Leading With Empathy Quotes

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.

Bond is stronger than blood. The family grows stronger by bond.

Never sever ties with a family member you once loved. Each of you might be on different spiritual paths, but both trails are leading you home.

Kylie bit down on her lip. Burnett took a step forward. He squared his shoulders, empathy filling his eyes. He took a deep, apparent heartfelt breath and looked at Kylie. She nodded at him as if giving him the lead. He looked back at Holiday and, in a deep voice, said, "Kylie has something to tell you." Kylie's mouth fell open and right then she knew it was official. Men sucked at verbal communication especially where anything emotional was concerned.

Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences lead to wisdom.

Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of “You’re not alone.

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.

Without close and reciprocal relationships with other animal beings, we're alienated from the rich, diverse, and magnificent world in which we live.

Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.

If you want more kindness in the world, put some there.

I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy. The idea is false on the evidence. Like shit, change happens.

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it.

Tolerance fails as a virtue, first of all, because it is in some ways demeaning to people. It is much better to speak of “respect” or “empathy.” But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center. Thus we fall back on “tolerance,” which merely means conceding to people the right to be who they are, while withholding our respect. But the determined advocates of tolerance are not content with that and keep slipping back into making tolerance imply the necessity of respect . . . Thus the obligation of tolerance leads inexorably to intolerance, turning the claim to be tolerant into a tautology, a statement that merely repeats itself—“I am tolerant except about those things of which I am intolerant.

Shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive behavior than the cure. Guilt and empathy are the emotions that lead us to question how our actions affect other people, and both of these are severely diminished by the presence of shame.

Shame resilience is about moving from shame to empathy—the real antidote to shame.

Effective stewardship leads to generative work and a generative culture. We turn wheat into bread—and bread into community. We turn grapes into wine—and wine into occasions for joyful camaraderie, conviviality, conversation, and creativity. We turn minerals into paints—and paints into works that lift the heart or stir the spirit. We turn ideas and experiences into imaginative worlds for sheer enjoyment and to expand the scope of our empathy.

Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame are those who lack the capacity for empathy and human connection.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.

If you put shame in a petri dish and cover it with judgment, silence, and secrecy, you’ve created the perfect environment for shame to grow until it makes its way into every corner and crevice of your life. If, on the other hand, you put shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, shame loses its power and begins to wither. Empathy creates a hostile environment for shame—an environment it can’t survive in, because shame needs you to believe you’re alone and it’s just you.

Many researchers have argued that the use of toxic positivity in healthcare is unethical and even dangerous. It leads to unfounded assertions of confidence, implies a lack of empathy for the patient, and can cause people to make uninformed decisions about their health.

Emotions are the gifts of our ancestors. We have them and so do other animals. We must never forget this.

Diminishing trust caused by a lack of connection and empathy.

Which means we can start fresh. Reject the patterns of history. Promise not to repeat old mistakes. We can lead with compassion and empathy. Fight back against those who look to divide us, or pit us against one another, or make anyone feel less than. It is up to us—the ones who have yet to receive our boxes—to decide what type of world we wish to inherit, no matter how much time our strings may give us.

Empathy for an enemy's pain was good, but you couldn't let that lead you into the fallacy of accepting their actions.

Silence is the enemy of social change.

Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding

The trickiest barrier to empathy? Take a look in the mirror. Being kind and extending the hypothesis of generosity to ourselves when we mess up is the first step. Resisting the urge to punish or shame ourselves when we make mistakes is true mastery.

One of the signature mistakes with empathy is that we believe we can take our lenses off and look through the lenses of someone else. We can’t. Our lenses are soldered to who we are. What we can do, however, is honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours. That’s a challenge if you were raised in majority culture—white, straight, male, middle-class, Christian—and you were likely taught that your perspective is the correct perspective and everyone else needs to adjust their lens. Or, more accurately, you weren’t taught anything about perspective taking, and the default—My truth is the truth—is reinforced by every system and situation you encounter.

When we are all mind, things can get rigid. When we are all heart, things can get chaotic. Both lead to stress. But when they work together, the heart leading through empathy, the mind guiding us with focus and attention, we become a harmonious human being.

