How to Gain More Empathy

Being able to develop empathy is something that is attainable with effort and genuine affinity with the human race.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. First off, let’s distinguish the difference between sympathy and empathy. To me, sympathy is the act of feeling sorry for someone else, or himself/herself. With time the sympathy may still exist within yourself, but it is in the background until it is brought back to consciousness. With empathy, it is taken one step further. Not only do you feel sorry for someone, but it becomes more attune to the situation at hand.
2. For example, if someone who works with you is fired, a sympathetic person feels sorry for their co-worker, but that is the extent of it. The empathetic person feels sorry for his or her co-worker, and then takes an additional step and actually puts himself or herself in that person’s shoes. He or she realizes what would happen to the individual. How will he or she support their family? How will they find another job when the market is so volatile? You may even try to help them with their dilemma.
3. The person who has empathy may have resources at their disposal that can help. They may know someone who works at a different workplace who could help the person who was fired. Empathetic people recognize the need to help other people because there may come a day when they may need help too. Some may help out without any kind of reward expected because it is inherent in their personality.
4. How does one achieve empathy? It really depends on your disposition. If you are self centered and only care about yourself then empathy will not come easily. It would take a devastation of some significance to alter your perception, especially if someone helps you out knowing full well what type of person you are. While you may not consider yourself self-centered, you may have an indication of how others perceive you. Perception makes reality. If others perceive you as being selfish then that is what they are going to believe whether it is true or not.
5. Acquiring empathy is about being in tune with who you are as a person. If you have the ability to take a step back and look at a situation, determine how it can best help another person, even if a little sacrifice on your part is necessary, then actively go about and set the idea in motion, you are on the right path. Moreover, there is another aspect to empathy I call passive empathy. Passive empathy is when you are able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but due to circumstances beyond your control, you are unable to help with the situation. They are very rare since, in most cases, you can do something.
6. When you develop empathy it can mean that you are an active participant in using your abilities and resources to help out your fellow man. If more people developed empathy it could conceivably alter the human suffering that transpires on a daily basis.