Tag: Empathy

The Decisions We Make

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, Success

The other evening, I was getting ready for bed and was about to wash my face and brush my teeth when in the bathroom I saw a bee sat on the windowsil. My first reaction was fear, and my mind started racing with imaginings of the bee stinging me. At this point, I was presented with a choice: be scared or be curious.

I chose the latter and moved in closer to have a look at the bee. It was alive, and it seemed to be sleeping. I noticed it was a honeybee, and my mind became filled with compassion. The bee must have been flying around all day looking for pollen to make honey and was exhausted. I left the bee there to rest, and in the morning, I opened the window, and after a while, it woke up and flew out to head home.

The point is that when we are faced with making a decision we can decide what to do based on fear, anger and other negative states, or we can make it based on curiosity, empathy and other positive states. The choice before we make the decision is whether we react or respond to circumstances. Do we step back or attack, or do we lean forward or empathise? Whichever we choose can become a habit, so choose carefully.

Reducing The Suffering Of Others

Happiness, Health, Relationships

Naturally in life we don’t want to see other people suffer. However, we often go about the world interacting with others from our own point of view. We think about things in terms of how they impact us. This can cause us to be reactive to life’s events, asking ‘Why have they done this to me?’, for example. A better question to ask is ‘Why did they do that?’ This moves the thinking from us to them and allows us to consider the reason the other person is behaving the way they are.

Hurt people hurt people. So if someone hurts you with their words or their actions it is an indication that they are suffering, and rather than becoming reactive and trying to hurt them back, we could be compassionate and empathetic. This diffuses the situation and creates a space to helps the other person to heal. We will heal a little too.

If we reframe how we see our interactions with others and move from ‘How can I make things better for me?’ to ‘How can I reduce their suffering?’, then your relationships will improve and life will become more fulfilling.

Lean In With Empathy

Happiness, Relationships, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There are things in life we feel we are not equipped to deal with or to do, so we pull back and avoid these things. This often appears in our relationships. We pull back or we avoid topics of conversation or ways of being that scare us.

In my job I deal with complaints, so the person I talk to is usually upset, angry or both. I learned recently that I find it difficult to deal with people when they behave a certain way, so I don’t and I come across as cold and detail driven.

However, if i was to lean in with empathy, the conversation would be more productive and the other person would feel heard and respected. If you lean in with empathy in your lives the human connections you have will be much more rewarding.

Understanding Vulnerability

Happiness, Success

When we think of people being vulnerable we often think of young children, old people or those with a disability. However, we can all be vulnerable at some time or other, and it can be temporary, sporadic or permanent. Life events can make us vulnerable. We could lose a loved one, lose our job, have an unexpectedly large bill to pay, suddenly become severely unwell, have a sudden increase in caring responsibilities and the list goes on.

There is a stigma often associated with admitting our vulnerabilities and companies often have a one size fits all approach, which means vulnerabilities are to considered when supporting customers. People often assume others are not vulnerable without even considering the possibility. Vulnerability is something we should be considering and showing empathy towards.

Pre-COVID times a large percentage of UK adults had less than £300 in savings, which means they would have struggled if the boiler broke or their care needed significant repairs, and this has only got worse during the pandemic. Any of us could face a large bill for something unexpected. No one predicted the COVID-19 pandemic but it has left so many people vulnerable.

So, let’s be open about our vulnerabilities and show empathy towards others who may be struggling. Anyone you meet maybe struggling, so be kind, always.

Do You Care Enough To Fail

Achieving Goals, Success

If you work in customer service, as many do, like many you may turn up to work and do what you are told to do and go home again. In other words you serve customers within the boundaries that you feel will avoid you getting into trouble or losing your job. It is the fear of failure that causes the service that many people provide to be average. Not amazing and not poor, just enough to earn a paycheck.

This is the fundamental problem that causes customers to complain about the service they have provided. I work in complaints for a bank and I hear, more often than not, that the Advisor did not show empathy or provide help or that they were rude. Rudeness usually comes from an attitude of that’s not my job or that I need to be quick and get you off the phone because I have to keep calls to 3 minutes and no longer, if you work in a call centre as I do.

On the other hand excellent customer service includes listening to the customer, making a connection, empathising, as well as being efficient. In other words it is a shift in attitude not in time spent on the phone with customers.

This type of customer service takes practice and will involve failing, wishing you had said something different, etc. It is failing small enough to get feedback from a Manager when needed, but not big enough to get fired. The difference is whether you care enough to try and provide excellent service, rather than doing the minimum in order to not get in trouble.

