The Three Components
of Empathy
Recent definitions of empathy have suggested that this quality is comprised of three components.
First, the empathic person has a sensitive and accurate understanding of the other person’s feelings while maintaining a certain separateness from the person.
Second, empathy means understanding the situation that contributed to or “triggered” those feelings. Milton Mayeroff has provided an almost poetic description of these first two elements of empathy:
To care for another person, I must be able to understand him and his world as if I were inside it. I must be able to see, as it were, with his eyes what his world is like to him and how he sees himself. Instead of merely looking at him in a detached way from outside, as if he were a specimen, I must be able to be with him in his world, “going” into his world in order to sense from “inside” what life is like for him, what he is striving to be, and what he requires to grow.19
Finally, the empathic person communicates with the other in such a way that the other feels accepted and understood. The communication of one’s empathic understanding is crucial. Lewis and Wigel write:
The evidence … suggests that those who are perceived as being understanding have no better intellectual understanding of a subject than those who are perceived as not being understanding…. [If] we intend to stimulate in others a feeling of being understood, it is not important that we gain considerable information about them but rather that we help them see that we are able to perceive others and situations as they do.20
Specific methods that foster empathic understanding of others and help communicate that understanding to them were discussed in Part II of this book (Chapters 3-7), “Listening Skills.”
Research data indicate that empathy is a potent force for good. Teachers with high levels of empathy foster greater academic growth in students than teachers with low levels of this quality. Carl Rogers says, “It is the most effective agent we know” for fostering personal growth and “improving a person’s relationships and communications with others.”21
Not only does the empathic person foster constructive change in others, but his empathy helps him develop in positive directions himself. His horizons are widened and his sensitivities are deepened by empathic contact with others. Some psychologists believe empathy is one of the best single indices of psychological maturity.
IMPLEMENTATION
OF THE CORE ATTITUDES
Genuineness, nonpossessive love, and empathy are attitudes that foster improved relationships with people. The dictionary defines an attitude as “a mental or emotional orientation to some object.” When these three attitudes are missing, a person’s relationships are diminished. When these attitudes are present, the relationships can flourish. I believe that genuineness, nonpossessive love, and empathy are necessary conditions for optimal communication.
Merely to hold these attitudes, however, will do limited good. Genuineness, nonpossessive love, and empathy have little or no effect on a relationship until they are communicated to the other party. These attitudes need to be expressed behaviorally. They require skills that are possible to develop and which are strong in their impact. Many of these basic interpersonal skills are taught in this book.
Some people disparage skill development in the interpersonal realm. They condescendingly call communication skills “mere techniques.” They believe skill training in human relationships depersonalizes relationships. They believe that techniques may be appropriate when dealing with the world of things but that they have no place in interpersonal relationships.
In my life, however, many relationships were strained and some were destroyed because I lacked the skills to express the constructive attitudes I felt toward other people. When I did not know how to communicate the attitudes I had, the relationships gained little, if anything, from them.
One of the greatest deficiencies in our culture, it seems to me, is that a few people are highly skilled at expressing these key attitudes. It is unusual for a person to have been taught the methods by which to express his unique self and his genuine love for and understanding of others. Yet these skills are very important factors in achieving personal fulfillment and vocational effectiveness.
While some people overlook the usefulness of communication skills, other people become legalistic about them. They believe the only way you can listen to another is to follow a certain formula to the letter and that the only way to assert yourself is to follow another formula to a “t.” Certain guidelines are very helpful in making the core qualities operational much of the time. The attitudes, however, can be expressed in other ways. Attitudes are broader and more basic than the guidelines that suggest specific responses. Guidelines for communication skill development are invaluable to most people—but it is helpful to remember that there is more than one way to express genuineness, or nonpossessive love, or empathy. The more a person develops his communication ability, the greater the number of constructive alternatives that become open to him. The goal, after all, is more creative and responsible freedom in relationships.
People sometimes say, “What if I lack these core attitudes? Am I fated to experience relationships that are bland at best and destructive at worst?”
It is well to remember that each of us has some degree of these attitudes within us. The pioneering psychiatrist Alfred Adler spoke of an inborn social feeling, an inescapable characteristic of empathy, that exists in all of us. Some of the core attitudes may have atrophied from disuse, some may be blocked by our reactions to life experiences, but none of us is totally deficient in these qualities.
