Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.
~ George Bernard Shaw
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Empathy
Tolerance versus love
Tolerance is becoming accustomed to injustice; love is becoming disturbed and activated by another’s adverse condition. Tolerance crosses the street; love confronts. Tolerance builds fences; love opens doors. Tolerance breeds indifference; love demands engagement. Tolerance couldn’t care less; love always cares more.
~ Cory Booker
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Tolerance
Tolerance is becoming accustomed to injustice; love is becoming disturbed and activated by another’s adverse condition. Tolerance crosses the street; love confronts. Tolerance builds fences; love opens doors. Tolerance breeds indifference; love demands engagement. Tolerance couldn’t care less; love always cares more.
~ Cory Booker
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When I’m having a recorded conversation for a podcast, “being loving” or “loving the other person”, aren’t the words I’d choose. Low-brow jokes aside, it just doesn’t feel like the right word choice. Booker’s phrasing is obviously rhetoric. But there’s a reason rhetoric is like that: It works.
When I read Booker’s rhetoric I was thinking how shifting one’s context to coming from being loving changes the way I’d approach those situations. …or at least, how I might approach those situations. Changing my mindset would enable me to see opportunities I’d otherwise miss. (While still allowing me to rationally choose when it might be wise to walk by, cross the street, build a fence, get on with life, etc..)
And my new mindset—coming from being loving—made me think of a conversation I had a little while ago with Andrew Foster.
Ruh-roh, there might just be something to this “love” thing.
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PS: *gasp* I too have been misattributing “ruh-roh”, as in “ruh-roh rhaggy” to Scooby Doo. “ruh-roh” is Astro’s catch-phrase. Both dogs were voiced by the same actor though…
Empathy and compassion
With emotional empathy, you actually experience a weaker degree of what somebody else feels. Researchers in recent years have been able to show that empathic responses of pain occur in the same area of the brain where real pain is experienced.
~ Shane Parrish from, https://fs.blog/2017/12/against-empathy/
It seems obvious to me that being empathic is helpful since it suggests where to direct one’s compassion. However, is it necessary to be empathic in order to be compassionate?
Without compassion is empathy beneficial? Without compassion might empathy actually be harmful?
Why is my mission creating better conversations to spread understanding and compassion?
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The warrior sense of humor
Lastly, these remarks are inclusive. They’re about “us.” Whatever ordeal is coming, the company will undergo it together. Leonidas’s and Dienekes’s quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.
~ Steven Pressfield, from https://stevenpressfield.com/2011/04/the-warrior-sense-of-humor/
This also ties into what makes a good team. I don’t mean hyperbolic imagining of the team as some military unit. Rather, plainly stating what lies ahead, what will be challenging, and what are the goals for the team builds cohesion. The more the team members understand each other, the better they can empathize. Only when there’s empathy—my ability to use it and your awareness that I can and do use it to better help and understand you—can the barriers of fear be removed; fear prevents people from asking for help and from asking how they can help others.
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The secret to connecting with people
Let the other person have the privilege of being the first one to be understood. The biggest distraction to understanding someone else is self-importance. Needing to say something means you have to be thinking about it, and thinking about it means you have very little mental capacity left for empathy. Free up yours, and it will free up theirs.
~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2009/04/the-secret-to-connecting-with-people/
Empathy is the most useful ability I have ever developed. Sure, I first had to develop my abilities of self-awareness and self-assessment. But at that point, the need for empathy and compassion became plain as day.
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Empathy Is a Clock That Ticks in the Consciousness of Another
Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.
~ Alan Burdick from, http://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/04/alan-burdick-why-time-flies-empathy/
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