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Time to read: 20 mins. Empathy has entered the buzz world universe of work theory in the past 10 years, surfing the general wave of popularization of self-reflective practices (like Yoga, breathing techniques, mindfulness) intended or promising to expand consciousness and well being at the individual level, while also improving social interactions and overall business performance. Its general meaning is the capacity to join into and vicariously experience someone’s else emotional state. As many concepts which made it to commercial application before appropriate acquisition and assimilation, the term suffers of misunderstandings and misapplication. In practice, we can see how, when experiencing the other person’s distress, we may become confused, unable to gain clarity or prospective, or make decisions in a helpful way. Too much empathy and you cannot function, which leads ultimately some managers to even experience burn out. A 2016 study conducted by the University and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research of Poitiers on the relation between Empathy and Burn Out in Physicians (and the critical distinction between empathy and sympathy to which we will come briefly) tells us that “physicians with over-exaggerated empathic abilities would have more chances to suffer from emotional exhaustion, leading to compassion fatigue and, then, burnout”.  “Physicians with over-exaggerated empathic abilities would have more chances to suffer from emotional exhaustion, leading to compassion fatigue and, then, burnout”. This article intends to clarify the meaning of empathy and its relative terms, sympathy and compassion, their virtuous and non-virtuous applications, and provide some simple methods to enhance the practice of compassionate leadership, as opposed to promote empathic overwhelm. A Passionate Family: Empathy, Sympathy and CompassionThe terms empathy, sympathy and compassion all rotate around the same noun root, πάθος, pathos (affection, feeling) declined in the verb πάσχειν "paschein", literally meaning “suffering”, or “being emotionally moved”. A common derivative used today is the word Passion. Already in its original language pathos had its antinomy in the word Logos (ordered reason, articulation), today found in “logical”, “law”, the capacity of our human minds to make sense of reality and be able to see and comprehend it. These 2 forces, pathos and logos, primordial and opposite, one moving and the other composing, regulate the human experience, from a Dyonisiac to an Apollinean one: when harmonized they give rise to sublimity in humans arts and sciences. Let’s have a look at how empathy, sympathy and compassion developed from pathos: Empathy = “I feel inside you” from the Greek en-pathos – “en” stands for “inside”, meaning being immersed in the inner life of the other. Sympathy = “I feel with you” from the Greek sym-patheia – “sym” means “with”, indicates the capacity to feel with the other, along with them, as we understand their circumstances. Interestingly, the term was born within the art of Greek theatre, and it referred to the capacity of moving the audience to feel along the theatrical representations of the actors. Compassion = “I take part in your suffering” from the Latin cum-patior. Here there is participation in the feeling of the other but it takes the connotation of action, of being willing to partecipate with help. It is clear that when exercising empathy our self-perception blurs, as we identify completely with the other. Science helps us understanding what this “complete identification” entails and why, while it is one of the primary factors which have preserved and accelerated our evolution as a specie, its arousal might be very confusing and not always conducive of positive outcomes. 3 Types of Empathy To maintain only the most common term, empathy, but then decline it more orderly, psychology distinguishes between 3 types of empathy, very different from each other and which involve very distinct human faculties: Cognitive Empathy is an intellectual faculty, that expresses itself in the abstract capacity to understand why a person feels the way they do. It is also defined as “perspective taking” as it looks at the individual slightly from afar, in her context and relations, to understand how she may feel. It is a faculty that can be found also in antisocial personalities (including psychopaths) as it does not require a sharing of the emotional content, but the necessary intellectual skill to take perspective about the circumstances of the other (e.g. John had a car accident and is shocked. Anne never had an accident nor feels any personal reaction to John’s feelings, but she has the ability to understand why after an accident John would feel distressed).
