Month Two: Empathy
In one of my favorite parenting books, 20 Teachable Virtues, the author Jeff Wyckoff, reminds us that the first virtue we must teach our children is empathy. According to Wiktionary, empathy is 1. the intellectual identification of thoughts, feelings, or state of another person 2. capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.
As we continue through the Woman's Rite of Passage series, empathy is a key component to connecting with another human being. How can we truly understand someone else's intention, point of view, or feelings, unless we can put ourselves in his/her shoes? So many of our own personal misunderstandings (ie.how someone else has wronged us, or done something to us) comes from our inability to see things from their perspective. At the end of the day, we all want to be validated, understood. Empathy becomes the gateway to this validation. The greatest obstacle with empathy is not including our own personal story into the mix. It is natural to want to share our own story in an attempt to relate. What we don't see is how this, in reality, diminshes our ability to connect. When, on the other hand, we listen, without adding our own experiences, the person is left feeling heard and both of us come away feeling connected.
Experiment this week: When you engage in conversations, try not to add your own experiences or stories. Instead simply listen with full attention and try to explain back what you have heard.
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