It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists. Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist,

Empathy is a choice. And it’s a vulnerable choice, because if I were to choose to connect with you through empathy, I would have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. In the face of a difficult conversation, when we see that someone’s hurt or in pain, it’s our instinct as human beings to try to make things better. We want to fix, we want to give advice. But empathy isn’t about fixing, it’s the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness—not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.

The litany of what I did want? To be challenged. To not live in the safety of my own little snow globe and be reassured by familiarity and surrounded by what made me comfortable and coddled me. To stand in other people’s shoes and see how they saw the world—especially if they were outsiders and monsters and freaks who would lead me as far away as possible from whatever my comfort zone supposedly was—because I sensed I was that outsider, that monster, that freak. I craved being shaken. I loved ambiguity. I wanted to change my mind, about one thing and another, virtually anything. I wanted to get upset and even be damaged by art. I wanted to get wiped out by the cruelty of someone’s vision of the world, whether it was Shakespeare or Scorsese, Joan Didion or Dennis Cooper. And all of this had a profound effect. It gave me empathy. It helped me realize that another world existed beyond my own, with other viewpoints and backgrounds and proclivities, and I have no doubt that this aided me in becoming an adult. It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world’s mysteries—the unexplained, the taboo, the other—and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.

the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will to understand each other. If we can't see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good.

The results of five experiments involving more than a thousand participants showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to detect and understand other people's emotions. But it can't be any sort of fiction. The researchers distinguished between "popular fiction" (where the author leads you by the hand as a reader) and "literary fiction" (in which you must find your own way and fill in the gaps). Instead of being told why a certain character behaves as they do, you have to figure it out yourself. That way, the book becomes not just a simulation of a social experience, it is a social experience.

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould. But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered. Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives. […] I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown. Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown. You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete. This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.

Shame is not a compass for moral behavior. It’s much more likely to drive destructive, hurtful, immoral, and self-aggrandizing behavior than it is to heal it. Why? Because where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent. That’s what makes shame dangerous. The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The behavior that many of us find so egregious today is more about people being empathyless, not shameless.

If we believe empathy is finite, like pizza, and practicing empathy with someone leaves fewer slices for others, then perhaps comparing levels of suffering would be necessary. Luckily, however, empathy is infinite and renewable. The more you give, the more we all have.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging “Say it new! Say it new!

When you realize you've evolved from the mentored to the Mentor it gives much more to the meaning and lessons learned in life as well as untimely death. -CPT Dominic Garcia-

Burnout also leads to a large swath of physicians who aren't as empathetic toward their patients as they could be.

Individualizing education and starting with empathy for those we serve is where innovative teaching and learning begins.

It’s okay to not be okay all the time.

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

a lack of clarity in the concepts used will lead to a lack of clarity in the questions posed, and thus also to a lack of clarity in the design of the experiments supposed to provide an answer to the questions.

By understanding and increasing just this one capacity of the human brain, an enormous amount of social change can be fostered. Failure to understand and cultivate empathy, however, could lead to a society in which no one would want to live—a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all. This destructive type of culture has appeared repeatedly in various times and places in human history and still reigns in some parts of the world. And it’s a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values.

An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database. If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear. The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet. A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals. When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle. Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical Ambiguity Are there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible? There are. To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation. Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?

That said, if a person leads with charm and charisma and plenty of confidence, sit up straight and pay cautious attention. Make sure that there is empathy, that entitlement is not at play, that the person is genuine, that there is respect and, frankly, that he or she has the goods to back it up. Don’t let the charisma and charm blind you and stop you from looking deeper for the rest of it.

Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgement, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of “you’re not alone.

Research suggests that people rarely change their minds or form a new worldview based on facts or data alone; it is through stories (and the values systems embedded within them) that we come to reinterpret the world and develop empathy and compassion for others.

I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy. The idea is false on the evidence.

Testing the theory that we have an innate moral sense as proposed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, Bloom provides experimental evidence that “our natural endowments” include “a moral sense—some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions; empathy and compassion—suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away; a rudimentary sense of fairness—a tendency to favor equal divisions of resources; a rudimentary sense of justice—a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.

While shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying, guilt is negatively correlated with these outcomes. Empathy and values live in the contours of guilt, which is why it’s a powerful and socially adaptive emotion. When we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, or change a behavior that doesn’t align with our values, guilt—not shame—is most often the driving force.

What, then, can we conclude about the moral value of Metallica's music? In light of our discussion, it is decidedly mixed. Insofar as it has the potential to arouse negative emotions that lead to destructive behavior, it is morally damaging. Insofar as it helps purge us of destructive emotions, it is morally beneficial. And, insofar as it engages our imaginative empathy and gets us to think more clearly and deeply about controversial issues, it is morally edifying. So, while Metallica is unquestionably a monster of a rock band, it is far from obvious that they are some kind of monster.

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.

Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invited a sentry out of the rain and gave him his own dry uniform.

You may have control of your life, but you cannot control your environment. You cannot control the economy, trends, family circumstances, accidents, unexpected expenses, and the weather of life. You cannot control other people and their moods, personal situations, or issues. You cannot control biases or changes in your industry of choice. You cannot even control jealousy and envy in others. However, you can control your own STRENGTH to get back up and START AGAIN. Destiny is manifested only through action. You cannot be the captain of your own destiny, only the sailor, because we cannot control external influences that may alter the stability or direction of our ships. Once you understand this basic principle, you won't be so hard on yourself when things don't go your way. If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences lead to wisdom.

To lead you need to empathise, to empathise you need to genuinely understand, to understand you need to be willing to have difficult conversations.

The circle of indifference has the self at its centre. The circle of compassion has others at the centre. The former leads to apathy; the latter to empathy.

empathy requires some vulnerability, and we risk getting back a “mind your own damn business” look, but it’s worth it.

And the starting point for human improvement is empathy. Everything flows from that. Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge. When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another. Then you can move to the honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. That’s the source of progress.

I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

It is very hard to be human, little fox. Even the humans themselves don’t do a great job of it. The mortal world is full of hatred, betrayal, sadness and death. Most yokai and kami alike find that it is too much for them. Everything the humans think they value—love, honor, empathy, compassion—we yokai need nothing of those, especially when they so often lead to suffering and despair.

Lincoln never forgot that in a democracy the leader’s strength ultimately depends on the strength of his bond with the people. In the mornings he set aside several hours to hear the needs of the ordinary people lined up outside his office, his time of “public opinion baths.” Kindness, empathy, humor, humility, passion, and ambition all marked him from the start. But he grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force has not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.

Is it possible nevertheless that our consumer culture does make good on its promises, or could do so? Might these, if fulfilled, lead to a more satisfying life? When I put the question to renowned psychologist Tim Krasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. "Research consistently shows," he told me, "that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society." He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC — American corporate capitalism: it "fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition." There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things. As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates. Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body and soul.

A narrow-minded man can lead one to devalue others, and in the end, to desperately dangerous hates of outsiders, ranging in expression from discrimination against minorities to world conflagrations,' Tolman wrote. The solution? Create broader cognitive maps in the mind that encompass bigger geographical boundaries and a wider social scope, embracing those we might consider others, and in this way encourage empathy and understanding.

Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness. I am enough can slowly turn into Am I really enough? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer. You’re feeling shame for forgetting your son’s school play? Please—that’s a first-world problem; there are people dying of starvation every minute. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

Destiny is manifested only through action. You cannot be the captain of your own destiny, only the sailor, because we cannot control external influences that may alter the stability or direction of our ships. Once you understand this basic principle, you won't be so hard on yourself when things don't go your way. If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. Faith keeps our ships moving, while empathy and the memories of our experiences lead to wisdom.

Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge. When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another. Then you can move to the honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. That’s the source of progress.

It is far from guaranteed that an empathic state leads to a compassionate act. One reason for this is captured superbly by the essayist Leslie Jamison: [Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.46 In such a situation, saying “I feel your pain,” becomes a New Age equivalent of the unhelpful bureaucrat saying, “Look, I sympathize with your situation, but …” The former is so detached from action that it doesn’t even require the “but” as a bridge to the “there’s nothing I can/will do.” Having your pain validated is swell; having it alleviated is better.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. Self-compassion is also critically important, but because shame is a social concept—it happens between people—it also heals best between people. A social wound needs a social balm, and empathy is that balm. Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.