Then, too, when we express our attitudes by means of effective communication skills, the attitudes are strengthened and nourished. The more we practice the art and skills of loving, the more loving we become. My own experience and observation of trainees makes me utterly convinced that learning and using the skills taught in this book will foster an increase in the attitudes of genuineness, nonpossessive love, and empathy.
T. S. Eliot told of people who dreamed of creating systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. In our saner moments we all know that this concept is a fallacy. Communication skills, no matter how finely structured, cannot be a substitute for authenticity, caring, and understanding. But they can help us express these qualities more effectively than many of us have been able to do in the past. And the expression of these core qualities nourishes and reinforces these characteristics. As we manage to communicate more genuinely, lovingly, and empathically, we grow into the more that we can become.
AFTERWORD
Four Steps
to Improved
Communication
It is one thing to read about communication skills in a book; it is quite a different matter to apply them effectively in daily life. In teaching communication skills to thousands of people, I have found that five factors strongly affect whether the skills will be used in their lives—a quantified commitment to use the skills, the application of the skills in appropriate situations, a willingness to be undaunted by occasional failure, preparing others for the fact that you will be trying to communicate differently sometimes, and engaging in skill training.
A QUANTIFIED COMMITMENT
TO USE THE SKILLS
In the realm of interpersonal communication, as in so many other matters, people’s intentions tend to outrun their actions. Thus, when the typical reader finishes this book, she is liable to think, “I will work on each of these skills so that I can improve relationships with important others in my life.” In actual fact, however, after a few attempts at using the skills, the reader may tend to lapse back into the comfort of her old, but often less effective, ways of communicating. It’s not that she decided not to use the skills. Quite to the contrary, she may have thought she made a decision to use the skills frequently.
The word decision has been watered down by imprecise usage. So when I teach communication skills to someone (as I have be
en teaching them to you in this book), I urge the person to commit herself to a specific number of uses of each of the skills per week for a period of three months.
The specific number of uses of the skill is as important as the commitment to use the skill. Unless you pin yourself down to a specific number of uses, it is easy to think you are utilizing the skills more than you really are. Following is the commitment one of our workshop’s participants made:
MY COMMITMENT TO USE COMMUNICATION SKILLS
From October 16-January 16
Name: Harry Ogden
Skills
Commitment
Frequency of usage: Week of
Oct
November
December
Jan
20
27
3
10
17
24
1
8
15
22
29
5
12
Attending
5/wk
6
4
5
0
3
12
8
3
4
6
14
6
4
Reflective Listening
2/wk
3
2
1
0
4
6
3
3
2
0
4
3
Logical Consequences
2/mo
1
0
1
0
1
1
0
1
1
0
1
0
0
3-Part Assertion
1/wk
3
2
3
1
2
1
1
1
0
1
0
2
1
Descriptive Recognition
4/wk
4
3
0
0
0
14
5
6
4
7
18
8
9
Conflict Reduction
2/mo
0
1
1
0
7
0
0
1
2
0
1
0
0
Collaborative Problem Solving
2/mo
1
0
2
0
0
1
2
0
1
1
0
1
1
Every Friday afternoon, Harry reviewed his commitment and recorded on the chart the number of times he used each skill. He said, “It’s amazing how using the chart helped me to persist in using the skills. There were times, like the week of November 10, when I virtually ignored the skills all week and didn’t even realize I wasn’t using them. If you hadn’t urged us to develop a schedule that I could measure myself against, I’m afraid the skills would have fallen into disuse—like so many other good things that I’ve learned.”
I asked Harry how he remembered to review the schedule.
“That part was easy,” he said. “The day I made the commitment, I wrote ‘Comm. Chart’ in my datebook on every Friday afternoon for three months. Also, I scotch-taped the chart in a visible place in my office so that I could review my progress once in a while. Incidentally, the chart helped me to be aware of the seasons in my life. On Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks, I tried to greatly increase the use of my attending and descriptive-recognition skills. The same was true of birthdays and other special events. I began to give more of myself to others—as well as giving the more materialistic kind of presents.”
SELECT APPROPRIATE
SITUATIONS
When people are exposed to the skills taught in this course, they often want to try them out in some of the most difficult interpersonal problems in their lives. They may use reflective listening in situations that are most likely to trigger them into pronouncing judgments or giving advice. They tend to want to be assertive with the persons least likely to respond to an assertion message.
