C8 Blog - Connecting

Chapter Overview - Developing Empathy through understanding and connecting with others

Empathy is hard-wired into us

Our minds are wired for empathy it appers, as a nutural survival skill. The same parts of brain are activated when doing/feeling things ourselves as when seeing/feeling others in similar situations. Empathy builds trust and understanding, and is essential to getting through the tough times

Empathy is no analysing, psycholigizing, or just agreeing

Ways to Increase Empathy

Create desired mental habits - when you meet or think of someone, have your first thought be that they are just like me you want this person to be happy

The book introduces a thought and meditative practice called Just Like Me / Loving Kindness. It's a simple practice of understanding they are a human with feelings and emotions like me, that they wish to be happy and loved and have fulfulling relationships, just like me. And then in our minds we wish this other person to have the strength, resources and emotional and social support to navigate the difficulties of life, and wish them to be free from pain and suffering and for them to be happy, because they are a human, just like me.

Brininging Out the Best in People - and Useful Praise

• Establish trust
• Listen (Mindful Listening)
• Ask, be curious
• Feedback
• Partner to create options and practices

Watch out for traits of dysfunctional teams

• Absence of trust
• Fear of conflict - not willing to challenge
• Lack of committment
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to results

So Building Trust is the foundation... and the biggest part

• Start with Kindness, Sincerity and Openness
• Recognize other person is human, with emotions, goals, challenges - not just a customer, or supplier or colleague or junior
• Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt - their intentions were good at the time
• Trust begets trust, so assume they are trustworthy and share part of you

Three Assumptions for constructive meetings and interactions

• ...everyone is here to serve the greater good, until proven othersie
• ...nobody has hidden agendas, until proven otherwise
• ...we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise

Empathetic Listening

Like mindful listening where we listen, enquire, respond with our understanding, and observe our own thoughts and feelings, however we listen and sense what they may be feeling.

Formally (in an exercise together) this may be responding with the likes of "What I hear you feel is ...". In daily life however, it's much more subtle, in that we actively try to understand what they are both saying, and feeling, and weave that understanding into the conversation, given the other person the airtime to be heard and understood

In times where you feel you may have heard what they are feeling, and want to get a sense of if your approach or understanding was of use, you may ask something like "was this conversation helpful?"

Skillful Praising

Or what I see more as "useful praising", this is focusing on a persons behaviours and effort, and not things which may be seen as inherent traiuts of the person.

So instead of saying, "You're a natural with the clients" or "You're so smart being able to sort that gnarly bug out", you might instead comment "I like the way you made sure the client felt understood with you diagrams", or "That was quite an effort you put it last night on figuring out what had happened"

Political Awareness is Empathy - across a diverse fabric of people and interactions

This is understanding the feelings needs and concerns of individuals and how their feelings, needs and concerns interact with those of others, and how that weaves into the fabric of the organisation or group.

Increasing Political Awareness and Abilities

• Rich personal networks and connections - allies, mentors, groups to support and challenge me
• Read the currents, understand how decisions made, processes and key deciders
• Distinguish between own self-interests, those of the team, and the organisation, and other stakeholder
• Use self-awareness to understand my role in the web of personalities and interactions. Use empathetic listening to understand

An exercise to understand

Descibe a situation from the perspective of you were 100% right.

Then describe the same situation from the perspective of they other person was 100% right.

Enspiral Dev Academy - Blog Questions

Have you tried using any of the insight and techniques for growing trust and sincerity? How did it go?

I was taught many years ago one of the keys to building trust was to make small committments and keep them. Though I'm sure I can do better, I've found this a useful guide.

Adding kindness, sincerity, openness and recognizing the other human is just like me bring extra tools to my approach to create great relationships.

Try empathic listening - how did it go?

I do more Informal Empathetic listening. Feel I have been doing that for a while, sensing what feelings and perspectives and needs the other person or people May have

How did you find the loving kindness meditation?

It was a nice process to keep things centred, and to pre-load a relationship with good foundations. I felt like it made subsequent interactions a lot more loving and I was more open and accepting.

Complete the political awareness exercise here in writing.

Thinking of a situation earlier this year with one of my colleagues at work.

I thought it was unreasonable of her to start accusing me of not consulting with her when I had agreed with her Team manager Several months before and had been operating the new way for those months. I felt she had empowered her manager to decide such things and that she had not discussed with her manager before attacking me.

From her perspective, she has a lot of responsibility and was not aware of the change and felt she should have been consulted