CONNECT TO THE PAIN OF OTHERS: KEY PRACTICES:

• Remember that a leader’s job, by definition, is to cultivate community and connection.

• Recognize the “Four Horsemen” that seek to avoid connecting to the pain of others: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

• Practice seeing similarities and offering kindness.

• In conversation, look under the hood of others by asking about difficulties and challenges.

• Practice tonglen, or giving and receiving meditation.

• Foster empathy in order to inspire, and lead with, acts of compassion.

Whatever the reasons, the ways we act to protect ourselves in our relationships are fairly easy to recognize. We shield our feelings and our hearts from depending on others by doing exactly what we fear others will do to us.

• We don’t fully commit to a relationship or a group.

• We aspire to be strong and independent as a way to show we don’t really need a relationship or a group.

• We constantly search for another, better relationship (for better employees, partners, friends) or a better job; that is, we hedge our bets and withhold trust.

When I have done couples therapy in the past, on occasion I asked one partner to sit in a chair off to the side while I worked with the dreams and life stories of the other. My idea was that the people did not really know each other. Maybe by listening to each other and exploring their psyches they might have more empathy and a deeper appreciation for what the other was dealing with. As couples share their lives, they may come to think that they really know the other well. But that kind of intimacy can be misleading. Familiarity is not knowledge, and, in fact, it may be a block to really knowing the partner as a separate person. Some distance is necessary, hence my practice of attending to one person at a time. I encourage the one partner to be a close observer, perhaps gaining some empathy for the other. By listening to the soul I mean hearing the story that can’t be told.

The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.

1. Increase your power by reducing it…

As the researchers conclude, “power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones…

2. Use your head as much as your heart…

Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling. Both are crucial…

This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others…

3. Mimic strategically…

People therefore looked to cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. “One of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.” Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement…

The key is to be strategic and human—to be strategic by being human.

To put its wisdom simply, one could say the fundamental human challenge is this:

It’s hard to learn if you already know.

Unfortunately, we are hardwired to feel as if we know—as if we see reality itself rather than a version of reality filtered through our biases, backgrounds, or expertise. But we can unlearn the habit of knowing and reinvigorate our curiosity.