[Music] [Applause] [Music] without any further ado i'm super happy to to introduce my guest helen reese and helen is the chief science and chairman of empathetics she's the associate clinical professor of psychiatry of harvard medical school she's the director of empathy and relational science at mass general hospital and the author of the book the empty effect helen i'm so glad you're here thank you for having me yes i'm super happy for you to be here so um tell me a little bit about why did you write this book the empathy effect and and what's it
about so um the empathy effect really is uh emerged as uh the empathy research that my team and i have been doing for about 15 years and as we've developed more and more uh content and also knowledge about how empathy works we are bombarded with questions not just from health care which our empathy training you know research is focused on but from parenting organizations educational organizations um business organizations leadership and even politics so as these inquiries kept coming in and also as i was being interviewed for many other books i realized that there is uh
an application for empathy to all these domains and that it would really serve the um you know the audience outside of healthcare well to understand how empathy works better and how it really applies in these in these different domains what they have in common and how they're different great yeah so um before we get too much into this work maybe it'd be helpful for us to define some terms we talk about empathy and empathetic and empathic we talk about empathetic concern or empathic concern or you know can you empathy accuracy can you talk a little
bit about terms and how you use them sure so um just simply the difference between empathetic and empathic is empathetic is more of a lay term um that most people use in normal parlance and empathic is more of a neuroscience and research term which i tend to use because that's the world i live in um so empathic capacity really gets at the fact that empathy is not one thing like when people say oh she has a lot of empathy um does it mean she perceives really well other people's feelings or that she's able to process
them or that she's able to respond in a certain way that really feels connected because we've been able to through neuroscience imaging studies understand that there are different pathways so there's an input where we need skills and observational tools and emotional connection to actually perceive what other people are feeling um and for some people it just stops there they can perceive well but they actually don't know what to say or they don't know how to respond so there are processing um mechanisms that enable people to become more accurate at identifying what other people's feelings intentions
motivations and desires are so the empathic capacity is the whole thing from perception processing to response empathic accuracy is when you really um have understood another person's emotions correctly and the only way we really know is if we um you know we feel like we've got it but then we have the courage to say is is that accurate is that what i'm feeling and when the response is yes you get me then we can be sure that we have empathic accuracy and um the other term you were asking about was empathic concern so the way
the brain works is that we perceive and when most of us when we see someone in pain or suffering we experience some discomfort ourselves because other people's feelings actually do get mapped on our own brains and pain centers and that leads to a feeling of concern and humans are made to get this feeling to motivate them to do something to help but it really is just a motivator and when we actually do it then it's called compassion so there's an action uh uh is is am i hearing you say is the difference between being empathic
and compassionate is the action yes so when you say someone is compassionate because you've observed something like you wouldn't look at a statue and say they have compassion like either the person has shown a look made a gesture helped somebody donated money um there's there's something that they have exhibited somehow so compassion is the outward manifestation of being moved by somebody else's plight or suffering so i'm feeling empathic with our audience i think i'm hearing people say there's like someone typing on a keyboard or something and and no one is i'm not you're not and
dana's on mute so uh i'm not sure what that noise is and so i'm being empathic about that and i'm sure that's distracting and i'm gonna invite us to tune it out [Laughter] um you know this it seems crazy for me that i'm just now sensing in our conversation a clarity around empathy that i hadn't had before where i'm getting a sense of empathy being like this loop where i take in information and i process the feeling of the experience of that information and then i and then i exhibit an energy back with that and
in it and there it's there's like this this loop and what we in my work at learning in action we measure both sides but i never thought of it this way we measure empathy accuracy in terms of how accurate am i able to take in the inputs and we measure empathy compassion it's like how much do i care and the two are separate and someone can be really good at one and not very good at the other and i didn't completely get that until you talked about there being two like different processing loops in there
well that's exactly the terminology that i use in the book the empathy loop because it really is a dynamic flow of information in and caring and compassion out but i do want to say that we don't always uh complete the loop we can't you know it's not possible to respond to every every experience of somebody else's suffering so that's why i think they're separated because you know you could you have to regulate how much you can actually respond or you might not you know never sort of get home from work right for sure for sure
so um so is your sense that that empathy is something where um like it's innate to us you know i think in the book you talk about us being endowed with empathy but is that the same thing as as the idea that we're all born with it so um empathy is an inborn trait um so as early as three-month-old babies they they respond to other baby suffering um and and as early as toddlers who were like three years old if if their mother gets hurt they try to help so this this is pretty early um
