How to Talk with Anyone about Anything, page 7
Joe: Well, that makes a lot of sense, Charlie. It makes sense that you worry about illegal immigration being a strain on our economy, especially when you see that our country can’t even support its own citizens properly. And it would make sense that the fear around finances would remind you of growing up with financial insecurity. And it makes sense that you would see your candidate as strong to work with Congress to address this crisis given his vocal views on the subject. Did I get that right?
Charlie: Yeah, that really hits the bullseye! And I never connected that fear of financial insecurity with my past.
Next, Joe moves into the third step: empathy.
Joe: I can imagine, then, that you feel concerned and fearful for the country.
(Joe next checks on the accuracy of his empathy statement.)
Joe: Did I get those feelings right?
Charlie: Well, not exactly.
Joe: Will you send it again, or send what I missed?
Charlie: Concerned and fearful for the country, yes. But I’m also concerned for what illegal immigration means for me and for my kids’ future.
Joe: So you feel concerned and fearful not only for the country but for what that means for you personally and for your kids’ future. Did I get those feelings correct?
Charlie: That’s right.
When all three steps are completed, the speaker thanks the dialogue partner for listening and the listener thanks the partner for sharing, followed by a handshake, high five, or, if comfortable, a brief hug. Then they switch roles. The new speaker begins by expressing an appreciation for the new listener’s point of view and then moves into stating their view or experience of the subject matter. The new speaker, however, cannot criticize or negate the reality just stated by the dialogue partner, but rather focuses on their own perspective. To do otherwise would immediately dispel the safety created in the Space-Between.
SC Dialogue Step 3: Empathy
After the speaker confirms the accuracy of the validation statement, dialogue partners can use the following sentence stem to express empathy: “Given what you shared, I imagine you might feel ______________ [use emotional terms: hurt, frustrated, disappointed, lonely, relieved, relaxed, and so on].”
Then, check on the accuracy of the empathy: “Did I get that?” or “Did I get your feeling?”
Invite additional feelings: “Are there other feelings?
It’s possible Joe might see things differently. In his view, maybe illegal immigration is a result of the US government’s involvement in tearing up countries, that warrants a refugee’s need to flee, and that the answer to illegal immigration is to lessen America’s military involvement in other countries. And maybe Joe’s perception of overinvolvement reminds him of his authoritarian household with an abusive dad.
The point of dialogue is not to convince the other of one’s truth; it is to share where one stands, respectfully. The fear of financial insecurity can stand side by side with the fear of authoritarian rule. In the process, Joe and Charlie might come to realize that while they have different views of how to handle the immigration issue, they have common ground. They agree there is a problem or a crisis that needs to be addressed. They might disagree on the “how” but agree on the “what.” That is the stepping stone to cocreation and collaboration. And they simultaneously begin to strip away the personal histories that fuel their hostile perceptions.
THE CHALLENGES AND BENEFITS OF EMPATHIZING
Expressing empathy elicits the same internal shift as the rest of the SC Dialogue: a movement through the dialogue toward restoring connection and joyful aliveness. Empathy helps distinguish between the deed and the doer, between what our partner says or does and the person our partner inherently is.
Yet empathy can be challenging. To imagine, much less to experience, when one or both dialogue partners are feeling hurt and angry requires shifting out of one’s own experience into the experience of another. Although speakers may have difficulty expressing or confirming feelings, most of the challenges with empathizing revolve around the listener.
For example, the listener may:
be internally judging the speaker’s feelings,
be reacting to feelings of guilt for having caused the dialogue partner’s painful emotions,
feel uncomfortable expressing strong emotions due to cultural and socialization experiences, or
be afraid of getting absorbed into the dialogue partner’s hurt and misery, especially if they have had similarly painful experiences.
But again, starting with positive messages, gentle guidance, practice, and time, those engaged in an SC Dialogue can overcome these challenges. Additionally, the speaker and listener may need to carefully monitor their breathing and thoughts to feel safe and secure in the conversation and, if necessary, take a temporary pause to re-ground themselves.
The Benefits of SC Dialogue
The goals of an SC Dialogue are both uncommon and profound. Every step—mirroring, validation, and empathy—offers both speaker and listener a golden opportunity for something intangible, something that cannot be bought with money: differentiation and connection.
While common ground can often be discovered in SC Dialogue, it is not the goal of a Dialogue. The goal is to fully understand two perspectives side by side.
When we accept the limited nature of our own perceptions and move into curiosity, a whole world opens up to us, bursting with opportunities. Successful conversations are characterized by safety, curiosity, and respect.
SC Dialogue restores connection if the rules are followed and the technique is practiced. It can be the engine of transformation. Just as no one would expect to be a good skier without diligently exercising the muscles that are required to snowplow, no one can expect a complete change in perception and communication without dutiful practice of the skills of SC Dialogue.
