FOUR WAYS TO DEVELOP EMPATHY

I didn’t know when I started this newsletter a year and a half ago that empathy would emerge as the throughline that stitches together almost all of my entries. 

Yet, week after week, it became clear just how important empathy is in order for us to become effective leaders, makers and marketers. 

It also became clear that to practice empathy and bring more of it into our work, we have to go a little further than merely trying to see things from others’ perspectives. 

We have to learn to put ourselves into their shoes— through direct experience or using our moral imagination. 

It got me thinking about what we could actually do as regular practices in order to train and develop our empathy muscles. 

Here are four suggestions to get you started. 

Ask better questions

As makers and marketers, we often ask ourselves what our customers, audiences and readers actually want. A better question would be to ask, what would I, as a customer, want? This subtle shift in focus stimulates our empathy muscles in a powerful way.

In order to help us stretch our empathy muscles, Seth Godin, my marketing hero, also suggests the following question: Those who don’t like what I offer, why are they right? The point of the exercise is to develop the empathy to distinguish between a bad idea and those who simply don’t get it. Considering the experience of those who dislike what we offer helps us cross boundaries.

Cross boundaries

Even in the context of our interconnected world, we still live largely segregated lives. We interact mostly with people who look like us, share the same interests, beliefs and values. The infinite digital universe is made up of micro-communities that serve as echo chambers for our existing beliefs and worldviews. 

To develop empathy, we have to learn to escape the comfort of our micro-communities, and cross boundaries to interact with those beyond our world. It can be as simple as seeking opinions vastly different from ours or building up the courage to speak to strangers. 

But there’s no better way to practice empathy than to travel because abroad, meeting and speaking with strangers isn’t optional. It is a requirement for survival.  

Through that experience, we see the world anew. We discover new ways of thinking, seeing the world and organizing societies. We understand, perhaps for the first time, that reality is subjective. And that realization alters our map of reality to account for our newly found worldviews, while keeping our minds open to other versions of realities yet unknown to us.

Write fiction

Empathy is often defined as seeing things from others’ perspectives, but I argue that it is literally impossible to do. Instead, we use our moral imagination to put ourselves into their shoes. 

I took a creative writing class last year and it was completely eye-opening. It is a great exercise to develop our imagination and strengthen our empathy muscles. 

To harness this empathy tool, great marketers often create personas for customers. By treating each type of customers as a character in a short story, they can create narratives about each of them in order to better understand their needs and aspirations. 

Practice self-inquiry 

Despite our apparent differences, we have more in common with other people than we or society would have us believe. We share in common the most fundamental things about being human: hopes, needs, aspirations, fears, biases and fallacies. Those things are present in all of us, and merely differ in their expressions. 

The more we get to know ourselves, the easier it becomes to look beyond those

superficial differences. We learn to see them merely as variations of the same substance that binds us as humans. We gain the ability to see and hear ourselves in others’ hopes, fears and doubts— even when they don’t exactly mirror ours.

Practicing self-inquiry can take multiple forms: meditation, journaling and reflections, to name only a few.

Ultimately, stretching our empathy muscles happens when we move our practice from an intellectual to a visceral experience. I have learned so much about myself writing these newsletters. In doing so, I have gained a deeper understanding about you all. I am even becoming a better marketer. And so can you.