in development um little children know when somebody else is being picked on and and you know they do this with puppet um types of simulations and little kids get into a lot of distress if they see one puppet stealing a toy or hitting another puppet so these feelings of discomfort when others are being harmed are really hardwired which is not to say that there aren't people with deficits you know that i mean everything in human development is on a continuum so i'm not saying every single person in the world has a capacity for empathy because
we know there are definitely people who do not but they are um you know out on on you know on the spectrum as being more unusual and the um other the myth about empathy used to be that it was fixed you either have it or you don't and that has really been debunked because we know there are many forces that nurture empathy that cultivate it and there are other forces that um can beat it out of people so it is a dynamic capacity that really depends a lot on inner resources and external demands so um
is it fair to say that for us to be as empathetic with others as we can be it requires us to resource ourselves absolutely i mean it's a it's a funny analogy but you could never drive a car um past the amount that you have gas in the tank right at some point if you don't fill the tank you're going to run out and the car is going to stall and the same goes for an empathic capacity um people love to give because it feels good but at some point they start to get exhausted and
tired and it is so important to have what i call self-empathy so that you're taking care of yourself and sort of charging that battery so you can go out and be present in helping others yeah do you find i mean do you find that caregivers are particularly bad at that is that just my experience well yes i i mean it's it is really an interesting thing that you know helping others actually feels very good and you can imagine that if we didn't feel good about helping others our species probably would not survive i mean we
all have to be you know connected in communities um that collaborate and cooperate where there's reciprocity for life to continue so it has to feel good but some people don't know their limit to when they've exhausted their own internal resources or that they're exposed to an inordinate amount of suffering like if you think of emt uh professionals or trauma surgeons or uh therapists working with trauma survivors people that have or oncologists who are telling people every day that they can't these are massive onslaughts to a reserve of empathy because you're getting tapped into and merged
with people's bad news and suffering and we need to uh buffer against that or we lose the capacity to help at some point right right so um is it possible to be too empathic like can one of some of the questions that we got from our um audience was like how do i avoid you know emotional burnout you know secondary trauma um so what how do you and and i and i uh experience it in in my in my community how burnt out not just burnout which is a little bit different there's burn there's being
burned out because not resourcing ourselves but then there's taking that on ourselves which is a which is another level um i'm curious um your thoughts about being too empathetic and what happens when we take that on so your question about can we be too empathetic the answer is yes um you know empathy is a precious and like a cherished human capacity to help others um but as i just said if if you're um your makeup is to take on other people's feelings in a very profoundly deeply felt way you can become overwhelmed by this and
everyone's capacity for empathy is different so in my work in health professionals with health it's often that they've become so distracted from the work with patients that their empathy is suffering but there's another continuum where there's too much and they're suffering because they don't have that those boundaries between self and other that is clear like that is your suffering and i'm here to support you but i'm not here to absorb it all yeah so um there's a part of the brain involved in empathy called self other distinction and if there are any scientists on the
on the potential it's in the superior parietal lobule so they have really identified a place in the brain that brings in that cognitive piece that says you know he or she is going through a horrible loss and i am really moved by this but i need to stay in my role as helper because if we are a coach a nurse a physician a counselor a therapist people are coming to us not to kind of dissolve in tears with them and and be you know just as upset as they are they're coming to us they're looking
for a rock and a foundation to make sense of the trauma and to process their own sorrow that doesn't mean that shedding a tear or being moved is a bad thing i i think that feeling connected on that level like that person really understands but we do need that boundary between our role as a professional helper and not being you know that person's sister cousin or best friend because they're going to get that emotional contagion there which might feel good from a friend but they're coming to a therapist a coach another helper to also make
sense of it right and so so what's your best and i don't have the word recommendation for for those of us in the kind of relational professions that have a little bit more permeability in that that lobe where we're taking on too much of our clients work well realizing that all of us in helping professions also need support so going at this as a lone ranger is a is a risk so there can be professional support groups where the identity of any of the people that coaches or therapists or anyone are taking care of remain
anonymous but where the feeling of what it is to work with a person who's been very traumatized or is going through a very difficult time where that emotional burden and labor is processed with either peers or a person's own coach or therapist so the idea that we're just helpers but that we don't need help ourselves is is really problematic your supervision peer support individual whether you want to call it therapy counseling support if you're in a profession where you're constantly exposed to suffering or trauma that is essential in the old days there used to be
