Content

• To step
• Part 1 of 3: Evoking your empathy
• Part 2 of 3: Become more empathetic
• Part 3 of 3: Understanding the power of empathy
• Tips
• Warnings

Empathy is the ability to empathize with others - the key to forming meaningful relationships and peaceful coexistence. Some people are born with a natural capacity for empathy and others find it more difficult to empathize with other people. However, if your ability to picture yourself in someone else's shoes is lacking, there are several things you can do to deepen your empathy. This article discusses the meaning of empathy and steps you can take right away to become a more empathetic person.

To step

Part 1 of 3: Evoking your empathy

1. Get in touch with your own emotions. In order to feel someone else's emotions, you have to be able to feel them yourself. Are you in tune with your feelings? Do you notice when you are happy, sad, angry or scared? Do you let these feelings surface and express them? If you tend to temper your emotions instead of making them a part of your life, work on yourself to feel a little deeper.
   • It is quite normal to push away negative feelings. For example, it's more fun to distract yourself with TV or go to the pub than to sit down and think about something bad that happened. However, pushing your feelings aside creates a disconnection, a lack of familiarity. When you can't express your own grief, how can you expect to feel someone else's grief?
   • Take a moment each day to focus on your emotions. Instead of hastily pushing out negative feelings, think about them. Be angry and afraid, and deal with those feelings in a healthy way, such as crying or writing down your thoughts or talking to a friend about how you feel.
2. Listen carefully. Listen to what someone is saying and notice the flexion in their voice. Observe all the little clues that reveal how someone is feeling. Maybe the other has a trembling lower lip and glittering eyes. Maybe it's more subtle - the other looks down a lot, or seems absent. Put yourself aside for a moment and absorb the other person's story.
   • Don't judge while listening. If you find yourself thinking about a previous disagreement you've had, or are critical of someone's choices, or have another feeling that makes you feel absent, force yourself to start listening again.
3. Imagine that you are the other person. Have you ever read a moving story that was so captivating that you completely forgot about yourself? For a moment you were there and you became that character, and you knew exactly what it would feel like to see your father again after 10 years or to lose your lover to someone else. Empathy is no different. When you listen to someone and really try to understand him or her, there will come a point when you start to feel what the other person is feeling. You will get a glimpse of what it means to be the other.
4. Don't be alarmed if it feels uncomfortable. Empathy can be painful! It hurts to understand other people's pain, and it takes effort to connect at such a deep level. Maybe that's why empathy is on the decline - it's just easier to keep conversations light, and stay safe in your own cocoon. If you want to become more compassionate, you can't hide from people's feelings. Realize that this will affect you and can change you. But you do get a deeper understanding of the other person, a basis on which to work on a deeper connection.
5. Show the other person that you empathize. Ask questions that show that you are listening. Use body language to indicate that you are attentive: make eye contact, lean forward slightly, don't fidget. Nod, shake your head, or smile when appropriate. These are all ways to show your empathy in the moment, to instill confidence in the person who shares feelings with you. If you seem distracted, or give other signals that you're not listening or interested, the person is likely to close and not want to share anything with you anymore.
   • Another way to be empathetic is to confide in the other as well. By making yourself as vulnerable as the other person, you build trust and a mutual bond. Open yourself up more and enter the conversation.
6. Use your empathy to help other people. Compassion for someone is a learning experience, and it is good to let the knowledge you gain influence your future actions. Maybe this means standing up for someone who is bullied a lot because you understand them better now. It can change the way you behave the next time you meet someone, or change your opinion on certain social or political issues. Let empathy influence the way you stand in the world.

Part 2 of 3: Become more empathetic

1. Be open to learn more about what you don't understand. Empathy stems from the desire to know more about other people and to have different experiences. Become curious about what life is like for other people. Learn as much as you can about different things every day. Here are a few things to get you interested:
   • Travel more. When you go to places you've never been, spend some time with the people who live there to learn about their way of life.
   • Talk to people you don't know. If you're sitting next to someone on the bus, start a conversation instead of diving into a book.
   • Get out of your regular routine. If you tend to hang out with the same people and go to the same places, change this and meet new people. Expand your world a little.
2. Try harder to empathize with people you don't like. If there are areas where your empathy is failing, do your best to change this, or at least get a better understanding of people and groups you don't like. At some point, if you notice that you feel disgusted with someone, ask yourself why. Instead of avoiding them or being negative about them, decide to put you in their shoes. Find out what you can learn by being empathetic towards people you don't like.
   • Remember, even if you can't reach some sort of agreement, you can still feel empathy. It is possible to feel empathy for someone you dislike. And who knows, once you open up a little bit more, there are reasons for you to change your mind about the person.
3. Do your best to ask people how they feel. This is an easy way to be empathetic a few times each day. Instead of not wanting to talk about emotions, ask people about their emotions and really listen to their answers. This does not mean that every conversation should be deep, solemn and philosophical. However, asking people how they feel can often help you empathize with the other person, and the person you're talking to really see.
   • In addition, you should also respond more truthfully yourself when someone asks you how you feel. Instead of saying "Great!" When you feel down, you might as well be telling the truth! See what happens when you express your emotions a little more instead of hiding them.
4. Read books and watch more fiction. Reading lots of stories, in the form of books, movies and other media, is a great way to develop your empathy. Studies show that reading fiction actually improves your ability to empathize with others in real life. After a while, you can better imagine what life would be like if you were someone else. The purification of laughing or crying along with a character can help open up the emotions of others.
5. Exercise your empathetic skills on someone you trust. If you are not sure if you are empathetic, practice your empathy on someone else. Make sure the person knows you want to work on it so the other person understands when you're not hitting the right note. Ask the person to tell you how they feel, and go through all of the above steps to empathize with them. Tell the person how you feel as a result of what he or she has told you.
   • Find out if the feelings are correct. If the person is expressing grief, and you felt sad when the other person talked about it, then you have interpreted their emotions correctly.
   • If the feelings didn't match, you may need to spend more time tuning into your own emotions and recognizing emotions in other people.

