Emotional awareness is the only skill that predicts leadership success.
Self-Reflection for Leaders Quietly separates strong leaders from stuck ones. Strong leaders understand something many people overlook: self-reflection for leaders is not downtime. It’s a performance skill. For some leaders, the quietest week of the year feels… strange. Meetings slow down. Decisions pause. Some people are fully offline, while others are half-working from home. For leaders accustomed to a fast pace, this lull can feel uncomfortable—or even unproductive. If you find yourself restless during this quiet time, it may be…
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Strong leadership decisions depend less on having the right answer and more on confident decision making when the stakes are high. During disruption, crisis, or uncertainty, there is always an emotional reaction. That is human. But effective leaders know how to steady themselves, control their impulses, and create just enough space to respond clearly rather than react emotionally. They reconnect with their values. They consider the impact on their team, stakeholders, and customers. Then they move forward with clarity. That…
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Acceptance is another powerful practice related to empathy. Acceptance is acknowledging the reality of a situation without judging or trying to change it. This is a powerful practice that many of us resist. When we do get there, it almost always leads to gratitude. For most people, this is the hardest part of empathy. Naturally, much of the time, we have a tendency to want things to be different from how they are right now. The world is far from…
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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: 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…
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One step beyond feeling empathy is tactical empathy, or what some people call, validation. Tactical empathy is the act of letting another person know you see them, you hear them, you understand them. To be effective, validation has to resonate with the other person as if they said it themselves. The easiest way to do this is to mirror what they said, or copy it. Hearing their own thoughts from another person’s mouth is a powerful experience. This is a…
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Empathy vs sympathy: they sound alike but they are quite different. We feel sympathy for someone and, in contrast, we feel empathy with someone, that’s the difference between empathy vs sympathy. Feeling sympathy for someone implies a certain distance. It’s more like feeling pity for someone. They are feeling something that you are not. They are struggling, and you are not. When you empathize with someone, you feel what they are feeling. So rather than distancing, it is bonding.…
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