something called valent groups that michael balanch who was a primary care physician kind of leader he recognized that primary care physicians deal with so much unexpected pain bad diagnosis you know all kinds of social determinants of health overwhelming problems and back in the 60s he recommended that at least one hour a week that physicians get together just to process the emotional burden of all of these problems and it's coming back now as something that we need to build into our system because the secondary trauma thing is real there's only so much you can take and
responsibility to boot without sharing a difficult story or hearing another colleague like that's the place to cry that's the place to say you know my favorite patient i just had to tell them that you know that they have pancreatic cancer it's killing me so that's the kind of the support piece the other is self-care and self empathy and what kristen neff calls self-compassion which means it's beautiful her work recommends meditation um self-kindness and the third is shared humanity which is means that we're all going to make mistakes and we're all just human and when we
make them we need to be as caring and considerate of ourselves as we would be to our best friend yeah yeah so empathy starts with our self i feel you know i just recently finished reading kristin neff's book so i highly recommend it it's a book on self compassion so i think she probably has lots of books but i just rec um read her book on self compassion and i had no idea she she has an autistic son i have an autistic son uh and uh uh she's got uh amazing stories about um her work
with her son and her work around self-compassion so strongly recommend it so let's um go to our audience so i see a question and i'm going to go to dana in just a moment oh hi gail gail asks what do you recommend for leaders that feel empathy will undermine their expectation of others when there are performance issues that is a great question it is because it's very natural to think that empathy and accountability are on opposite ends of the spectrum i actually think that they're very linked so um i call it misguided empathy if you
let workers get away with things that they shouldn't because you feel sorry for them um like oh don't worry about it you know well the client will understand don't worry if so you know we have to uphold you know the integrity of our businesses and what people expect but we can also be um empathetic and curious about why did things go wrong why was that deadline missed and instead i think the key here is to not judge the person before we understand what happened yeah so it's really maintaining a stance of curiosity before we go
to judgment wow so in many i have so many examples of where somebody wasn't getting something done and the team was getting really frustrated and angry that one member wasn't you know pulling his weight and um it really took some conversations to find out like what is really going on here um and when people don't feel like they can say i've got this personal issue or you know i don't want to burden the team with my problems they say nothing and then everyone just thinks they don't care so starting with curiosity yeah i so appreciate
that because it's like if someone's not before it seems like the very first thing we can do as leaders is be curious as to why not which is like which is a form of empathy i feel and when someone's not meeting deadlines or they're you know missing work or coming in late and we have no idea what that's about right and if we assume right away like negative things like they're lazy they don't care they they have a poor work ethic that may all be true but wouldn't it be better to start with i've noticed
that coming on time is is seems to be a challenge you know help me understand what's going on if you start with empathy you know you might get a story of some vulnerability that they didn't want to say you know and if if you start there and you you get you know a snarky answer or defensiveness that doesn't really feel like you know it is about vulnerability but maybe they're out looking for a new job that's an important conversation too yeah for sure right and if it's not a good fit you know having that empathic
conversation might help the employer know like it's time to like look for a replacement and also to say you know it's not always a good fit and you know but why don't we talk about what would be a better fit instead of getting into a tug of war yeah for sure uh and the other thing that comes up from regale is is that there's some potential like self other off off balancedness for people who have a hard time both being empathetic and accountable holding people accountable anyway so dana what is going on with um in
our audience besides that crazy noise which is distracting i get it i hear it too so yeah um so we have a great question from tim brody um he asked if everyone is empathetic is there really such a thing as empaths or is that a description that fits everyone um an empath as i understand it is someone who is exquisitely sensitive to the feelings of others someone who will walk down the street and see a homeless person and almost like start crying because they can imagine the horror of living on the street so acutely that
they get dysregulated not everybody is an empath uh most people have empathy and just like intelligence there's like a distribution curve we have people that are super intelligent we have people who are lower on intelligence but it doesn't mean that people don't have any if they're just lower on the spectrum and the same is true for empathy yeah so as as an empath tim i i can tell you that if being empathic and being an impact are not the same thing um if i'm not um if i don't have a good container uh uh around
myself and i be i began working with a shaman to improve my container ship if i don't have a good container i will literally feel the feeling like feel the sensations other people feel um so feel it feel in my body what they're feeling and so yeah if if if you identify in our audience of someone as an empath and in other words like you you can physically feel um the experience of someone else than um then um working on ways and there's a woman who's written a book i can't remember her name it's specifically