Emotional Empathy is the vanilla empathy, an emotional and somatic response to the emotions of the other, that can take place spontaneously, without the intervention of will and intellect. It spans from very basic experiences, like body mimicry (mirroring the body language of our interlocutors even without realizing) and emotional contagion (laughter spreading hysterically in a theatre even when not everyone got the joke, or yawning) to more complex ones (experiencing mental and physical distress for a length of time after hearing of the sorrows of another – e.g. John had a car accident and is shocked. Anne can’t stop thinking about him and how terrible it must have been, she talks about it with family and friend, and she even started feeling nervous when driving herself). Compassionate Empathy is the deal of our pursue, what we should try to develop in ourselves and others. It is the capacity to be sufficiently cognitively skilled to understand the pain of others and the circumstances that led to it, and to be emotionally capable of resonating to a lesser or greater extent with their actual feelings (negative AND positive) and, as a result of this understanding and resonance, take resolute action to alleviate the suffering or enhance the well being of the other. This capacity requires knowledge, experience, reflection and action (e.g. John had a car accident and is shocked. Anne knows that the experience can lead to a long lasting trauma: she offers John to car pool with him to work for a few days, so he regains fast the trust and pleasure to get into a car, and she gives him the contact of a trauma therapist to work on the aftermath of his experience, if he wants). 
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| Prosocial behaviors start happening in humans as young as 12 months. Children this age are regularly witnessed spontaneously comforting victims of distress, without any rewards. |  |
The way empathy manifests and develops is today incorporated within two leading theories:
The Simulation Theory
Simulation Theory takes empathy to its core genetic source, the nature cause, as a biological process of mesmerizing and very promising repercussions. The development of the Simulation Theory was possible thanks to the discovery of Mirror Neurons: these neurons allow the gathering of several types of information (words, movements, smells, etc.) through different channels (auditory, visual, etc.) about others’ actions, emotions, sensations, and communicative messages, and the mapping of these into our own neural structures. These maps become ours to all intended purposes: this means that after the "intake" and the “imprinting” we can reproduce the same processes as "the other" (the source) with the same results (the same feeling, the same expression, the same movement). Even if the mirroring starts quite basically, more like a hint to the same purpose, it feels like we inherit the matrix, the blueprint for it, and are hence able to develop further into a fully accomplished reproduction.
This explains elegantly why our brain experiences in the same way both the “real” as well as “the imagined”. This phenomenon, very well understood by symbolists, is today being harvested in an array of exciting applications, from sports and musical training, to virtual reality and neurorehabilitation.
When we “empathize” our mirror neurons are engaged assimilating the state of the other and reproducing it into our own neural networks, where it will affect the charge of neurotrasmitters and everything they activate, deactivate or modulate, from our sleep to blood flow and inflammation levels. Empathy can heal you, give you access and use of the universal encyclopedia of sentients, or can make you sick.
The Theory of Mind
The Theory of Mind is much more about nurture. Each of us, through different developmental stages that can be affected, and even compromised, by culture, education, predispositions, and overall health, develops a more or less functional Theory of Mind, an understanding of how the mind of others (the invisible entity behind someone’s face) works, and also reflect in comparison about ours. We build so to say a theory about what others experience, how they come to having different emotions, behaviours, expectations, believes, intentions and thoughts, and we are able to elaborate the same frameworks about ourselves.
The Simulation Theory
Simulation Theory takes empathy to its core genetic source, the nature cause, as a biological process of mesmerizing and very promising repercussions. The development of the Simulation Theory was possible thanks to the discovery of Mirror Neurons: these neurons allow the gathering of several types of information (words, movements, smells, etc.) through different channels (auditory, visual, etc.) about others’ actions, emotions, sensations, and communicative messages, and the mapping of these into our own neural structures. These maps become ours to all intended purposes: this means that after the "intake" and the “imprinting” we can reproduce the same processes as "the other" (the source) with the same results (the same feeling, the same expression, the same movement). Even if the mirroring starts quite basically, more like a hint to the same purpose, it feels like we inherit the matrix, the blueprint for it, and are hence able to develop further into a fully accomplished reproduction.
This explains elegantly why our brain experiences in the same way both the “real” as well as “the imagined”. This phenomenon, very well understood by symbolists, is today being harvested in an array of exciting applications, from sports and musical training, to virtual reality and neurorehabilitation.
When we “empathize” our mirror neurons are engaged assimilating the state of the other and reproducing it into our own neural networks, where it will affect the charge of neurotrasmitters and everything they activate, deactivate or modulate, from our sleep to blood flow and inflammation levels. Empathy can heal you, give you access and use of the universal encyclopedia of sentients, or can make you sick.
