Empathy is the essence of our era. 

We take personality assessments that rank our empathy tendencies. We attend training to recognize the biases that make us less empathetic. We deploy design thinking techniques to empathize with the user experience. These are important and necessary.

At the same time, we tend to talk about empathy as something outside of ourselves that we’re trying to find and bring inside.

Empathy is already in all of us.  Empathy is what makes us love our favorite character in a movie.  Empathy is what draws us into a book we can’t put down.  Empathy is what moves us to call a laid-off colleague, hug a crying baby, celebrate a friend’s promotion.

Actors are perhaps the best empathizers because they must seek to understand the other without judging. Actors specialize in putting themselves in others’ shoes, understanding a situation from another’s point of view even when it’s the opposite of their own views.  When it comes to the Empathy muscle, actors are professional body-builders.

You can train your Empathy muscle like an actor by asking:

1. Why does that person see the situation the way they do? How can I honor their perspective?

2. What is the other person's motivation? What do they want and why?

3. If I were in their shoes, how would I be thinking differently?

As leaders, we all get pretty good at socializing ideas, pressure-testing recommendations, doing a little nemawashi (the meeting before the meeting) to manage stakeholders.  These actions can be a bit manipulative if we just have our own agenda at play. Prepare like an actor. Get into the head of the other “characters” with these 3 questions to amp up Empathy.

P.S. Here’s an interesting read on how the various C-Suite leadership roles require the skill of Empathy: https://www.fastcompany.com/90662605/every-c-level-executive-must-also-be-a-chief-empathy-officer