Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  6. The Seeker

  Dare: Be confident and fearless.

  Seekers are daring. They are confident and fearless. Frankly, if we hadn’t had a bit of the Seeker running within us, we probably couldn’t have undertaken the mammography project at all. The Seeker gave us the assuredness we needed to take on such a daunting challenge and be unafraid to do things differently. I have discovered in my own self-work that I often operate from this archetype. Entrepreneurs are inherent risk-takers, and they must dare in order to be successful.

  A boundless explorer, the Seeker bravely sets out on new adventures. The Seeker lives outside his or her comfort zone, acts with confidence and self-assurance. Embody the Seeker when embracing new experiences and daunting challenges, knowing that unfettering your pursuits will eventually lead you to the answer.

  7. The Cultivator

  Commit: Nurture with purpose and intentionally grow.

  Cultivators have powerful vision. They understand that we commit to things today as a way of getting what we want in the future. Most people get so caught up in the day-to-day that they lose sight of the long game. The Cultivator remembers to maintain a state of empathy for the point he or she is working toward, even if it’s far out on the horizon. In our work with GE, we constantly reminded our team that the work we were doing was bigger than selling more machinery. It was about improving the overall patient experience and potentially having an impact on the lives of those involved.

  The Cultivator is committed to developing ideas and is intentional about every action. Through the Cultivator, you can connect everything you do to the development and maintenance of your thoughts and work. When something feels daunting and protracted, look to the Cultivator to provide perspective and leadership. Naturally gifted at seeing the greater purpose, the Cultivator knows what it takes to reap what he or she has sown.

  CHAPTER TWO EXERCISES

  Archetype Exemplars

  We can now begin to build a deeper familiarity with the seven Empathic Archetypes. A method we’ve found helpful is to think about someone in your life or the world who personifies each archetype the most. Think of this exercise as discovering your archetype exemplars.

  To some, the Convener, whose behavior is to host, immediately brings to mind Martha Stewart or other well-known lifestyle gurus. Others might imagine a maître d’ at their favorite restaurant or their yoga instructor. Each of these perfectly embodies the spirit of the Convener.

  Assign to each archetype a real-life person who embodies its behavior. Doing so will help bring the archetypes alive for you and will bring them closer to your own reality. It will also help you understand and work with the archetypes more readily.

  Self-Assessment and Application

  Once you have a better understanding of the archetypes, it’s time to connect with your personal strengths and weaknesses. You must be honest with yourself about this work. No one is evenly distributed across all seven archetypes; a good way to determine where you index on each of them is to personalize them.

  Personalizing the Archetypes

  Reread each of the archetypes, keeping in mind the real-life exemplars you have assigned to each one. Now, for each archetype, look back on your own life and identify a moment in your past where you clearly embodied the archetype fully. Remember how it felt when you were in that moment. Were you happy? Anxious? At ease?

  As you do this exercise, journal your memories of these experiences. Consider how easy or hard it was for you to find an example in your past. Did it come to you immediately, or was it difficult to find one? How did you feel in those moments? Was the feeling natural or unnatural? These are the clues that will help you to understand your strengths and weaknesses across all seven archetypes.

  Use the spider graph on the next page, or one you sketch yourself, to plot where you felt most to least comfortable with each archetype, and a clear picture will start to emerge.

  With this assessment of where you stand with the strengths and weaknesses of each archetype, you can begin “trying on” each one. One of the ways I try to improve my ability to shift among archetypes with greater ease is by pushing myself to work through the ones that make me the most uncomfortable. You can also identify specific ways you can “show up” in the perspective of a particular archetype and make them part of your daily practice.

  For example, let’s look at the Alchemist, whose behavior is testing and learning, experimentation at all costs. Ask yourself each day how you can challenge yourself to experiment. It doesn’t have to be huge. You don’t need to dive into particle physics. Perhaps you have always been intimidated by cooking. Now is your chance to pick up some groceries and make something for yourself. You will probably not like the feeling of being outside of your comfort zone, but stick with it.

  See how you look at problems from this perspective. How do you grapple with not knowing how the dish will turn out while you’re prepping the ingredients? Does it make you anxious? Those who thrive in this archetype become exhilarated at this moment of experimentation. See if you can find a way to experience the joy that comes from this experimentation. Over time, you’ll discover how the mind of an Alchemist works and the sort of state you can embody in order to connect with it more fully. Do the same for each archetype in order to understand your strengths and weaknesses better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Connecting to Your Whole Self

  In college, I thought management consulting—providing solutions to companies and helping them think through complex problems—sounded incredibly interesting, and I was sure that was what I wanted to do. I even imagined what it would be like working at one of the big shops such as Bain, or Booz Allen Hamilton, or Deloitte. It seemed like the kind of thing I would enjoy.

