2024 Joyce Stein Award Celebration
HONORING THOSE WHO MAKE A POSITIVE IMPACT ON THE GROWTH AND ADVANCEMENT OF WOMEN The Joyce Stein Memorial Award is given in memory of Boisean Joyce Ann Stein, a long-time […]
A Time for Growth: The World Needs More Empathy
Empathy has many definitions, but simply put it means recognizing and sharing the emotions of another person and having a desire to help them. It involves seeing the situation from the perspective of another and sharing their emotions, including distress, anger, loneliness and fear.
Often associated with empathy, compassion, pity and sympathy are emotional reactions to the discomfort or misfortune of others. While pity and sympathy are defined as feelings for someone else’s discomfort or misfortune, having compassion for someone involves feelings of wanting to take action to help alleviate the suffering of others.
Having empathy includes understanding that there are many factors that go into decision making and cognitive thought processes. Life experiences, from childhood to dinner last night, influence the decision making choices of today. Understanding this allows a person to have empathy for individuals who sometimes make illogical or irrational decisions or react poorly to situations. Having empathy doesn’t mean you must make excuses for poor behavior, but typically there are emotions behind that behavior that are likely deserving of your empathy. And in giving that, you could be providing comfort and support – without making excuses for actions.
Everyone is born with the capability of feeling empathy. While some feel it more naturally than others we can all work to develop and grow our empathy—it can be learned. If we develop our empathy toward one another as adults, and develop it in our children, the benefit to our community would be significant.
Ways to Grow Your Empathy:
Most important? Practice modeling empathy for the children and young adults in your life. Talk to them about what empathy is and why it is important to you.
Source: Burton, Neel. “Empathy Vs Sympathy: Sympathy and empathy often lead to each other, but not always.” Psychology Today. May 22, 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201505/empathy-vs-sympathy
The Compassion Project: Let us be the ones who transform our world by allowing compassion to lead our action. Throughout the year, this column will feature the various ways to have compassion for others, for our specific organization, and for yourself.