The Theory of Mind
The Theory of Mind is much more about nurture. Each of us, through different developmental stages that can be affected, and even compromised, by culture, education, predispositions, and overall health, develops a more or less functional Theory of Mind, an understanding of how the mind of others (the invisible entity behind someone’s face) works, and also reflect in comparison about ours. We build so to say a theory about what others experience, how they come to having different emotions, behaviours, expectations, believes, intentions and thoughts, and we are able to elaborate the same frameworks about ourselves.
 | “Wherever the dancer steps, a fountain of life will spring from the dust.” - Rumi "Population-scale survey data about health and arts engagement have illustrated that there may be health and well-being benefits for individuals from merely attending arts events" Frontiers. |
ToM helps us predict that Judith may choose to lie about having recently filed a false tax declaration, or know that Sasha feels awful after his wife left him through a text message, or understand why our new inexperienced colleague feels shy speaking up at the weekly meeting.
ToM is a great place to start when you want to look at organizational issues in diverse environments: people feel lack of empathy from a colleague, yet that person’s ToM is really hard-wired differently, and cannot respond in the way we expect through our own ToM. Children from Iran and China, for example, in a culture of collectivism, develop “knowledge access” (understanding that to know something you have to see it) earlier and “diverse beliefs” (understanding that others may feel differently and uniquely about something) later than Western children raised in a culture of individualism. The same goes for behaviours like “play pretending” (even simple joking), “hidden emotions” (knowing that someone may smile when they are sad), “capacity for narratives” (both the elaboration and the acquisition of meaning through stories, that may have a temporal architecture and arching very different from the linear actuality of events): they are all competencies of Theory of Mind that vary to a great degree between individuals, although the themes and areas are ”hardcoded” libraries of Homo Sapiens.
Theory of Mind seems to have much more relation to what we called earlier “Sympathy”, and definitely with Compassion, as it is the infrastructure of Cognitive Empathy. It does overlap with Empathy as we do intrinsically access our “ToM modules” every time we feel for someone, and our incompetence in ToM will definitely impair our ability to respond effortlessly to the emotions of others (although here there are some chickens and eggs to resolve even in the science).
At the same time, ToM can be very accurate in individuals who cannot engage in natural empathic processes (antisocial and psychopathic elements) which explains why people affected by these personality disorders may still be perfectly capable to use cognitive empathy to arrange their relationships and social transactions in ways that will benefit them.
ToM is a great place to start when you want to look at organizational issues in diverse environments: people feel lack of empathy from a colleague, yet that person’s ToM is really hard-wired differently, and cannot respond in the way we expect through our own ToM. Children from Iran and China, for example, in a culture of collectivism, develop “knowledge access” (understanding that to know something you have to see it) earlier and “diverse beliefs” (understanding that others may feel differently and uniquely about something) later than Western children raised in a culture of individualism. The same goes for behaviours like “play pretending” (even simple joking), “hidden emotions” (knowing that someone may smile when they are sad), “capacity for narratives” (both the elaboration and the acquisition of meaning through stories, that may have a temporal architecture and arching very different from the linear actuality of events): they are all competencies of Theory of Mind that vary to a great degree between individuals, although the themes and areas are ”hardcoded” libraries of Homo Sapiens.
Theory of Mind seems to have much more relation to what we called earlier “Sympathy”, and definitely with Compassion, as it is the infrastructure of Cognitive Empathy. It does overlap with Empathy as we do intrinsically access our “ToM modules” every time we feel for someone, and our incompetence in ToM will definitely impair our ability to respond effortlessly to the emotions of others (although here there are some chickens and eggs to resolve even in the science).
At the same time, ToM can be very accurate in individuals who cannot engage in natural empathic processes (antisocial and psychopathic elements) which explains why people affected by these personality disorders may still be perfectly capable to use cognitive empathy to arrange their relationships and social transactions in ways that will benefit them.
(Which) empaths are more successful in business – an exercise to distinguish and fulfill different empathic skills
Let’s have a look at some of the perks that empathic people supposedly enjoy in business and try to understand, at the light of the distinctions we have made about different types of empathy, which empathy is involved in each of these abilities:
Think about each of these, and reflect on what type of traits, skills, behaviours and cognitive abilities may be required to accomplish them satisfactorily. Use your ToM. The exercise is very useful to bring back to your team, and see based on the personality and preferences involved, who may succeed better in certain tasks, regardless of their role or job title. You can also use it as a self-reflective tool, to know which of your faculties you should tune up or soften when you engage in different activities.
Here I propose a possible reading, but you can feel free to elaborate.