  But as the saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”

  My path has taken me in a different direction, but the thing I’ve held on to from those dreamy undergrad days is that deep down I knew I wanted to solve cerebral, intricate problems. What I would come to find as Sub Rosa grew was that we’re able to do something special that consultants rarely get the chance to experience: we actually get to enact the solutions we recommend. We’re not just recommenders, we’re doers. Many of our clients have told me stories about hiring consultants who work with them for months to develop a big new strategy. They research and do the analysis they need in order to finally deliver a massive, often complex document that drops with a thud onto the client’s conference room table. It’s a perfectly crafted panacea for all that ails the client.

  But too often the solutions the consultants produce are disconnected from the implementation. They haven’t been crafted by implementers, and as a result, they sometimes miss the key elements needed to bring the strategy or solution to life. In a word, the consultants lack empathy. Though I didn’t know it back in my college days, the connection between thinking and doing, between recommending and acting—that is what real empathic problem-solving requires.

  At Sub Rosa, my colleagues and I often have the opportunity to engage with clients from start to finish. When we have clients who want to work with us in this way, the process is much more holistic. They understand the high degree of interconnectedness between the two types of work, and they value a partner who can work alongside them to bring well-rounded solutions to life. These are the best kind of clients.

  Nike is one of them.

  One day, Nike came knocking on our door with a visionary new product it was introducing, and it needed our help to solve a strategic and executional challenge. The company wasn’t just looking for a clever marketing idea; it was looking for a partner who could work with its product, marketing, and communication teams to build a strategy to introduce a new shoe with special technical features to the general market in a way that would tout its innovative properties while also being understandable. It was right up our alley.

  Sub Rosa had already done several assignments for Nike—projects that had experimented with and challenged convention. We
’d put together artist collaborations that commissioned diverse forms of installation art with new materials being introduced by Nike. We’d designed exclusive, ultrapremium retail lounges where high-end customers could create bespoke sneakers in a private suite alongside a Nike designer. We had established such a trusting relationship while working together that when Nike needed to do something disruptive, we were sometimes fortunate enough to receive the call.

  By 2013, Nike had been working on this product for several years, and it was something the market had never seen. Some of Nike’s best and brightest manufacturing and material technology came together to create the Nike Free Hyperfeel.

  Nike has an amazing lab called “the Kitchen,” where researchers and designers study performance, materials, the physiology of elite athletes, and a whole host of other things that help Nike continue to be a cutting-edge powerhouse. In the many years we’ve worked together, I’ve been inside the Kitchen only once, and it was like being inside Willy Wonka’s factory. Only it smelled a lot more like fresh rubber than chocolate.

  After countless tests in the Kitchen, the Nike team arrived at the Nike Free Hyperfeel—a new running shoe that is ultrasensorial, form-fitting, and higher performance than ever before. The shoe combined some of Nike’s already existing technologies, such as Flyknit (a weaving technology that uses high-performance fabric to sew the top of the shoe, replacing the less ecological and more costly leather, stitching, and gluing process), as well as a Lunarlon insole, which molds more naturally to the bottom of the foot, and Dynamic Flywire, which allows the shoe to flex and contract like ligaments in the body.

  It was a big deal.

  Hyperfeel represented years of research and development, and the story was a tricky one to communicate. There were tons of attributes—the material science, the design, the research that had led to the product’s creation—that needed to be woven together to launch the product successfully. Nike wanted to have people hear about the technology that had gone into it, to be impressed by it, and to actually feel it.

  We needed to create an experience that would wow consumers not only with how the shoe looked but also with how it felt on their feet—and we knew that empathy held the key to solving this. We turned to the Seven Archetypes to help our team gain the broadest, most empathic understanding of what we wanted to communicate. But early on I realized that if we wanted to apply empathy to this particular problem, we would need to go deeper in order to engage with consumers on multiple levels. It led us to the creation of something we refer to as the Whole Self—a philosophy largely inspired by my meetings with a man named Gil Barretto, an intellectual and spiritual “athlete” of Olympic proportions.

  OPENING DOORS LEFT-HANDED

  His voice had a subtle booming quality. He didn’t yell. He didn’t even speak loudly. But his tone had a gravitas and a rumble that made his words land on my ears in a way that made me uncomfortable yet inspired me at the same time.

  “How present are you?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  I was twenty-eight years old at the time and thought I knew everything there was to know about life. I was switched on. I was insightful. I was definitely present. And I was sure I relayed as much as I attempted to summon a sense of humility through my young and oblivious pride.

  Gil smiled back and asked a simple question: “Are you right-handed?”

  “Yes,” I responded.

  “Good. Here’s what I’d like you to do . . . . When you leave here today, I want you to open every door you approach with your left hand.”

  I thought to myself, That’s it? Easy enough.

  That was one of my early visits to Gil Barretto, a man who would become a mentor and a guide and who would play an intimate role in my personal and spiritual development for the seven years we worked together before his passing. I met Gil through a series of fortuitous circumstances. For a few years, I had been part of a monthly meditation group hosted by my dear friend Alexandra. Alex is a kind and mystical woman who is about ten years my senior. She’d been working on her own mindfulness for a long while and had opened her door to help others seeking a more present way of being. We’d spend time each month talking about the work of G. I. Gurdjieff and Carl Jung, the finer points of the Nag Hammadi Library, and other esoteric works. It was a powerful time for me that opened my eyes and my spirit to a world much bigger than myself.

