Archives for August 2013

Why Don’t We Empathize First?

Last week, I advised empathizing before advising. To attempt to remedy my hypocrisy, I will now empathize with the desire not to empathize. Because there really are a bunch of good and legitimate reasons we try other tacks. I’ll say some reasons I don’t empathize, so I’m not speculating too much about general motivations, but I think my reasons are common ones.

A big reason I don’t empathize is that when I perceive what seems like an obvious gap in someone’s thinking, or thing they could do to fix their situation, I get excited! I really do want other people to be happy and like helping them, and often I feel impatient about getting right to the heart of things. Plus, people are often asking for non-empathy things, such as advice. 

A related thing is that a big part of me likes conversations to be fast-paced. This goes along with being impatient, but it’s not the same thing. I like the energy and positive affect that comes from getting ideas out there quickly. I like conversations where everyone is interrupting everyone. Not everyone does, and I try to reign in this tendency of mine depending on context.

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Reminder: Empathize First!

If you’re talking to someone who is seeking support, it is incredibly useful to empathize before giving advice. This is true even if the person is nominally seeking advice. 

I know to do this, but in the past few weeks, it’s happened at least three times that I can think of that I’ve been in a group situation where someone who was visibly upset came to the group for support with a difficult situation, and then we all jumped in with advice. I won’t go as far as to say that the advice was useless. I know from experience that I can partly take in advice even when I’m triggered, and that I will often go home and think about what the people told me to do.

But empathy first is still the way to go for a few reasons.

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Conversation Rules for My Birthday Party

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The feedback I got indicated that the “ask a personal question” rule was the most helpful. 

I suspect that setting the intention to have good conversations in the first place was more effective than the specific ruleset, but it’s hard to know with these things. I consider the ruleset an alpha version, and I want to experiment much more with parties specifically designed to produce good conversations.