Part 3 of 3: Understanding the power of empathy

1. Think of it as sharing someone's emotions. Empathy is the ability to empathize with someone. It requires you to go below the surface and experience the same emotions that someone else is experiencing. It's easy to confuse empathy with sympathy, which is the case when you feel sorry for someone for their misfortune, and perhaps respond to that feeling to try to help. But empathy goes deeper: instead of in front of to feel someone, you feel with someone.
   • For example, let's say your sister starts to cry when she tells you that her boyfriend just broke up with her. When you see tears roll down her face and listen to her description of what happened, you feel a lump in your throat. Not only do you feel sorry for her, you also feel sad. That's empathy.
   • Another way to look at empathy is to see it as a shared understanding, an ability to project yourself into someone else's experience. The thought of walking a mile in someone else's shoes is a description of the feeling of empathy.
   • Being empathetic means sharing in any emotion - it doesn't have to be a negative emotion. Empathy is attuned to all of a person's feelings and emotions so that you get a sense of what it is like to be that person.
2. Realize that you can feel this for everyone. You don't have to have the same background as someone else to feel empathy for them. It's not about having a shared understanding, because you've been through something too. In fact, you can feel empathy for people with whom you have nothing in common. Being empathetic is about experiencing what someone else feels - whatever it is. It doesn't have to be something you've felt before.
   • This means that you can feel empathy for everyone. A young person can empathize with an elderly person in a nursing home, even if he or she has clearly never had that experience. A wealthy person can empathize with someone who is homeless, even though he has always had the privilege of having a roof over his head and eating a lot. You can feel empathy for a stranger on the train that you see from across the aisle.
   • In other words, being empathetic doesn't mean imagining what life should be like for someone - it means feeling what life is like for that person on an emotional level.
3. Understand that you don't have to agree with someone to empathize with that person. In fact, it is still possible to be empathetic towards someone if you completely disagree with their views and don't even really like them. That person is still human, and has the same range of emotions as you. It may not be easy to do, but you can still empathize with that person's pain and suffering, just as you could if it were someone you love.
   • For example, let's say your neighbor is at the other end of the political spectrum than you, and is inappropriately venting ideas that you think are completely wrong. However, if he were injured, you would come to his rescue.
   • It may be even more important to be able to empathize with people you don't like. Empathy helps us see each other as people in need of love and attention, no matter what. It creates the opportunity to make peace.
4. Forget the rule "Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself". George Bernard Shaw has already said, `` Don't treat others the way you would like them to treat you - they may have different preferences. '' The 'golden rule' doesn't really apply when it comes to empathy, because it doesn't help you understand what it is to be someone else. Being empathetic means opening yourself to someone else's point of view, other people's "preferences", instead of imposing your own experiences and ideas.
   • Thinking about how you want to be treated can serve as a good starting point for being respectful and conscientious, but to be empathetic you have to dig a little deeper. It's hard to do, and it can even feel uncomfortable. But the more you do it, the better you understand the people around you.
5. Understand why empathy is important. Empathy improves quality of life on both a personal and social level. It helps you feel more connected to the people around you and creates a sense of shared meaning. In addition, people's ability to experience empathy for people other than themselves leads to great social benefits. It helps individuals and groups get past racism, homophobia, sexism, classism and other social problems. It is the basis of social cooperation and mutual aid. Where would we be without empathy?
   • A recent study found that the level of empathy among students has dropped by 40% over the past 20-30 years. This suggests that empathy is, at least in part, something that can be learned or unlearned.
   • By connecting with your sense of empathy every day and making it a priority, you can improve your ability to be empathetic - and see how your life improves as a result.

Tips

• Use your perception and emotions as a guide and to make suggestions.
• Chances are you won't get a full picture of the situation, but this shouldn't be a problem.
• This requires a fairly active, caring mind to work properly. It may not always work.
• Don't believe that your view of the situation is the right one - everyone will view it in a slightly different way.
• If you are struggling to visualize the situation clearly, try comparing it to an experience of your own that is similar to the one you are trying to imagine.
• Empathy is not a physical, finite procedure. It can be spontaneous (indeed, unwanted), or it can be triggered by getting the slightest glimpse of a situation.

Warnings

• If the emotions are strong enough, this feeling can linger for a while after the empathy. This can be dangerous if it's a particularly depressing topic. If this happens, don't worry. Try to think of as many happy memories as possible and counteract the depressive empathy with joyful empathy.