- Creative thinking
- Stronger relations
- Better communication
- Increase sales
- Customer Care
- Job Interviews
Think about each of these, and reflect on what type of traits, skills, behaviours and cognitive abilities may be required to accomplish them satisfactorily. Use your ToM. The exercise is very useful to bring back to your team, and see based on the personality and preferences involved, who may succeed better in certain tasks, regardless of their role or job title. You can also use it as a self-reflective tool, to know which of your faculties you should tune up or soften when you engage in different activities.
Here I propose a possible reading, but you can feel free to elaborate.
- Creative thinking – perspective taking (to see things without feeling obliged to feel like others about them + emotional empathy (to feel moved, enflamed enough to create). Can have some level of Compassionate empathy, especially if your creative thinking is going to resolve someone’s problem!
- Stronger relations – emotional empathy (nothing builds better rapport than spontaneous mirroring, and direct mimicry) and compassionate empathy (they know you have helped them and they know you will still do). This builds a trust, a cement, that will easily overcome gaps in other areas (like having a very different background). The opposite isn’t true.
- Better communication – A lot of perspective taking (cognitive empathy is of essence to understand your audience, their needs and channels) and some good emotional empathy as a secret ingredient to stir the souls to movement and call to action
- Increase sales – This is a very interesting one: I know sales reps that would go all the way with Cognitive empathy, have a bullet proof strategy to persuade exactly that client. The truth: these people don’t convert. Get a Compassionate, who understands and wants to solve the client’s problem, not theirs, and you will see the numbers go up.
- Customer Care – compassionate empathy is here of essence. If you don’t feel the urge to resolve the other person problem as if it where your own, please don’t. Don’t.
- Job Interviews – you definitely need all of them to build rapport, understand the job requirements and the interviewer, and fire your neurons in problem solving mode. Yet, a lot depends on the interview stage. If you are at the technical assessment, shield emotional empathy – this activity requires functions of focus, clarity and objectivity that excessive emotional resonance would deteriorate.
Surviving being an emotional empath and upgrading our cognitive abilities – turning from Empathy to Compassion
Now we understand better the different types of empathy, how they emerge and play within social interactions and how they can be useful in different contexts. You can learn a new competence very quickly through your mirror neurons, or read a room in a matter of second thanks to a well formed ToM, but things do not work as elegantly with empathy when what you resonate with are distressed emotions. Suppose you are a very sensitive emotional empath, and simply get easily overwhelmed when you start resonating (mirror neurons firing) with(in) the sorrows and distress of an other? How do you regain a position centered within yourself and your own core emotions, thoughts and body sensations? And from here, how do you engage in Compassionate empathy, and unlock your capacity to actively and skilfully help the other?
When emotional empathy is triggered in relation to an other’s distress (and we have seen how this is, with few exceptions, a natural reflex), we may notice the following reactions taking place in our own system:
When emotional empathy is triggered in relation to an other’s distress (and we have seen how this is, with few exceptions, a natural reflex), we may notice the following reactions taking place in our own system:
- Heart accelerates
- Breathings accelerates
- Muscles move without our control (in positive emotional feedbacks, this can be a smile suddenly appearing on your face, with negative resonance it may be a frown, or a knee-jerk reaction of our limbs)
Everyone has witnessed people experiencing the same situation and reacting very differently. Francis’ team was using the whiteboard for a 3 days workshop that the entire organization had heard about. The morning the last workshop day was ready to begin, the team found out that someone had taken the whiteboard away from the room, without any notice or message. The situation is the same for everyone, and everyone describes it with the same words “Someone took our whiteboard”. Yet, one of the team members follows by saying: “Oh no, I have the slides ready, but without the whiteboard we will never be able to make the exercise work!” (emotion: despair); another: “Not again! These guys from the second floor, it’s always them, now they will hear me!” (emotion: anger); and a third: “Oh but why? I had told Juliet how important this was, why she ignored my priorities again?” (emotion: sadness). None of these feelings is a testament to the actual situation, but they are all individual ways to interpret the value of the facts for oneself. To come to this value each person relates to their own believes, and juxtaposes unknown facts to obtain a coherent story (“it must have been Juliet, and she always ignores me”.