Because conflict-avoidant Emily would never “bite” or even hiss unless Greg had done something truly horrible, on some level she processes his bite to mean that she’s terribly guilty— of something, anything, who knows what? Emily’s guilt feels so intolerable that she tends to deny the validity of all of Greg’s claims— the legitimate ones along with those exaggerated by anger. This, of course, leads to a vicious cycle in which she shuts down her natural empathy and Greg feels unheard.

We must use the time when we are single or take time alone when we are in a couple to understand ourselves, our pleasures, and our values. When we learn to love ourselves, we develop compassion, empathy, and patience. Then we can use those qualities to love someone else. In this way, being alone—not lonely, but comfortable and confident in situations where we make our own choices, follow our own lead, and reflect on our own experience—is the first step in preparing ourselves to love others.

Socially Accessible introvert looks like an extrovert on the outside and sees extroversion as a bar that he or she can never quite reach. These individuals are often very successful in social arenas, but fault themselves for not having more fun. This self-alienation is rampant among American introverts, as is the self-interrogation—society’s puzzled attitude turned inward. Alienation from self can lead to depression, which is, at best, a loss of empathy for the self and, at its worst, self-hatred.

It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it. I used to believe this as well. But now I don’t. Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives.

An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects - people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy. Buber wrote, "When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them." After spending a decade studying belonging, authenticity, and shame, I can say for certain that we are hardwired for connection - emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

Shame Resilience 101 Here are the first three things that you need to know about shame: We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. We’re all afraid to talk about shame. The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives. Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable—it’s the total opposite of owning our story and feeling worthy. In fact, the definition of shame that I developed from my research is: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.1 Shame keeps worthiness away by convincing us that owning our stories will lead to people thinking less of us. Shame is all about fear. We’re afraid that people won’t like us if they know the truth about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, how much we’re struggling, or, believe it or not, how wonderful we are when soaring (sometimes it’s just as hard to own our strengths as our struggles). People often want to believe that shame is reserved for the folks who have survived terrible traumas, but this is not true. Shame is something we all experience. And while it feels as if shame hides in our darkest corners, it actually tends to lurk in all of the familiar places, including appearance and body image, family, parenting, money and work, health, addiction, sex, aging, and religion. To feel shame is to be human.

The irony across all self-protection is that at the same time as we’re worrying about machine learning and artificial intelligence taking jobs and dehumanizing work, we’re intentionally or unintentionally creating cultures that, instead of leveraging the unique gifts of the human heart like vulnerability, empathy, and emotional literacy, are trying to lock those gifts away. There are some things that machines and algorithms do better than us for the simple reasons of computing power, quicker elimination of variables that humans either don’t see or won’t readily dismiss, and the fact that machines have no ego.

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

For empathy to be activated, a witness has to interpret someone else’s pain and see it as similar to their own. When Black pain not only is seen as dissimilar to the viewer but also gives them pleasure—when our bodies have been defined as inherently criminal—it’s no wonder that police body camera footage of an unarmed Black person being murdered so rarely leads to a conviction.

I asked the stage managers to bring up the houselights so I could see people. I needed to feel connected. Simply seeing people as people rather than “the audience” reminded me that the challenges that scare me—like being naked—scare everyone else. I think that’s why empathy can be conveyed without speaking a word—it just takes looking into someone’s eyes and seeing yourself reflected back in an engaged way.

DON’T BE SO HARD ON YOURSELF. I can bring good even out of your mistakes. Your finite mind tends to look backward, longing to undo decisions you have come to regret. This is a waste of time and energy, leading only to frustration. Instead of floundering in the past, release your mistakes to Me. Look to Me in trust, anticipating that My infinite creativity can weave both good choices and bad into a lovely design. Because you are human, you will continue to make mistakes. Thinking that you should live an error-free life is symptomatic of pride. Your failures can be a source of blessing, humbling you and giving you empathy for other people in their weaknesses. Best of all, failure highlights your dependence on Me. I am able to bring beauty out of the morass of your mistakes. Trust Me, and watch to see what I will do.

