Empathy is one of the most important communication skills.

In many ways, all other communication skills depend on empathy.

But what is it?

What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Is empathy only about feeling other people's emotions?

Empathy and sympathy?

How much of empathy is about feelings and how much about thoughts? What does emotional regulation have to do with empathy?

What is empathic accuracy?

What is Empathy?

We hear a lot about empathy. We're told it's very important. Some of us are told we don't have enough of it, but we're not always sure exactly what it is. It sort of has to do with being concerned about other people, being able to sense other people's emotions. But today, I want to give you what I think is the best and most complete definition of empathy that I've encountered.

Empathy is I think the most basic and fundamental of all communications skills. I think all other communications skills aside from maybe basic mastery of language rely on empathy, but it's one of those words that we use so much. And yet, if we're pressed to define what it means, not all of us can define it very well.

I recently came across this great book called The Art of Empathy by Carla McLaren. I highly recommend you read it if empathy is a topic you're interested in. It offers both a single definition of empathy, and then it talks about the six most essential aspects of empathy. That's going to take up the bulk of this blog entry. The main definition and six essential aspects of empathy.

What is empathy? Well, Carla McLaren says, "Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts, and needs of others, such that we can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support."

That's a mouthful, and we'll come back to that. Let's see some key characteristics of it – social and emotional skills. So it's a skill. It can be learned. If you've been told that you don't have enough empathy, you've come to the right place. You can learn empathy. I plan to make a bunch of videos about how to respond empathically. It helps us feel and understand. There's the feeling part, the sort of emotional part, almost bodily part.

There is also the understanding, cognitive part of empathy. This helps us understand both emotions, but also circumstances, intentions, thoughts, needs, their inner mental life and their perspective. Empathy is not only about feelings or emotions. It's also about people's internal states and their perspectives, such that we can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate support. What good is empathy if we can't take effective action to comfort people, soothe them, and meet their needs?

McLaren’s 6 Essential Aspects of Empathy

I think this a great definition of empathy and I want to take on its individual parts. McLaren says empathy has six essential aspects, and we'll define each of those briefly.

1. Emotional contagion: This is I think what I think most people think of when they think of empathy. We think of the woman on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the empath who could feel other people's emotions. Emotional contagion is about being able to feel other people's emotions and identify them in others. This is a critical aspect of empathy, but there's much more to it than that. Some of us have only that, and some of us are so empathic we feel other people's emotions so strongly that those emotions overwhelm us. We can't be very effective at empathic responding if we're totally overwhelmed by other people's emotions. But emotional contagion is an essential aspect. The ability to feel what other people are feeling or to recognize their feelings by their non-verbal behavior, their signaling, and so on.

2. Empathic accuracy: This is the ability to accurately identify what other people are feeling. There are only a handful of maybe 6 to 10 basic emotions. I'll make another video about that eventually, but they can shade into one another. It's important when we're empathizing with people to be able to tell the difference between anger and frustration, between excitement and joy, between grief and consternation, or whatever they might be. Empathic accuracy is the ability to accurately identify what other people are feeling. Not just to feel it, but actually to identify it and reflect it back to them. And it's not just their emotions, but it's also plans, goals, intentions. To have empathic accuracy is to create an accurate map of the other person's internal mental state.

3. Emotional regulation: This is our ability to handle our own emotions. When we think of empathy, we often think of the other person's emotions and our ability to deal with the other person's emotions. But fundamentally, empathy begins at home. You can't be effectively empathic unless you have a handle on your own emotions, unless you've done the work of maturing into an adult who can understand, tolerate, and identify their own emotions, who has come to grips with their own difficult emotions. Then when you have intense emotions, you have the ability to regulate them, tune them down, and keep your composure even when you're feeling intense emotions. If you can't regulate your own emotions, you often can't effectively deal with other people's intense emotions because they bring up such powerful emotions in you that you lose your control and your ability to effectively help other people. Emotional regulation is the ability to regulate and control the intensity of your own emotions.

4. Perspective-taking: Perspective-taking is a fundamental communication skill all of its own. It's about the ability to see the world through the eyes of the other person, to walk a mile in their shoes. This is to try to understand what would it be like if I were in their position, if I had just been fired, if I had just had a death in my family, if I had just made a big mistake at work, if I had just been broken up with or gotten bad news, or if I had just gotten a diagnosis of a serious disease. Perspective-taking is the ability to use our own life experience to project ourselves into the position of the other person to try to understand not only what they're feeling, but what they might need, what they might be expecting, what they might be thinking, the reasons for their feelings, the story they might be telling themselves and so on. That's perspective-taking. It helps prepare us to take action.

5. Concern for others: The first four aspects of empathy are about skills, the ability to feel other people's feelings, to identify them accurately, to regulate our own feelings, to see the world through the eyes of another person. But the last two are about our ability to take action. So the fifth is concern for others. This is a sort of a character trait or disposition. We have to care about others. I guess we can imagine an evil genius who had all the other aspects of empathy, but didn't care about other people, or maybe a narcissistic person who had the skill to manipulate other people, but didn't care about other people. Concern for others, or the affirmative desire to be compassionate and altruistic, is part of empathy. We can't just understand other people's emotions if we're inclined to ignore them or discount them. Concern for others is an essential aspect of the overall picture of being an empathic person in the positive sense that we normally think of the word.

6. Perceptive engagement: This is the second of the ‘action’ aspects of empathy. Perceptive engagement is the ability to take effective action to meet other people's needs. We have to have the skill to see what other people want and need, and the concern or motivation to do so. Then we need the ability to actually take action to meet each other's needs. McLaren talks about being able to engage, for example, someone who is grieving, to be able to engage in constellation, not just compassion. Compassion is sort of the ability to feel what they're feeling. Constellation is an affirmative action you take to comfort another person.

Summary

So that's it. From Carla McLaren's fantastic book, The Art of Empathy, both the definition of empathy, which is I think comprehensive, and six essential aspects of empathy. I've hope you've enjoyed this content. I'll return to these concepts repeatedly and try to give you examples of how we put empathy into action, in terms of the communication skills that allow us to say the right thing when we're exercising our perceptive engagement and respond empathically to people that we care about or work with.