Empathy is a fundamental component of both emotional and social intelligence, yet it’s a highly misunderstood term.
When people think of empathy, they often first think about sympathy and compassion. However, empathy is much broader in scope. Empathising with another person isn’t the same as sympathising with them. They’re two completely different capabilities.
Sympathy is about taking pity or feeling sorry for someone else, whereas empathy is the act of listening and understanding feelings to take on the other person’s perspective or viewpoint – what they see, what they feel, what they want – and working to truly try to understand their situation.
Empathy involves deep, active listening, which goes way beyond hearing and understanding the words being used. It’s a very difficult skill to master. If you have good empathy, you’re able to read between the lines of dialogue and discern the person’s motivation and focus. Subtle but reliable signals advertised on the face, in the eyes, with the posture and rhythms of speech signify what people are really thinking about when you are talking with them.
Your natural impulse will be to consistently try to bring attention and recognition back to yourself. By overcoming this, you begin to develop clear, intuitive senses that support your ability to be empathetic.
Empathy is about resisting these impulses and being able to sense and read the signals that people are sending in the course of an engagement or an interaction with you.
Let’s have a look in more detail the difference between empathy and sympathy. It’s important to be clear in your own mind about the definition of both and the difference between the two.
Empathy is about accurately reading other’s feelings. It’s about respecting other’s feelings while creating a solution where both parties gain.
Sympathy, on the other hand, is an act of reacting to emotions to try to prevent and alleviate suffering. It’s based upon pity. Sympathy is not necessarily concerned with how others are feeling. When you show sympathy, you take a position of superiority and, more often than not, you’re trying to do something that will alleviate your own concerns and satisfy your own emotions. So, sympathy is not necessarily concerned about how others are feeling, it’s more about doing something that makes you feel better.
Sympathy sets people apart, whereas empathy brings people together.