“Someone took our whiteboard? Any idea who? Is there a second one in the building? Let’s go find out now” (emotion: maybe some enthusiasm) could be the healthy (and pretty much only fact based) reaction. With Francis we worked on this example of her team’s dynamics: they were losing so much energy and time chasing their own mental creation, without any self-regulation. We needed to see what could be done to bring all of them to a more healthy type of reaction to the environment and its changes, more efficient and sane.
With emotional empathy it is very much the same, we feel some changes in our emotional and somatic state as mirror neurons fire, we have some initial subtle thoughts arising in recognition of this alteration, and finally loud, conscious thoughts, that brand this material giving it a specific name and connotations.
Different thoughts can lead to different outcomes and developments in (1) what your body is doing (2) what you pay attention to and think about vs what you exclude, and (3) how you want to act. This can turn into a non-virtuous and even toxic process.
“Someone took our whiteboard? Any idea who? Is there a second one in the building? Let’s go find out now” (emotion: maybe some enthusiasm) could be the healthy (and pretty much only fact based) reaction. With Francis we worked on this example of her team’s dynamics: they were losing so much energy and time chasing their own mental creation, without any self-regulation. We needed to see what could be done to bring all of them to a more healthy type of reaction to the environment and its changes, more efficient and sane.
With emotional empathy it is very much the same, we feel some changes in our emotional and somatic state as mirror neurons fire, we have some initial subtle thoughts arising in recognition of this alteration, and finally loud, conscious thoughts, that brand this material giving it a specific name and connotations.
Different thoughts can lead to different outcomes and developments in (1) what your body is doing (2) what you pay attention to and think about vs what you exclude, and (3) how you want to act. This can turn into a non-virtuous and even toxic process.
 | "Everything we see in nature is manifested truth; only we are not able to recognize it unless truth is manifest within ourselves." - Jakob Bohme |
Carlos and Thomas are programmers in a large corporate: they share the same cubicle, late hours troubleshooting followed by brilliant solutions and cigarettes breaks, since 2 years and, introvert, rational types, they have grown very affectionate of each other. Thomas has had a number of conflicts with their common manager, and shared these over time with Carlos, who doesn’t experience the same but can see Thomas’ point of view (sympathy). One day Thomas invites Carlos to join him outside, he is furious: the boss has once again turned down his request for a raise. Carlos starts feeling awful, as much as Thomas or even more. He remembers how this happened to him in a previous job, how much he hated his previous boss, the insomnia, the anxiety, the sense of frustration. He suggests to Thomas that there is only one way out of this, and it's resigning straight away. Emotional empathy overflows into Carlos, makes past experiences rebound, his mentality suggests a solution that he himself imagines with relief. Thomas does not resign, he continues complaining every day, but goes on with his work, while Carlos feels progressively that he cannot trust his boss anymore, not with what he is doing to Thomas. 6 months later Carlos has a burn out and quits a job he loved. The story of Thomas has hooked into his own past trauma, doubling its intensity, becoming the colour and shape of every day at the office, painting black joys and achievements.
Simon was very often feeling angry when he had to listen to Paula’s distress: Paula, who was from a culture where emotions are collective, shown and spoken about, was vocal and emotional about the recent organizational changes which risked putting out of work one third of her team in spite of their great work. Simon, who came from a more individualistic background, where negative emotions were suppressed at all costs and definitely not shared, felt a sting every time Paula was speaking up in such intense terms: he would feel emotional, resonating without knowing with Paula’s sadness, anger, distress, but his thoughts would explain the range of changes taking place within himself as “uncomfortable”, “fastidious”, “too much” for simple lack of better words. His cognitive competence of emotions was low, his ToM conditioned at young age, and he had to label Paula as an “irritating drama queen” to stir away from unfamiliar (or suppressed) feelings that he did not want to confront in himself. Simon is reliving trauma through Paula, but he does not know. Meanwhile nobody can stand anymore the level of friction between Simon and Paula, the team feels they have to take sides, or ignore the elephant in the room. Someone starts calling the environment toxic.
The connotations, interpretations and labels we provide depend on our emotional competence and range, our cognitive capacity, our past experiences, our blockages and traumas, and our pre-recorded responses. Theory of Mind and Cognitive Empathy here show their true colours.
