Concept of empathy. Six habits to increase your empathy level. Extraction of the book of Roman Krznaric: Empathy, why it matters, and how to get it.

1. EMPATHY
Why it matters, and how to get it
Extract of the book:
Roman Krznaric:

2. CALL FOR NEW AGE OF OUTROSPECTION
• Outrospection meaning discovering who you are and how to live by stepping
outside yourself and exploring the lives and perspectives of other people.
• Create better balance between looking inwards and looking outwards

3. CONCEPT OF EMPATHY
• Empathy involves stepping into someone´s shoes gaining an understanding of their feelings
(affective aspect) and perspectives (cognitive aspect), and using that understanding to guide
our actions.
• Two approaches to empathy are:
1. Perspective-taking (also called ´cognitive empathy´)
Cognitive empathy develops naturally in early childhood – just at the time when the distinction
between self and other begins to emerge – tells us that human beings are inherently social creatures
wired for empathy. It is about the ability to imagine perspectives other than your own. It involves
making an imaginative leap and recognising that other people have different tastes, experiences and
worldviews than your own.
2. Shared emotional response (known as ´affective empathy´)
Affective empathy is about sharing or mirroring another person´s emotions. Leading to a shared
emotional response.

4. 6 HABITS TO INCREASE YOUR EMPATHY LEVEL
1. Switch on your empathic brain
2. Make the imaginative leap
3. Seek experiental adventures
4. Practise the craft of conversation
5. Travel in your armchair
6. Inspire a revolution

5. 1. SWITCH ON YOUR EMPATHIC BRAIN
• ´Mirror neurons´ are neurons that fire up both when we experince something (such
as pain) and also when we see somebody else going through the same experience.
People with lots of mirror cells tend to be more empathic, especially in terms of
sharing emotions.
• ´Mirror neurons´ allow is to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual
reasoning but through direct simulation. Our brains mirror the state of other people.
• Neuroscience has dicovered empathy in ´mirror neurons´
• Most people are able to expand their capacity for empathy throughout their lives -
especially their cognitive or perspective-taking empathy - by practising mindful
attention towards other people´s feelings and experiences.

6. 2. MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP: BARRIERS
• We face four fundamental social and political barriers that block the full expression
of our empathic imaginations: prejudice, authority, distance and denial.
• Highly empathic people consciously strive to make the imaginative leap into other
people´s mental worlds despite all the barriers mentioned.
• We must first explore the four barriers to empathy in more detail in order to defy
them:
• Prejudice. The vast majority have assumptions and prejudices of others. We are prone to
stereotyping, making snap judgements based on first impressions, and casually project
our biases and preconceptions onto people while knowing very little about the reality of
their lives. What all stereotyping has in common is an effort to dehumanise, to erase
individuality, to prevent us from looking someone in the eye and learning their name.
The consequence of this is that it creates culture of indifference that empathy finds
difficult to penetrate.

7. 2. MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP: BARRIERS
• Authority. Humans have the tendency to obey authorities. ´I was just following the orders´
• Highly sensitive to culture and context
• We learn obedience from teachers and parents, and slowly absorb the culture of obedience as we
grow up
• Highly empathic people have the desire and capacity to defy authority when empathic actions calls
for it.
• Distance. When we do not know people, when their lives are far away and unfamiliar, our
capacity to care about them is more difficult to ignite. The spatial distance.
• Also social distance where we have bias towards empathising with people who socially resemble us
in some way, such as educational background, ethnicity or religion.
• Temporal distance. We worry about the welfare of our children or grandchildren. Bonds start
becoming weaker with respect to our great-grandchildren and even further.

8. 2. MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP: BARRIERS
• Denial
• People, organisations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is
too disturbing, threatening or anomalousto be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The
information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.
• Human beings are particularly skilled at protecting themselves by inventing convenient
reasons why they do not need to take action to relieve the suffering of others.
• All four barriers are primarily inventions of culture, society and politics, rather than
traits deeply embedded in human nature. This means that we can, as individuals and
societies, find ways to challenge them.