Once learned, SC Dialogue can be used in all contexts for many purposes: establishing more pleasant interactions, exchanging information, negotiating tricky compromises, airing grievances, and so on.
The Resistance to SC Dialogue
The two biggest complaints we encounter in teaching SC Dialogue methods are:
No one talks this way!
It takes so long!
NO ONE TALKS THIS WAY!
Often, people feel our method has a stilted structure. It’s likely to strike some people as an unnatural, even stultifying way to converse. And they may rebel against it. And that is okay. It is a strict structure, for a purpose.
To become proficient in accounting, coding, basketball, speaking a new language, or playing the violin requires consistent practice to achieve proficiency. All skills require learning and practicing certain behaviors until they are integrated.
As you practice SC Dialogue, you will become less resistant. With practice, SC Dialogue becomes less artificial and more natural. And it is also true that sometimes mirroring alone may be sufficient for effective communication that is not fraught with emotions. But if you want to move beyond communication to communion, then you need to include all three steps.
IT TAKES SO LONG!
Think of SC Dialogue as the long way that makes your journey shorter. While it may take longer to have conversations using the SC Dialogue process, all your conversations will ultimately become more efficient because small frustrations don’t quickly spiral out of control into a period of prolonged, resentful silence. Yes, it can be awkward and tedious at first. But it is also necessary, humbling, and transformational for anyone trying to overcome differences of opinion and viewpoint with customers, coworkers, friends, family, and out in the world.
CHAPTER 4
Empathy with Everyone
The expression of empathy is the most important connecting skill we humans have. It is our ability to understand and relate to the feelings and perspectives of others. But that capacity seems to be in short supply in these polarized and testy times. Too often, people with opposing views go on the attack rather than try to understand each other and find common ground to work out—or work around—their differences.
This is a problem because, historically, our success as a race—and our happiness and fulfillment as individuals—depends so much on connecting, communicating, interacting, working, and coexisting with one another.
The skill of empathy helps generate safety and connection in all of our relationships and interactions. While our rational skills help us understand what others say, our empathy allows us to discern the feelings and meaning behind the words. This is how we mentally read the spaces of silence that words cannot reach.
The process of empathy begins and ends with curiosity and wonder. It communicates to the listener a respect for their feelings and perspective even if you don’t have the same feelings or point of view. Successful leaders—especially those in elected government positions but also in businesses and organizations—have to be able to understand the viewpoints of opponents if they hope to win their cooperation and support through compromise and collaboration.
A 2021 study of 889 employees by Catalyst found that the positive effects of empathy include innovation, engagement, retention, inclusivity, and work-life balance: “We found that empathy is an important driver of employee outcomes such as innovation, engagement, and inclusion—especially in times of crisis. In short, empathy is a must-have in today’s workplace.”1
The employees interviewed in the study were found to be looking for companies where leaders and managers have empathy for the challenges faced by their employees and respond with more flexible and remote-work options and greater racial equity and inclusion “in a world where rapid change is the norm and a technological revolution is fundamentally transforming work.”2
As a couple, we learned early on that it was a mistake to merely assume we knew what each of us needed from the other. We needed to take the time to be curious, ask questions, listen, and understand what we wanted from each other. The same holds true in all relationships, which is why empathy is so important.
We noted earlier that we created the SC Dialogue process initially as a response to a fight we were having early in our relationship. At that time, we primarily focused on helping couples listen more productively. We realized the importance of empathy in our work with a couple we will call Dawn and Henry, who were caught in their own seemingly intractable impasse.
Dawn’s complaint was that Henry always replaced her perspective with his own, and then he added insult to injury by saying she did not make sense. When they came to us, their primary issue of contention was where to send their son to college. Dawn and Henry could not agree on which college they thought their son should attend, and they paid little heed to where the son himself wanted to go.
They’d reached a point where they knew they needed help in making a decision, so they came to us, which was good, but the decision had to be made in two weeks, which didn’t give us much time to resolve their long-standing issues in communicating as a couple.
When introduced to the SC Dialogue process, they readily became engaged. In fact, they were among the first couples with whom we experimented with dialogue. Both were intelligent and equally articulate, but they had difficulty listening to the end of a sentence, so they had to be highly regulated by us facilitating a dialogue.
After several tries, Henry, who spoke with authority, managed to mirror Dawn with enough accuracy that she felt heard. She was moved to tears, saying, “That is the first time in my life I have ever felt heard,” which astonished Henry.
Then she mirrored Henry as he laid out his authoritative analysis of the positive features of his university of choice. Also after several tries, Dawn finally mirrored him accurately enough that he accepted it, but he was not as emotionally moved by being heard.
