Why is Empathy an important component to improve our interpersonal skills?
Very often we hear people telling us, “I don’t need your sympathy.” We always pass observations such as “it is all his fault, he should not have done like that.” Behavioral specialists and coaches have done various empirical analysis and have gone on to document that people just want to be understood as they are. People want their feelings to be acknowledged and recognised, whatever they are going through, whether it is happiness, confusion , problem, sadness, shock, trauma etc. We go through all this in our day-to -day life and we relate to people in different moods and situations.
When there is electric stimulus of moods and different types of behaviors, it is natural that there could be unpleasant reactions, flaming emotions which lead to conflicting and unpleasant situations. We tend to become judgmental, pass value judgments, retract to our stereotypes and refuse to open our minds to feelings and emotions of others.
Empathy is a process where we start understanding the emotional position of the other person, what the person has undergone, and under what circumstances certain series of events have taken place.
For this, “we need to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.” Empathy is not sympathy, it is the total confidence we repose in the other person, making him feel comfortable, making his emotional quotient very positive, making him believe what emotion he is undergoing is a result of certain circumstances, and we share with him that same emotional platform.
She is the founder of The Academy for Communication and Learning and is based in Chennai.