9. 2. MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP: TOWARDS EMPATHY
• There are three steps to make the imaginative leap of empathy: we must a) humanise the
´other´, b)then discover what we share – and what we don´t – with people, and finally we
need to c) empathise with our enemies.
a) Humanise the ´other´: acknowledge the humanity of people - their individuality and
uniqueness – and treat them as beings of equal worth. E.g. Shindler´s list: ”I knew the
people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them
like human beings.”
b) Discover what you share in common. We all possess deep wells of pain and sorrow that we
can draw on to help bridge social divides and create empathic bonds. We cannot assume
that others will share our moral codes, our tastes or our interpretations of the world. That
is why highly empathic persons also actively attempt to understand what they do not have
in common. We need to turn to the Platinum rule: ”Do unto others as they would have you
do unto them” – asking to resist the temptation of projecting our own experiences and
views onto others.
c) Empathise with your enemies. You can gain understanding of someone´s worldview
without having to agree with their beliefs or principles.

10. 3. SEEK EXPERIENTAL ADVENTURES
• Experiental learning may be the most demanding approach to empathising yet has the potential
to yield the greatest rewards. There are several way to try it for yourself:
• Immersion, physical like spending months in a wheelchair, become an undercover empathist. Try e.g. job
swap or shadowing for couple of days.
• Exploration, become like anthropologist who search out and closely observe lives and cultures that are
different from your own. For travelling to succeed in expanding our empathy, Che Guevara recommeds
to have project to direct you (his was to volunteer for a few weeks at the leper colony in Peru).
• Cooperation, working together with others leading to feel of belonging and empathy, think of it as
being in the same boat rather than the same shoes as other people. Thrust people together in an
intense shared experience or to pursue a common enterprise, and empathy is likely to flower.
• From the book by Griffin: Black like me: ”If only we could put ourselves in the shoes of others to
see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the
tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”
• Pianists don´t perfect their technique by reading musical scores, nor carpenters by studying texts
on how to use a plane. They practise, practise, practise.

11. 4. PRACTISE THE CRAFT OF CONVERSATION
• Conversation is one of the essential ways in which we come to understand the inner emotional
life and ideas of others.
• Highly empathic people bring six unusual qualities to their conversations: curiosity about
strangers, radical listening, taking off their masks, concern for the others, a creative spirit, and
sheer courage
• Different communication guides, tips and ticks can make conversation mechanical and stilted,
introducing a serlf-consciousness and artificiality that actually get in the way of empathy
• The six habits in more details:
1. Curiosity about strangers. Curiosity can help us discover who are people around you, like neighbours,
co-workers, and how they see the world. We need to find ways of rediscovering the childhood
curiosity about strangers that most of us once naturally possessed. Conversations with strangers can
be an adventure in personal learning and enlightenment, a way to challenge your own ideas and
experiences to create a two-way dialogue, a ´conversation´ rather than an interview. Also essential to
realise is that most people actually want to talk about the things that matter to them. Offer them the
space, and they will open themselves to you.

12. 2. Radical listening is about our ability to pe present to what´s really going on within – to the unique
feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment. A) presence involves emptying your
faculties and listening to the other person with your whole being, letting go of preconceived ideas and
judgements about them. B) consciously focus on identifying the other person´s feelings, and c) make a
concerted effort to understand their needs. One should also show understanding of the conversation by
paraphrasing what they have just said, reflecting their message back to them in the form of questions that
use neutral language.
3. Take off your mask. Empathy is built upon mutual exchange: if we are open with others, they are much
more likely to be open with us. Conversation is a two-way dialogue to create mutual understanding.
Removing your mask is about embracing vulnerability. In our culture vulnerability – exposing your
uncertainties, taking emotional risks – is considered failing, weakness. Brené Brown argues: ” We´re
brought up believing and being taught and seeing it modelled in our parents, that vulnerability is
weakness, and that going out into the world without armours is basically asking for the hurt that you get.
But to me, vulnerability is not weakness – it´s the greatest measure of our courage.” continuing: ”When
vulnerability is not tolerated in the workplace, we can forget about innovation, creativity and engagement.
Those are all functions of vulnerability.”
4. PRACTISE THE CRAFT OF CONVERSATION

