Browse Tag: mental wellbeing

Eight Ways to Improve Your Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings and emotions. It is essential to building good relationships, both at work and in your personal life. People who don’t exhibit empathy are viewed as cold and self-absorbed, and they often lead isolated lives. Sociopaths are famously lacking in empathy. Conversely, someone who is empathetic is perceived as warm and caring.

The research shows that empathy is partly innate and partly learned. Everyone can improve, however. Here are eight ways to strengthen your own empathy:

  1. Challenge yourself. Undertake challenging experiences which push you outside your comfort zone. Learn a new skill, for example, such as a musical instrument, hobby, or foreign language. Develop a new professional competency. Doing things like this will humble you, and humility is a key enabler of empathy.
  2. Get out of your usual environment. Travel, especially to new places and cultures. It gives you a better appreciation for others.
  3. Get feedback. Ask for feedback about your relationship skills (e.g., listening) from family, friends, and colleagues—and then check in with them periodically to see how you’re doing.
  4. Explore the heart not just the head. Read literature that explores personal relationships and emotions. This has been shown to improve the empathy of young doctors.
  5. Walk in others’ shoes. Talk to others about what it is like to walk in their shoes—about their issues and concerns and how they perceived experiences you both shared.
  6. Examine your biases. We all have hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) biases that interfere with our ability to listen and empathize. These are often centered around visible factors such as age, race, and gender. Don’t think you have any biases? Think again—we all do.
  7. Cultivate your sense of curiosity. What can you learn from a very young colleague who is “inexperienced?” What can you learn from a client you view as “narrow”? Curious people ask lots of questions (point 8), leading them to develop a stronger understanding of the people around them.
  8. Ask better questions
    Bring three or four thoughtful, even provocative questions to every conversation you have with clients or colleagues.

Learn to Empathize and Build the Relationships that Truly Matter to Career Success.

(Content credits : Received content as a forward )

Mindfulness and mental well being

You may feel stressed-out when waiting in a line at the bank or the post office, when driving in traffic or along an unfamiliar route, when facing a deadline, or when having an uncomfortable conversation.

You can even experience stress reactions as a result of anticipating or remembering such events.

Though these stresses seem fairly minor, they can cause all sorts of symptoms, such as muscular tension, headaches, insomnia, gastrointestinal upset, and skin conditions. Long-term stress can also be a factor in serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and dementia, particularly if you rely on unhealthy strategies to cope with stress, such as smoking, substance abuse, overeating, or overworking.

One of the gifts that mindfulness offers is helping you recognize that there are choices in how you respond to any stressful situation.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, describes this eloquently: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” (Pattakos 2008, viii).

Even amidst Frankl’s imprisonment, he found ways to provide comfort and healing to those around him, underscoring that, with awareness, everyone has freedom of choice how to respond. The key is awareness.

Of course, conditioning is a powerful force that can make it difficult to change. Just as water finds the path of least resistance, you’ll tend to fall back on habits because in many ways this is the easiest course to follow. This includes habitual ways of seeing and reacting.

To help provide motivation for the challenging work of turning off your autopilot and resisting habitual reactions and behaviors, mindfulness activities such as Mandala art , meditation or breath awareness will help you explore how stress is impacting your life.

Becoming truly aware of the stress in your life and how you interact with it is a necessary first step in choosing new responses that will serve you better.

Let me ask you today – Are you aware in the present moment? And from a scale of 1-10 how aware are you?

(Adapted from the book- Mindfulness Stress Based Reduction workbook)