for empaths um but it's around developing your ability to around container ship yeah yeah thank you okay so um so what are roadblocks to empathy if if empathy is a good thing why aren't we all empathetic or empathic well um there are many roadblocks to empathy and you know i think we i hear about this on the news almost every single day when there is conscious or unconscious bias toward other groups um the judgment and the sense that not everybody is worth our caring and concern is a real roadblock to empathy and if we have
prejudice against others that we don't really get to know people as individuals but we've decided that certain groups deserve our empathy and others don't um that is a cognitive choice to block your empathy the antidote to that is to get to know people who are different from us um there are um programs like dinners across difference is a program you might have heard of where people intentionally have dinner with people who are from different backgrounds different countries different races different sexual orientations and the point is just to get to know each other as people and
it's a profoundly important step and also exposing our children to people who are not like them is is a really important part of a broad education other road rocks to empathy are things that put us into fight-or-flight mode because then we are focused on our own survival and not the survival of others so when we feel criticized so this is why you know really critical feedback from a boss is not very helpful to get people to change because they go into fight or flight and they probably can't even hear anything positive they just feel like
they've been caught out as being inadequate and that puts people into a very closed down mindset so but you know like even in in healthcare if a patient comes in and criticizes a doctor or nurse about like you know this didn't work i felt worse um that can initially block empathy because the healthcare worker is taking this personally as opposed to broadening the perspective and saying and realizing the patient's upset about the medicine not working they're not really it's not really an attack on us um so when we experience things as attacks on us that
are really about something else our empathy is blocked and in healthcare you know i've observed a lot of interactions and when doctors and nurses get defensive about well you know maybe you didn't take it right and maybe you know you didn't follow the direct like again instead of showing curiosity let me understand better what exactly happened because then you might find out you know that the directions you gave were misunderstood or that you were unclear and then you have a chance to clear something up but if you go right into defense mode you've alienated your
empathy and the person feels judged when we get criticized when we feel put down when we feel misunderstood and when people are yelling at us or even rolling their eyes or you know giving us a bad look sometimes our empathy just goes out the window because whose pain are we focused on our own yeah i mean it is it is um an incredibly um simple but extremely difficult idea when somebody is upset with us to say want to learn more about what you're feeling instead of like i didn't do that you know and the secret
is when you are open to learning a little more even though it might feel threatening you're probably going to help that person's upsetness diminish whereas if you come in with defense it's going to keep escalating yeah right okay so i'm sorry go ahead no i'm just going it's very hard to learn to do this but that's why empathy training takes time right it's not like oh just do this and you'll be more empathetic it's like we have to practice these things and then we recognize oh i did i did that again and instead of being
full of self-criticism and judgment just say i'm still on a learning curve oh yeah giving yourself some grace exactly yeah given us the grace that we would want we would give to any friend yeah exactly yeah yeah so um tell us about teaching people to be empathetic obviously you're here because it can be trained right so tell us about um how it can be trained how you know it can be trained um a little bit about your experience there so um i mean whether it could be taught was really the question behind a lot of
our research at mass general hospital so understanding how the brain works was really unlocking the secret to how to train and teach empathy so um a lot of it is learning how to read emotions accurately how to um first of all start with enough self-awareness that we know kind of where we are emotionally before we engage with a a patient a friend a spouse a partner so it really does begin with some self-awareness like i'm in a good place i think this is like a good time to open the door and have this conversation as
opposed to being frantic and late and like instead of getting settled or like the way you started this pot in our allison was to say what is our attention today i think that's a beautiful example of like instead of just hopping right in here and starting to talk it's like what are we doing here together what are we trying to accomplish together so starting with what i call a mindful approach and some people call a beginner's mind is like the best way to start any interaction and then our training focuses a lot on picking up
emotional cues that are coming through facial expression posture tone of voice by naming people's emotions what we think is going on that's actually becoming intentional like she seems really concerned like if i make that mental note or she seems really anxious then i'm not going to butt in and start offering a bunch of advice i'm going to realize i need to hear this person out because they've got to get from this level of emotional upset a little down before we can actually discuss going on so it's picking up emotional cues it's um understanding how people
are affecting us internally or what i would call physiologically so um you know when we're sitting with people we we have a feeling of whether things are going well like that feeling of being in sync uh we we know it but most of the time when we're in sync we're not thinking hey we're really in sync but i mean people are feeling pretty good about you know the conversation but internally we get signals when we're not in sync like someone gives us a look or doesn't quite like right now you're nodding like you get me