Just as it would be foolhardy to start jogging one day and enter a marathon the next, so it is unwise to use the skills in difficult situations before you have tried and mastered them in less-dramatic settings.
UNDAUNTED
BY OCCASIONAL FAILURE
These skills aren’t panaceas. When used well, they have a high probability of being successful and enriching relationships. Even the most skilled and genuine users, however, have occasional failures.
Presumably you are not yet one of the world’s most skillful practitioners of communication skills. If the pros occasionally have their failures, you will undoubtedly have your share too. When the skills don’t work well for you, you have the option of giving up or figuring out what went wrong and learning how to correct that the next time. Persistence in the face of occasional failure is a necessity for persons who are committed to develop any skill.
PREPARE OTHERS
FOR THE CHANGE
After learning communication skills, some people have a strong desire to keep the skills a secret. Others want to prepare the important others in their work and personal lives for the fact that they will be trying to use some different approaches to communication some of the time. Our research suggests that it is usually beneficial to tell the people with whom you are likely to be using the skills that you will be trying to utilize some new approaches to communication, why you are doing it, and what these will be.
After participating in a workshop, Harry Ogden wrote his wife:
Dear Midge,
It has been a long time since I’ve sent a letter to you. You may be wondering why I’m sending this letter. As you know, I’ve been taking a course on Management Communication Skills that means a lot to me. Well, many people in the course expressed frustration over the fact that those who meant so much to them were not there to share in the experience. They also said how hard it is to convey the feelings and skills to other people. I felt that same frustration and have decided to attempt to express what the experience has meant to me and to share some of that with you.
You may have some feelings about this—some positive, some of anxiety, or some even of threat. So I want to tell you how I think the course may affect me.
One of the main things we learned is how to listen when a person has a need to be listened to. Essentially the listener should have genuine concern for the speaker, should reflect facts and feelings (I’ll explain more of what I mean by that when we talk), and, most importantly, be nonevaluative and refrain from giving advice. I really want to learn how to listen this way. I hope that this will enable you to be more “you” and me to be more “me.”
One of the major benefits of listening is the establishing of trust in a relationship.
When a relationship has trust, you don’t have to be defensive about yourself, being yourself becomes easier.
So I really want to learn to be a nonjudgmental, reflective listener. It’s not going to be easy, and I may seem a little phony at times, so I ask you to be patient with me as I try to overcome some bad communication habits and learn some new skills.
We learned a lot of other skills, some of which you and I have discussed already. In this letter I’m not going to go into the other skills, though soon I’d like to explain how and why I hope to use them.
Well, in closing, I would like to say that the course was a
most unusual experience for me that opened up some important avenues of communication and self-discovery. I decided to try to share some of that meaning with you in this letter. Thank you for listening—and for being you.
With all my love,
Harry
P.S. It was fun talking about the three-part assertion message on Wednesday night. And I promise to put my dirty clothes in the hamper!
In addition to the letter to his wife, Harry told his children about the course and that he was going to try to communicate differently. At work he called a meeting with all his subordinates and told them about the course content and how he hoped to implement it on the job. In each setting, Harry admitted that he didn’t know the skills well yet and that he might forget to use them at crucial times. He also said that sometimes the skills might seem strange and perhaps even unproductive to people. He asked for a three-month period in which to give the skills a fair trial. After being kidded a bit about “things certainly couldn’t get much worse,” everyone agreed to give Harry three months to try to develop and use the skills.
“I’m glad I negotiated that trial period,” Harry told me. “Several times people said, ‘You’re doing that communication thing on me.’ And, after reflecting their discomfort, I would say, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be working too well right now—but we said we’d give it a three-month try. Let’s see if I got the gist of what you were saying.’ And we’d be into the conversation again.
“At the end of the three months everyone agreed that the experiment was a success. Sure, it bugged people some of the time. But all agreed that the reflections were better than the roadblocks and the assertion was better than nagging or aggression. And now it’s easier to agree to disagree on values issues and to solve real problems on a win/win basis.”
SKILL TRAINING
Skill-building workshops can be a tremendous asset in developing one’s ability to communicate better. This book describes the concepts and tells what the central communication methods are. But reading a book is not the equivalent of learning in a workshop situation in which the skills are modelled by the trainer and on audio and video tape and where practice sessions with feedback are held. Most people find that a skill-training workshop is very helpful in fostering increased interpersonal effectiveness.
People Skills_How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts Page 36