  One day Alex said she thought it was time I connected with Gil. She had referred to Gil from time to time in passing. She’d say something about how she and Gil were talking about such and such or that she’d be seeing him at a monthly gathering of his students. I didn’t know what Gil taught or what being his student entailed, but I was intrigued. When she offered to introduce us, I happily agreed.

  After my first session with Gil, I spent the next week opening countless doors, only to realize on the other side that my right hand was recoiling from the handle and returning to my side. “I did it again,” I’d tell myself. It was beyond frustrating.

  I couldn’t believe that something as simple as opening a door with my nondominant hand could be so difficult. But I wasn’t in the moment. I was unconsciously moving through life while my mind continued to race through an inner monologue at a million miles an hour.

  Of Gil’s many gifts, his ability to help others see this about themselves was one of his best. He knew how to assign a simple action, something that would require presence and discipline and that, if adhered to over time, would lead to a heightened sense of self-awareness. That’s what the doorknob assignment did. It made me realize that I was rarely, if ever, actually present. To put it another way, I had no empathy for myself. I was completely detached and had no real understanding of who I was or where I was.

  I was always thinking about something else. Where I was going. The meeting I had just left. What I wanted for dinner. Anything other than the present moment—or even the door in front of me and the conscious act of opening it with my left hand.

  Gil looked like a Navajo elder, though actually he was mostly Puerto Rican, hailing from Spanish Harlem. If you looked at him long enough, he’d start to look like any number of ethnicities. He was timeless and raceless, and though he was entirely self-aware, he was selfless, caring for his students as they fought their inner battles. He never missed a meeting or started late. He was in his late seventies when I met him, but he still stood over six feet tall and had broad shoulders. He always wore a shirt and tie and expected the same of me when we met about three times a month.

  He’d lived in India with gurus, he’d studied beside esoteric scholars in far-flung corners of the world, and he’d trained with descendants from the twentieth-century spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff’s school. He had been educated as a psychologist, and he played a mean saxophone. He didn’t have a particular philosophy that he preached. He wasn’t interested in filling his students with his own dogma. He once said that if my god was an umbrella, his job was to help me understand and believe in that umbrella better than ever before. His own experiences and study had given him powerful tools to help his students on the road to self-understanding. That was what made Gil so special.

  I kept trying to master the door-opening exercise and would return to Gil time after time, lamenting that I wasn’t getting it. Eventually, after about four months of work, I was able to proclaim my success. “I’m doing it, Gil!”

  He smiled a half-grin and said, “Good. Now switch back.”

  It took me a few more months of the exercise before I began to figure out what it was really about. I had begun to breathe more slowly. I was in my body. I was becoming more present. I was learning how to quiet the inner dialogue that had me running around like a madman. I was beginning to understand my inner self.

  That was what Gil had been striving for all along. He was dismantling some of my bad internal habits. He was helping me to see the different “I’s” that were driving my actions. Some days it was a manic “I” who couldn’t stop thinking about work and clients and m
anaging the growing complexity of the company. Other “I’s” were self-destructive, self-indulgent, or simply lazy. I got to know all of them and was able to see that each of them was a lesser version of the man I wanted to become. The nearly constant state of self-observation Gil had put me into had helped me notice when the wrong “I” was showing up and trying to run the show.

  So in a way, Gil saved my life. He didn’t pull me from a burning building or take a bullet for me, but he might as well have. He stepped in front of a false version of myself that was at the wheel of my mind and body. He spotted in me a more essential, more capable “I” and over time, with additional training and dialogue, he helped me regain control of a self that was careening toward disaster.

  Sometimes a session with Gil seemed like talk therapy. I’d go on and on about what was happening in my daily life, and he would let me talk as his silent gaze looked into something deeper. After I had rambled on for probably thirty minutes, he’d usually ask a sharp and powerful question such as “Why do you think I should care about any of this?” or “Who’s talking right now?” Those questions would knock me back and make me rethink everything I’d just said.

  Other times we sat across from each other, gazing into each other’s eyes for a long period of time. The room would seem to change dramatically. The light would shift. Even Gil’s face would start to change. In those moments I’d see or sense something, some sort of information lying just beyond my normal perception. Gil knew how to help me access that information; to see and hear it in a way that was understandable, while also crazy and entirely mystical. Powerful things would happen in his office. I never quite knew what to expect, and even when we had a tough session that left me in tears, I never regretted our meetings.

  During the time I worked with Gil, I began to know myself more fully, and I came to refine my own philosophies on personal development and, more specifically, on empathy. It’s been about a decade since we first met, and Gil passed away a few years ago—peacefully and in his own way—but he still walks with me every day.