When we break it down, empathy becomes a number of small acts and practices of empathy.
Here are a few practical and tactical practices of empathy, with special thanks to Caroline Fleck and her excellent book on Validation:
- Attend: Pay attention and listen actively, literally lean in.
- Copy: Repeat words, phrases or gestures to illustrate you understand.
- Contextualize: Understand the context in which they find themselves. External forces are powerful.
- Equalize: Let them know that anyone in their exact same shoes would do the same.
- Name feelings or proposing: A key part of tactical empathy, the act of naming feelings or guessing what someone else feels as a way of helping them feel deeply understood.
- Take Action: Occasionally, when you truly see someone else’s pain or difficulty, there is something you can do to help ease it. Do it.
- Emote: When you recognize a strong feeling in someone, vocalize it. This includes like “ugh,” “ah,” or “ooh”. Sometimes, it’s “wow,” or in texts, OMG. It is a physical and raw gut-punch reaction to the emotion they are feeling as if you feel it too.
- Disclose: Occasionally, you can disclose that you have had a similar feeling. Use this sparingly. It is actually very rare that we have an experience quite like someone else’s. The danger is that instead of empathizing, we start reliving our own experience. Especially with difficult or traumatic experiences, it’s easy to get side-tracked into your own narrative and stop empathizing altogether.
Whatever you call it and whatever you do, use these empathy skills to keep your mind on their experience and help you understand them. Try various ways to show you get them and see what works best for you.
This post is part of my Gratitude Project 2025: The Magic of Empathy — a 30-day exploration of empathy and gratitude. Visit the hub to follow along or catch up on past reflections.
If you’d like to explore the science behind gratitude, visit the Greater Good Science Center’s Gratitude Resources.
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