Simon was very often feeling angry when he had to listen to Paula’s distress: Paula, who was from a culture where emotions are collective, shown and spoken about, was vocal and emotional about the recent organizational changes which risked putting out of work one third of her team in spite of their great work. Simon, who came from a more individualistic background, where negative emotions were suppressed at all costs and definitely not shared, felt a sting every time Paula was speaking up in such intense terms: he would feel emotional, resonating without knowing with Paula’s sadness, anger, distress, but his thoughts would explain the range of changes taking place within himself as “uncomfortable”, “fastidious”, “too much” for simple lack of better words. His cognitive competence of emotions was low, his ToM conditioned at young age, and he had to label Paula as an “irritating drama queen” to stir away from unfamiliar (or suppressed) feelings that he did not want to confront in himself. Simon is reliving trauma through Paula, but he does not know. Meanwhile nobody can stand anymore the level of friction between Simon and Paula, the team feels they have to take sides, or ignore the elephant in the room. Someone starts calling the environment toxic.
The connotations, interpretations and labels we provide depend on our emotional competence and range, our cognitive capacity, our past experiences, our blockages and traumas, and our pre-recorded responses. Theory of Mind and Cognitive Empathy here show their true colours.
Essential skills for Compassionate Leadership
There are 2 essential skills that we need to develop and make ours if we want to ensure that emotional empathy does not become a vicious cycle of negativity, spiraling us and others into a system dominated by confusion, misunderstanding, exhaustion, frustration, manipulation and fear: the practice of mindfulness and cognitive competence. When we exercise the 2, we are turning the uncontrolled response of emotional empathy into Compassion, which activates our capacity to be the motor of positive change in the environment around us.
1. The Practice of Mindfulness
The most important factor is actually realising that an overflow of emotional empathy is taking place, and that one is indeed losing their own ground and drifting into the state of the other.
The ability to remain aware on one’s own mental, physical and emotional state, either when in static state or when in motion (mental, emotional or physical motion, that is) is referred to, in our common language, as Mindfulness, an array of trainings and practices that has developed from Vipassana and partly Zen Buddhism.
Clinical psychology and psychiatry since the 1970s have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness which have been succesfully employed to reduce depression, stress, anxiety, and drug addiction. Not only does the practice of mindfullness reduce worry and rumination (the 2 villains always present in a variety of mental disorders) and has shown to be a preventive strategy to halt the development of mental health problems, but we have evidence of an influence on physical health, particularly when we look at the physiological effects of stressors on the immune and inflamatory system (which we mentioned earlier, when looking at the functioning of mirror neurons): these processes can be biologically altered when we develop succesfully the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness trains our ability to “see” our thoughts as they occur. As our physical reactions (blood rush, breathing accelerations, muscle tensing) arise, it allows us to notice. As subtle thoughts recognizing those physical reactions co-emerge, we notice. As thoughts labelling with name, connotations, and causes our emotions and their value, develop, we notice.
This minute process of awareness, or presence, which seems very difficult to obtain, can be observed and trained in everyone. Approaches like Theory U and Presencing, Coaching, Somatic Experience can help us engaging in these processes, slow down our thoughts and take the necessary reflective time to see through our own unravelling with clarity, gaining experience and forming in time consistent habits.
The most important factor is actually realising that an overflow of emotional empathy is taking place, and that one is indeed losing their own ground and drifting into the state of the other.
The ability to remain aware on one’s own mental, physical and emotional state, either when in static state or when in motion (mental, emotional or physical motion, that is) is referred to, in our common language, as Mindfulness, an array of trainings and practices that has developed from Vipassana and partly Zen Buddhism.
Clinical psychology and psychiatry since the 1970s have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness which have been succesfully employed to reduce depression, stress, anxiety, and drug addiction. Not only does the practice of mindfullness reduce worry and rumination (the 2 villains always present in a variety of mental disorders) and has shown to be a preventive strategy to halt the development of mental health problems, but we have evidence of an influence on physical health, particularly when we look at the physiological effects of stressors on the immune and inflamatory system (which we mentioned earlier, when looking at the functioning of mirror neurons): these processes can be biologically altered when we develop succesfully the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness trains our ability to “see” our thoughts as they occur. As our physical reactions (blood rush, breathing accelerations, muscle tensing) arise, it allows us to notice. As subtle thoughts recognizing those physical reactions co-emerge, we notice. As thoughts labelling with name, connotations, and causes our emotions and their value, develop, we notice.