right i feel like we're in sync but if all of a sudden you're like you know making some kind of thing so we can either choose to ignore that signal and just keep talking or we can say do you feel like you got what i meant right there or did something not quite land well so being just sort of more moment by moment attuned now with coaches who do a lot of phone um coaching and is would that be the case and virtual uh a lot of probably and in person as well but also via
video and phone so i just believe that as many challenge channels that we can open to really take in what p you know all these signals that people are giving the more empathic accuracy we're gonna have um but i also know that um experienced coaches get very good at picking up tones of voice silences um like little ways that people disconnect it's a little bit harder if it's on the phone but um on the phone you you are way more tuned in to um tone of voice and um that that is actually one of the
most powerful conveyors of emotion is is tone of voice but if people are halting and there's a big silence after you've said something it's probably a good idea to say hmm help me interpret that silence just now yeah like it not like that that was a communication just because it wasn't full of words doesn't mean it wasn't the communication mm-hmm you know the other thing that's coming up for me and for some reason i'm flashing back to a meeting i had with someone yesterday it's a project we're working on there are two of us and
um a gentleman this is via video he was he looked to me to be physically distressed his words weren't conveying it but physically he looked really distressed and it was one of those situations where it's the lesson i'm i'm coming to is like if i were to kind of empathetically accurately or empathically accurately from my head say you know you seem kind of upset today i i knowing him i think he would have felt critical and so it just is it's just reminding me that i can't do empathy from my head i've got to do
it from my heart which is like how are you feeling like how are you buddy i think your point just now is a really important one because that that that choice between naming an emotion and knowing it might feel like the person feels criticized um where other people might feel like oh she really gets me like if if you said you just seem really distressed today people sometimes they start crying like i am but when you know the person and you are you've got more information about you know any vulnerability about having emotions named then
of course you only name that to yourself yeah and it might say something more general like this sounds like this is really hard stuff you know instead of saying you look really upset but what you everyone needs to do is say to yourself he looks really distressed he looks really upset because that will shape what comes out of your mouth yeah and i'm just literally i'm just now realizing that a question i might have asked is like how are you doing energetically because even emotionally is a sensitive place to go um i like that yeah
how are you doing because that's something he could hear yes some people hear the word emotion and they hear it's weak it's wrong it's inappropriate you know i mean emotions really are are what makes relationships work it's picking up on you know connecting settling um inspiring uh appreciating these are all it's an emotional dance you know um but the word is loaded and um it's really great to find words that are uh more neutral yeah yeah yeah yeah so i'm seeing a couple of questions in the question box heidi is asking can you briefly describe
secondary trauma and how coaches might experience it so i have an idea but what do you think helen um i'm really curious about your idea and uh i so secondary trauma as i understand it is when a helper starts getting a lot of emotion contagion where the traumatized either victim or patient or accident victim whatever it is where their experience um starts to map very strongly on the on the helper or the caregiver so that the suffering starts to um dysregulate the helper to the extent where they start to suffer either physically or emotionally or
with depression or anxiety to the point where they are now traumatized themselves that's how i understand it yeah i went to a um a seven-day silent retreat at spirit rock i don't know maybe a month ago and there was a um there was a wee bit of talking one time during the week where some of us got together and had a chance to process with one of the teachers our experience and there was a therapist there who um cried all week long and the sense i got was that was that she was suffering from the
secondary trauma of her her patients she that she uh wasn't able to to to create a sufficient container for herself or sufficient boundary between her she and herself um and it was she was really traumatized um so it can't it well i would say the secondary trauma um occurs when we're not able to sufficiently uh self-contained separate and some might say some might say that that one of the reasons we might experience secondary trauma is that there's something for it to hook on that there's can be something within us that is not maybe sufficiently processed
that's why it's so important for us as relational you know in relational professions to do our own work so that there isn't any you know this unprocessed trauma to hook onto well you're what you're addressing right now is the fact that we have the most empathy for people who are like us and for people who have suffered like us for people who share a common goal like those are the top three that we have our most natural born empathy and i think you're absolutely right that if other people's trauma is landing on top of our
own the reactivation of unprocessed and unhealed wounds can really feel overwhelming and um that's why self-awareness going into these professions and understanding our own vulnerabilities is is critically important the other question of course is what do you do about it so this person went on on a retreat and sounds like had a deeply processing experience that hopefully helped heal heal the person um we also have to be mindful of the caseloads that we take on um you know there are there are people who are easy to help and there are people who are more challenging
