Jargogled Impressions.

I was listening to this podcast called “The Skip” with Nikhyl Singhal where the host is interviewing few women leaders in tech and asking them questions on how they manage their work commitments with their personal life, and it struck me that I was lacking in empathy for the women in my life. That women have it tougher when it comes to managing family and their goals (professional, persona) was not new to me, but I had thought that I understood how hard it was, and I thought I understood how insane it was. I realized how wrong I was.

It’s very easy to believe that you are empathetic. For there are no hard definitions for when empathy starts. It’s this very open-ended nature of empathy that can drive a wedge between people, even with the most noble of intentions. Empathy is when you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and really try to understand the world from their vantage point. Empathy is when you can feel the pain, and the hurt, and the anger, and the desperation in someone else’s life and are able to listen and understand. Empathy is when you leave your judgements aside and just be present. Empathy is the epitome of being. It seems to be passive, and it seems to be circular, and it sometimes seems to be too inert – but much like the trees standing tall – just being, empathy is imbibing this tree-like quality and just be. Empathy is this emotional awareness of the situation playing out around you. It’s this cognitive function that our minds perform when we are able to understand others’ mental states and perspectives.

How many of us can really say we are empathetic to those around us? Of course, you can be empathetic in one situation easily, and not be in another. It comes intuitively in some situations because by design, we are able to reserve out judgements, be more patient, and be more forgiving in our expectations. But in many cases, I have observed, we consistently over-estimate how much we empathize.

Why is that? And how can we weave more empathy in all our interactions?

I guess part of why there is this mismatch in our ability to empathize and the reality is that, for many of us, who live constantly with their own interior voices, it is easy to make ourselves believe that we understand, that we have control over the theory of the mind, that with our experience in the world has given us with a unique lens to do so. It’s a narrative that we build for ourselves, and the perception we create for our sanity, driven partly by the mental models we have built around us to deal with situations. Most of the mental models we leverage in our lives are derived from incidents and events from our early, adolescent life and as we make use of them in new environments and with new people around us, there arises a natural gap in what we perceive as reality versus what is.

Empathy with your family members can go a long way towards turning those mundane moments of daily life into a rich source of life itself. When you are listening to those you love, like really listening, without turning your answer mode on, you become involved in the life of those you listen to. On a daily basis, this listening can turn into a goldmine of shared life together that makes our life so much more meaningful, turning even the most ordinary moments and memorabilia and things so much more enticing and engaging.

Empathy with the community around you, especially when you include your digital community, is so much harder, and yet, when mastered, so much more invaluable. Empathy can turn you from a meme monster and a troll to a magnanimous contributor to the great online dialogue. When we are tuning in to our social media feeds with empathy, we are really opening ourselves up for a thrilling adventure and sojourn into the minds and thinking and situation and perspective of those dramatically different from us. If mastered, this can turn all the major social media platforms into a community of supporters, into a window to understanding the world, into a portal to a magical land far, far away.

Empathy with customers is also a valuable skill to possess to master sense of product shaping and vision. When you empathize, you are not focused on solutioning, which spreads the canvas open to learning more from your customers over and above what you can build to delight them. In so many cases, your customers do not need anything other than a patient ear. Even in these cases, a patient listening can work wonders in helping you understand how your product really works, outside of the confines of your PRD documents and your compete documents.

The dimensions of feedback that you can capture isn’t something that can be easily encapsulated in a theoretical framework, for the understanding is not as objective. This understanding is a realization of the jobs that your customer is aiming to accomplish, which in many cases can be very different from your initial assumption of their core ‘job’. When you dig deeper, much as Christenson’s milkshake principle, you can unearth dimensions of ‘job’ that are missed, even with deep, data-oriented analytical research.

Reading fiction is a great way to train yourself into the art of empathy. When you are peeking into the mind of the author, and through her, into the minds of the characters in the fictional yarn, you are really seeking to understand the world they find themselves in. While relying more on the painstaking insights and learnings of these authors, fiction still provides a unique open-ended platform to bring your own understanding and perception into the story. This is when the magic happens – you start realizing how little you know about other people, how vast and impenetrably deep their world is, how fascinating it is to grab a window to this passing train of their thoughts and their feelings. Oh life becomes so rich and so full of stories that mean something when you really just stop and listen.