The aid program that I am suggesting must not be used by the wealthy nations as a surreptitious means to control the poor nations. Such an approach would lead to a new form of paternalism and a neocolonialism which no self-respecting nation could accept. Ultimately, foreign aid programs must be motivated by a compassionate and committed effort to wipe poverty, ignorance and disease from the face of the earth. Money devoid of genuine empathy is like salt devoid of savor, good for nothing except to be trodden under foot of men. The West must enter into the program with humility and penitence and a sober realization that everything will not always “go our way.” It cannot be forgotten that the Western powers were but yesterday the colonial masters. The house of the West is far from in order, and its hands are far from clean.

With love resonating through our souls, we are capable of energizing and enlivening those around us with startling power. This energy makes us beautiful to all, even to those who are so concerned with themselves that they can barely see what is right in front of them. This energy gives us access to every power that humans have to create connection with one another: caring, patience, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, empathy. It also gives us the charge to lead, activating within us the one virtue needed to unify humankind: courage of the heart.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good. And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.

After all, aren’t autistic people supposed to lack empathy? This is a common mistake. My children, who are both on the severe end of the spectrum, do not lack empathy. If anything, they are particularly sensitive to other people’s emotions. People with autism do have empathy, they sometimes just show it in different ways.               The fact is that I care about the people that I pastor. It is emotionally difficult when I lead funerals for people I have been in relationship with. I rejoice with people in good times and mourn with people in difficult times.               So

Guilt plays a pro-social function in strengthening relationships; it encourages taking responsibility, motivates amendatory behaviors such as apology or confession, leads to higher quality solutions to crises and is associated with more constructive anger management … Guilt is also associated with positive empathy and the ability to acknowledge and understand others’ points of view. In contrast shame is associated with responses that are injurious to social relationships… Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening. Difference, as to the Supremacist, becomes a threat.

As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me: do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren’t we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We’ll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water. But I was straying from my goal, getting into the spirit of things. Two

Many children are not raised in such environments; their caregivers focus instead on the child’s behaviors, performance, goals, and results, which can lead to a child feeling fundamentally unseen. It is a form of objectification when adults focus solely on correcting a child’s behavior. This lack of empathy gives the child a sense that no one has interest in who they are underneath the behaviors. There are two significant consequences to a child feeling such rejection. First is their hopelessness, despair, and pain from experiencing this level of misattunement. Second is how a child personalizes and internalizes this experience of misattunement. The environmental failure is experienced by the child as their personal failure. Tragically, a child then learns to treat themself in ways that they were treated. If a child’s openness and curiosity are minimized, unsupported, or attacked, they learn to do that to themself.

The walk is over too quickly. Tally tries everything she can think of to make it last longer, suggesting that Rupert needs to be taken all around the park and then play some stick-chasing games. But after twenty minutes, Mum says that it’s time to head home. “He’s an old dog,” she tells Tally. “And he had quite a fright yesterday. He’ll be happiest having a sleep on his bed now, while we pop out for a while.” “Can’t Nell and I stay here?” Tally asks, the second they’re inside the house. Mum shakes her head. “Not today. After yesterday’s escapades I think that I want us all to stick together. And besides, Dad is looking forward to seeing you.” “I can’t wait to see him,” says Nell, and Tally wonders how she can be so brave about going to the hospital but so scared about something as silly as the dark. Just like the dog walk, the drive to the hospital doesn’t take long enough. Mum parks the car and they all get out. Tally stares at the building ahead. It is grey and gloomy and huge and she knows that if she were to get lost in there then she’d never find her way out. “This way,” says Mum, leading them towards the main entrance. They walk past a man sitting in a wheelchair and a woman with her arm in a sling, and Tally lowers her eyes so that the only thing she can see is Mum’s feet in front of her. The ground changes from concrete to tiles and then Mum’s feet stop and Tally has to look up There are people everywhere and the lights are so bright that it hurts her eyes. “Dad is on the fifth floor,” mum says. “So we need to take the lift.” Tally steps back, accidentally bumping into Nell.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.