to help because of the tactics they use the things they pull out in us and it is a professional duty to examine their own caseload um and really ask yourself do i have the resources to take on another person with with this issue that activates me or with this degree of trauma when i have three other people or two other people that are actively working on this so this is a professional duty it's it's not like oh i should just take on everybody because that's what i'm here for and how can i turn a person
away if if we get overloaded by taking on too many difficult cases we're not good to anybody and that is going to lead to a burnout situation that i have actually seen people consider leaving their professions because they get to such a depleted state so we have to think long term about is this really helpful to take on something that i know is going to put me over the edge yeah you know i i just um we'll put this out there into the universe everyone listening everyone who does what we do for us to look
at the new decade ahead to look at 2020 and uh we tend to say yes to things and believe that because i can i should many of us do and we we doing what we do have to restore reserve re resource ourselves and sometimes that means saying no and saying no is a bigger yes to something more not just for us but for the work that we can do so um yeah i just felt like i wanted to say that um saying no can lead just to a bigger more important yes um yeah so um
we've got two questions and i i feel like though i want to get to um well let me i was going to say getting to the e-m-p-a-t-h-y or or i've let me turn it back to you helen this is an audience who wants to know oh my gosh like i want to help my clients be more empathetic um how do i do that and i feel like you've covered some of that if there's anything else more you want to say about that as to how coaches might do that with their clients and the other thing
that key questions that we're getting and is very true is like what if someone doesn't want to be empathetic or what if they're they're coming to coaching because they're having their colleagues are experiencing relational challenges with them lack of empathy is part of it but they're not showing up saying i want to be more empathetic so can you convince someone to be more empathetic and then assuming that someone wants to be more empathetic is there anything more you want to say about how you can help someone be more empathetic okay so i'm i'm trying to
understand this question as maybe being a um not infrequent request that someone's looking to coaching because they've gotten feedback that they don't have empathy yeah they don't have empathy and maybe they don't care that they don't have empathy well um i think it begins with tapping into self-empathy and exploring was there a time when you needed someone to understand you or you felt like they really blew it and try i mean the best way to empathy is to get somebody to feel in their own bones in their own heart what it felt like to be
misunderstood or judged or not cared about um so i think a lot of it begins way earlier before we try to tell people how they should be to other people is that we have to understand maybe how they built up the defenses against their own emotions that makes them not want to go there [Music] i feel so important and and i can anticipate that some of our audience is might be asking themselves like what is that therapy or is that coaching um because that's that's a question coaches ask themselves pretty frequently and you all have
to do what you're comfortable with and my personal take and i want to hear what you have to say helen is that as long as there's something that's showing up now in the present that isn't working or healthy for the client then then understanding the root of it uh can can be maybe the best way to to to the extent that they are willing to share at the level they're willing to share maybe the only way the change occurs is understanding where it started well i i do i mean i i do understand the distinction
between coaching and therapy and i recognize that sometimes there's a little bit of overlap and if it feels like it's going way too much into therapy it's it's the coach's duty to understand what's coaching and what needs deeper work um so i'm not suggesting that you start therapizing what i'm suggesting is as a starting point you know are we in agreement that one of the reasons you're seeking coaching or you've been recommended to coaching is that you don't seem to display empathy like are we agreeing that that's the problem and um is this something you're
interested in changing and if they say no then then it's like well is there going to be will there be consequences with your keeping this job if that doesn't change so then they need to say well okay i don't want to but i guess i have to and then i i consider some questions just probing questions was there a time when you yourself didn't experience empathy or when you know you were hurting and somebody seemed not to care like a probing question would just be like is that accessible to that person do they can they
immediately come up with an example and say yeah you know that happened to me when x y and z and then if if they quickly can say you know if that's how i'm coming across like i really want to work on this there's a very like immediate disconnect with how they want to be and as soon as they realize how lousy that feels that's coachable yeah and i so appreciate how you put it so you didn't go like back to childhood and like how did this get to these this way but it'd say like what's
it like for you not to feel understood right so you're still in the present they might relate back to something in their past but if quickly they can get to like oh i get it that is a horrible feeling i i do want to work on this but if you get two other reactions one is um you hear a horribly painful story the person starts really emoting and getting dissolving in tears or getting super dysregulated that's probably not that coachable that person probably does have to work something out or the opposite if you go like
no i've never had anybody do anything like that i don't even know what you're talking about that degree of defensiveness is not super coachable either that's super helpful that's super helpful well i can't believe it but we're at the end of our time together how did that happen that went fast like it did didn't it i loved it [Applause]
