostilities.

In this regard, they significantly report the words of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold: “you can only hope to find a lasting solution to a conflict if you have learned to see the other objectively, but, at the same time, to experience his difficulties subjectively”.

Hence, demonstrating empathy to your adversary is not a signal of weakness or vulnerability but a demonstration that you are negotiating in good-faith.

You can read more about this issue here

 

Image source: Yuriy Somov – Wikimedia Commons

Reason vs empathy in a presidential election

03/11/2016 /

According to the conventional wisdom, a good candidate in an election must be able to care about the problems and needs of people. Despite that, it’s not clear whether empathy really matters much to voters.

Although the capacity to sympathize with others’ suffering is often considered an essential virtue, some social psychologists assert that empathy may not be such a great quality in a leader.

Is empathy overrated as a guide for public leadership?

In his article published by the New York Times, John Tierney reports the point of view of different researchers on this subject.

On the one end, critics affirm that empathy is biased and parochial, it’s innumerate and it can be manipulated to inspire aggression. According to this view, “the best leaders have a certain enlighted aloofness”.

On the other hand, empathy is considered something that we can control and “it affords us opportunities to build more diverse and powerful social connections, and take control of our emotional lives”.

Notwithstanding this optimistic view of human nature, voters may at the end prefer reason to empathy.

Read more here.

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Image source: Flickr – Matt Brown -(CC BY 2.0)

 

 

Getting around the limits of empathy

14/07/2016 /

Although empathy is considered to be at the heart of several crucial sectors – from product development to customer service, including also leadership, failing to recognise its limits can impair individual and organisational performance.

As Adam Waytz brilliantly describes in its article there are three main problems you can run into when dealing with empathy, and luckily three valid recommendations for getting around them.

Problem #1: It’s exhausting

Being an heavy-duty cognitive task empathy depletes our mental resources.

Several studies on health and human professionals, as well as those who work for charities and other non profits, show that empathy is exhausting, in any role in which it’s a primary aspect of the job.

Problem #2: It’s zero-sum

Empathy doesn’t just drain energy and cognitive resources – it also depletes itself.

The more empathy we devote to one aspect of our life, for example our job, the less is left for others (family for instance). Moreover the zero-sum problem leads to another type of trade off: empathy toward insiders – people in our team or organisation- can limit our capacity to empathise with people outside our circles.

Problem #3: It can erode ethics

Empathy can cause lapses in ethical judgment. Extreme loyalty toward insiders may push us to take their interests as our own and to overlook transgressions, or even worse to behave badly ourselves. With actions like cheating or stealing to benefit those in the immediate circle people put empathy for a few before justice for all.

So how to rein in a land of excessive empathy?

As a manager there are a number of things you can do to mitigate these problems.

1. Split up the work

2. Make it less of a sacrifice

3. Give people breaks

Despite its limitations, empathy is essential at work.Understanding and responding to the needs, interests and desires of human beings involves some of the hardest work of all. Managers shouldlook for ways to give employees breaks,Encourage individuals to take time to focus on their interests alone. When people feel restored they’re better able to perform the demanding task of listening to what others need.

Empathy

Image source: Flickr – AleKsa MX (CC-BY 2.0)

 

 

Image source: https://locallocale.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/empathy-schmimpathy-why-bother-nathan-mctague-empathy-parenting-advice/

10 +1 secrets to communicate leadership.

27/08/2013 /

Communication is the real work of leadership

by Nitin Nohrian

It is a hard work communicating efficiently and even more when the goal one is trying to achieve is to look and be a leader.
Here are the 10 tips that Forbes has decided to share with us in order to become great (communication) leaders:

  1. Speak not with a forked tongue;
  2. Get personal;
  3. Get specific;
  4. Focus on the leave-behinds not the take-aways;
  5. Have an open mind;
  6. Shut-up and listen;
  7. Replace ego with empathy;
  8. Read between the lines;
  9. When you speak, know what you’re talking about;
  10. Speak to groups as individuals;

*Bonus: Be prepared to change the message if needed!

Read more on: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2012/04/04/10-communication-secrets-of-great-leaders/

no-one-leadership-style

Imagine source: http://yoacblog.com/?p=1504

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