5 Things all effective leaders need to have

Leadership

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

– John C. Maxwell

 

When it comes to effective leadership profit margins and performance projections are not the game. A leaders job is to know where they are leading their followers and to be able to articulate it in such a way as to inspire their followers to move in that direction together and to look after those that they lead. Leadership is about vision, energy, wisdom, human connection and having a moral compass.

Vision

Simon Sinek talks frequently about leadership and the need to have a vision and his vision is “I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single day inspired to go to work, feel safe when they are there and return home fulfilled at the end of the day.” My vision is of a world where the vast majority of people collaborate to help each other lead happy and successful lives and live fulfilling lives as a result. This is why I created and continue to write this blog. I would not be so bold as to compare myself to Simon Sinek, we are not even in the same league, but what I am pointing out is that a vision is of a world in which we want to live, it is tangible, it is something we can imagine and work towards.

The job of a leader is to instill their vision in the culture of those who they lead, so no one is fuzzy on the direction that they are going in. This means that the vision becomes a part of everything that the members of a team or the employees of a company do on a daily basis. When Managers only reward short term gains, like reaching a profit margin, then the whole thing becomes unstable and often collapses, but a vision is something that is almost unreachable, it is a north star which we will never reach, but it points us to where we are going. It is therefore a constant and creates a successful and stable working environment, which breads more creativity and innovation, because the vision is clear and the team or the employees feel safe to take creative leaps.

Energy

It is no accident that effective leaders have lots of energy, because energy is infectious and we are drawn to those with energy. If a leader uses energy well they energise the people around them and they diffuse it into the culture of their workplace, causing their team to put there mental, emotional and physical resources to the task of working towards the shared vision, towards the north star of that team and that company.

This only works, however, when the leader in question actively interacts with their team or their employees. Whether you are a CEO or a Team Leader passing your energy onto those under your charge is an essential ingredient of effective leadership, it is part of making a human connection with those that you lead, because for someone to follow you they need to trust you, and trust is built up over time through positive interactions where, as a leader, you look after those in your charge.

Wisdom

It takes time to become an effective leader, it is a combination of both knowledge and experience, along with the other traits I am discussing in this blog post. It has been found that the most effective leaders are between the ages of 45 and 70. This is the sweat spot for effective leadership. Wisdom is a term that is banded around a lot, sometimes it is referred to when talking about people in their 80s and 90s, but I do not think that it is necessarily always about age.

I believe it is about the daily pursuit of knowledge and understanding of how to do the things we care about well. It is about us putting this knowledge and understanding to the test of experience every day, and on the other side of failure after failure we find wisdom. It is a deep understanding of how and why the thoughts, speech and actions of greatness result in this outcome. It also takes time to become wise, which would account for the age range within which we find effective leadership.

Human Connection

When leaders are in charge of a small team of people there are day to day human connections. Everyone knows the names of each others children, everyone’s lives are intertwined. The team will work and socialise together and relationships are built up over time through many many little interactions that amount to strong human connections. Therefore the leader needs to be adept at building and encouraging these connections, these relationships. Empathy is a strong component in these relationships, to connect emotionally on an individual level.

Empathy is a cornerstone of any human relationship and a good leader knows that teams and companies are not built on money or products, they are built on human relationships, because 100% of employees are human beings and 100% of customers are human beings. An effective leaders job is to look after their team or their employees and their employees will look after the customers. This is how sustainable businesses grow, and the stakeholders will benefit from this model more than if the leaders only focused on what the stakeholders wanted.

Moral Compass

As leaders rise up the ranks they become more and more detached from the employees they lead, so empathy no longer works, human connections become lessened, because there are less of the little interactions that add up to a working relationship. This is why empathy decreases in effective leaders in higher ranking positions, but it is in fact replaced by compassion. In other words they become more focused on doing the right thing even when it is hard.

This compassion is their moral compass, which becomes more prominent in effective leaders over time. It is detached from the individual employees that the leader is leading, but it is focused on doing what is right for all of the employees in their charge. Even if they are the CEO of their company, an effective leader is dedicated to doing the right thing, even when there is pressure to do the easy thing and put profits over people.

Effective leaders need to have a vision and clearly communicate it out to those they lead. They need to use empathy to make real connections with the team they lead. They also need to engage their moral compass of compassion when leading from a more senior position when they cannot rely on close working relationships to support and guide their employees. Being an effective leader has a lot to do with knowing that people are more important than profits, because effective leaders create effective leaders in those that they lead. To be a great and effective leader we have to make sure we look after the person to the right of us and the person to the left of us and we can all do that.