For Henry, being heard was not his concern. His concern was being “right.” So in the next round, when Dawn validated his perspective by saying, “I can see how you see it that way,” he saw her statement as agreeing. We had to do a little more work for him to understand that Dawn “seeing” how Henry felt was different from “agreeing” with how he felt. This helped Henry validate Dawn in the next round, which he did by saying, as Dawn had said, “I get it, and I can see how it looks like that to you.” Before we could intervene to redirect him from further responding, though, he said, “But you know that’s crazy.” Although Dawn flinched, we directed her to mirror him rather than react, since they knew how to do that.
As we progressed with Dawn and Henry from validation to empathy, we had a deep insight. We saw empathy as a sort of acknowledgment that other people had feelings about what they were talking about.
Henry, following our instructions, said to Dawn: “I can imagine that when I don’t see things your way and call you crazy, that makes you feel insulted and probably angry, and maybe sad and alone.” We coached Henry to look at Dawn in the eyes and ask, “Are those your feelings?” This led Dawn to a very deep emotional response.
As Henry was naming her possible feelings, Dawn’s body began to tremble, and she broke down, sobbing. When she regained her composure, Henry had moved closer. He took her hand, and she said, “I don’t know what happened. It was like darkness was replaced with light.” Then, looking Henry in the eyes, Dawn said, “I felt visible for the first time in my life.” Spoiler alert: once they broke their impasse and connected, Henry and Dawn decided to let their son decide where he went to college, which was the right decision.
With that session, we became more interested in using empathy in our therapy process with couples. We engaged in a lot of research and experimentation with other couples, which convinced us to make it a mandatory part of the SC Dialogue process.
It clearly is the most powerful connecting interaction of all the steps of the process. Later, as we moved our work into the public realm with organizations such as schools and corporations, we discovered that when empathic statements are made by bosses to employees, or by employees to their boss or colleagues, the environment becomes refreshingly safe, and productivity goes up.
We have found over many years that empathy is appropriate everywhere and under all circumstances. It is fundamentally human.
Empathy vs. Sympathy
Empathy and sympathy are not the same, though they are sometimes confused. There are four subtle but important distinctions between the two terms. The distinctions between these concepts are particularly relevant to our ability to communicate productively and to build and sustain healthy relationships.
1. DIFFERENT IMPACTS
Sympathy involves feelings of pity or sorrow. In sympathy, you share the feelings of others. For example, you feel sad when a friend is sad. But with empathy, you understand the other person’s sadness even though you may not feel sad yourself.
Empathy is often expressed as “walking in the shoes” of another person. It is more about understanding and seeking to understand the other person’s feelings and perspectives. We suspend our own feeling state to imagine the feeling state of another. But we are only imagining. We never fully know the other. In this way, empathy involves a simultaneous knowing and not knowing.
Expressing sympathy can be tricky, especially outside of close personal relationships, because it is often based on assumptions. For instance, when Caroline learned that a coworker, Cheryl, was demoted from a managerial position to a lower-level job, she asked her to lunch and told her she was sorry about the change.
“Oh, don’t say that. I’m very happy,” Cheryl said. “In fact, I asked to leave management because my daughter only has one more year of high school before leaving for college and I want to spend more time with her while I can.”
In this case, Caroline’s sympathetic response was off target, even though it was well-intentioned. If she had been more empathic, Caroline might have asked Cheryl how she felt about the job change before assuming that sympathy was the correct response. Understanding that sympathy and empathy have different impacts leads us to the second important difference between the two.
2. THE ROLE OF COGNITION
In sympathy, we often get caught up in the emotions of others with little thinking (prefrontal cortex processing) on our part. Our sympathetic reactions are often unconscious and unmediated by cognition. Our affect spontaneously fuses into or with the other’s affect. We don’t plan our sympathetic response. It comes forth on its own when we are in the presence of the other person’s intense feelings.
Empathy, however, is an act of volition. In empathy, we choose to try to understand, and we use cognition to regulate our affect. We feel with someone but refuse to fuse with or presume to fully feel the feelings of the other person. Empathy is the experience of both a connection with and a differentiation from the other.
When Caroline offered her sympathetic response to Cheryl, she expressed an immediate, automatic outpouring of feelings of concern and support. She assumed her friend needed soothing. An empathic response, on the other hand, would be more thoughtful. Caroline might have instead first asked questions, such as: “How do you feel about the job change?” “Is there anything I can do to help you make this transition?” “How does your family feel about it?”
The emotion of empathy is as strong as sympathy, but it is framed within a larger perspective that includes factors the other person might not be able to address, such as, What does this mean for my career long term, or for my retirement plans?
In sympathy, the self fuses more into the emotional state of the other in order to lend support. In empathy, cognition helps the self retain a differentiated state in order to connect with deeper feeling and greater understanding. It invites a balance of both a separate (cognitive) as well as a connected (emotional) knowing.
While checking with her coworker, Caroline might have discovered that Cheryl was relieved to have less responsibility and the freedom to spend more time with her daughter. Empathy would have helped her discover Cheryl’s feelings rather than assume she knew what her coworker was going through.