13. 4. Concern for the others. Strive to focus on the other person´s interests and wellbeing, not just your own.
Empathy marketing is about stepping into people´s shoes, understanding their mindset, unconscious
desires and emotions, and then using the insights to sell them your product.
5. Creative spirit. Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When
approaching a conversation with creative spirit, delving into the worldview of another person, and sharing
your own with the other person, they might emerge slightly altered by the experience, and have empathic
insights that offer fresh thoughts and perspectives. Experiment conversations with adventurous openings
in order to brake conventions so your conversations become energising, memorable and vehicles of
empathic discovery.
6. Sheer courage. All the five previous habits require sheer courage. Courage also enables us to have those
really difficult conversations that we would much rather avoid, but which may offer the greatest scope for
cementing empathic attachements. Only with an attitude of freedom and spontaneity will empathic
conversation fully flower. Self-empathy is in some funfamental way about being good to yourself and
liking who you are. If you feel secure in yourself you will have a deep well of inner emotional strength and
self-knowledge to draw upon to care about others.
4. PRACTISE THE CRAFT OF CONVERSATION

14. 5. TRAVEL IN YOUR ARMCHAIR
• ´Armchair empathy´ is a form of travel you can do in your own living room.
• Literature, photography, film and other art forms have the ability to take us on imaginative journeys into lives that are profoundly
unlike our won, and also inspire empathic acts on the behalf of others once we have put down the novel or left the cinema.
Photographs excel, more than any other form of either art or journalism, in offering an immediate, vicerally emotional connection
to the world.
• Empathy is at the heart of storytelling itself. What sort of writing is most likely to expand your sensitivity to other people´s lives?
• Online connections allow two-way interactions enabling connections with different people around the world and learning about
other people´s lives.
• Empathy thrives best in relationships that have depth, and when we can immerse ourselves in other people´s unique view of the
world rather than a prefabricated online profile. Social networks may bring us into contact with global communities we feel part of
but in and of themselves these networks are not usually designed to facilitate making the imaginative leap into other mids. People
tend to behave in a deceptive and self-aggrandising way and pretend to be thinner, more popular, and more successful than we
really are. Possibility of anonymity and invisibility creates an ´online disinhibition effect´ where people feel licenced to engage in
antisocial behaviour like cruel and rude comments. Most fundamental problem is that e-personality can drift towards narcissism
which then comes to infect our offline personality too.
• The Arab spring and Occupy Movement revealed that digital technology can help to channel and spread powerful emotions such
as empathy and anger. Social media was a superb tool for the short-term objective of mobilising people to take part in public
protests, and to communicate what was happening around the world, but it was less good at providing other essential ingredients
of long-term social movement success.
• In some cases expanding our empathic abilities may be difficult, or even impossible, to explore some people´s lives through
approaches such as direct experience or conversation. In such cases Internet and armchair empathy can offer the possibilities to
create empathy.

15. 6. INSPIRE A REVOLUTION
• Empathists of the World unite!
• We are social animals, joy and meaning in life grow from being immersed in something larger than ourselves.
Acting together to create change.
• Could we be developing a global empathic consiousness that embraces not only all human beings, but also
animals and plant life, and even Gaia herself?
• Empathy is much more than a feel-good emotion that is limited to the realm of individual experience: it can
also be a collective force with the power to change society.
• There are now three promising realms: the teaching of empathy skills to schoolchildren, resolving and
mediating conflict situations and generating empathy for future generations to help tackle climate change.
Empathy can be learned and nurtured throughout our lives.
• There are growing number of peace-building and mediation projects that explicitly use empathy to help
resolve conflict situations, and that are scaling it up into a powerful collective force.
• Many climate change activists, environmental organisations and policy makers are starting to realise that
expanding empathy accross space and through time can ratchet up our moral concerns to new levels and
spur us to take concrete actions. They understand that we must become experts at imagining ourselves into
the lives and thoughts of the current and future victims of global warming.

16. THE FUTURE OF EMPATHY
• The future of empathy lies not just in the choices we make as individuals to transform our
own lives. To fulfil the revolutional potential as a force for social change, we must generate a
deep cultural shift so that looking at the world through other people´s eyes becomes as
common as looking both ways when we cross the road.
• Here are three ideas that can help ignite our collective imaginations and launch us into a
new empathic era: empathy conversations, empathy library and empathy museum of
experimental adventure space where you can explore how to view life from the perspective
of other people.
• Please share books, films, apps and articles that you have found to spark empathic thinking
and action at www.empathylibrary.com
• Do also read the whole book to be more inspired about Empathy, there are lots of examples
and stories not covered by this extraction. Full details of the book: Roman Krznaric: Empathy,
why it matters, and how to get it. 2015. The Random House Group company, UK.