This minute process of awareness, or presence, which seems very difficult to obtain, can be observed and trained in everyone. Approaches like Theory U and Presencing, Coaching, Somatic Experience can help us engaging in these processes, slow down our thoughts and take the necessary reflective time to see through our own unravelling with clarity, gaining experience and forming in time consistent habits.
| "Meditation is not an escape. It is the courage to look at reality with mindfulness" - Tich Nath Han |  |
2. Cognitive Competence
Once we are proficient in recognizing the material emerging through emotional empathy, cleanse our personal filters, and regain our ground control through presence and awareness, the second ability, Cognitive Competence, gives us the tools to react as well as possible, be ready and capable of offering solutions, innovative and sensitive, to the needs, distress calls, complexities, conflicts and problems arising around us.
Cognitive competence refers to the cognitive processes that comprise creative thinking, (aka divergent thinking) and critical thinking (aka convergent thinking). It is shaped by one’s abilities, intellective and interpersonal, summed to those acquired thought intellectual studies, such as logic, analysis, abstract reasoning.
Our minds need first to be able to apprehend (capture, store) information about ourselves and the environment accurately, and then utilize it to process new information, the function of elements within it, and the relations amongst these, in ways that are both factually exact and complete, and not limited to previously formed instructions or knowledge, hence new.
Needless to say, it takes some level of mindfulness to achieve a significant performance in cognitive competence: a distracted, confused mind, tied in limiting believes or fears regarding the self, can hardly afford the space and freedom to enjoy the rich learning curves involved in higher cognition.
Cognitive Competence requires individuals to 1. self-regulate, 2. create knowledge in structures and formats idoneous to its communication to transfer it, and 3. make new sense of the surroundings, while these are changing continuously: we then need to start the cycle again, self-regulating our response to the change and ensuring it does not filter out the possibility of generating new knowledge, and continue the virtuous cycle.
Once we are proficient in recognizing the material emerging through emotional empathy, cleanse our personal filters, and regain our ground control through presence and awareness, the second ability, Cognitive Competence, gives us the tools to react as well as possible, be ready and capable of offering solutions, innovative and sensitive, to the needs, distress calls, complexities, conflicts and problems arising around us.
Cognitive competence refers to the cognitive processes that comprise creative thinking, (aka divergent thinking) and critical thinking (aka convergent thinking). It is shaped by one’s abilities, intellective and interpersonal, summed to those acquired thought intellectual studies, such as logic, analysis, abstract reasoning.
Our minds need first to be able to apprehend (capture, store) information about ourselves and the environment accurately, and then utilize it to process new information, the function of elements within it, and the relations amongst these, in ways that are both factually exact and complete, and not limited to previously formed instructions or knowledge, hence new.
Needless to say, it takes some level of mindfulness to achieve a significant performance in cognitive competence: a distracted, confused mind, tied in limiting believes or fears regarding the self, can hardly afford the space and freedom to enjoy the rich learning curves involved in higher cognition.
Cognitive Competence requires individuals to 1. self-regulate, 2. create knowledge in structures and formats idoneous to its communication to transfer it, and 3. make new sense of the surroundings, while these are changing continuously: we then need to start the cycle again, self-regulating our response to the change and ensuring it does not filter out the possibility of generating new knowledge, and continue the virtuous cycle.
Leaders in particular, next to their more known traits of dominance, self confidence and proliferous activity, require to develop intelligence and task relevant knowledge. This requirement demands wide interests across different domains of responsibility (human interactions and psychology, to lead well teams and clients, communication, technology, economy, etc) and not just those of specialization (to make it simple, the CFO can’t run away when the team experiences a conflict and the VP Sales has to learn, reflect and gain experience before spear heading into the Chinese market - both would fail if they do not learn).
Factors that contribute greatly to the acquisition of cognitive competence, or can completely hinder it, are:
Factors that contribute greatly to the acquisition of cognitive competence, or can completely hinder it, are:
- our cognitive structures (self believes and our motivation, what we consider the goal)
- our cognitive processes (how we reason, and the state of our metacognition, our ability to think about thinking)
- our behaviour (how much and how well we engage in problem solving, decision making, and the acquisition of new knowledge regarding tasks and fields)
| "The most dangerous worldview is the view of those who have never looked at the world." - A. von Humboldt |  |
Conclusions
Empathy is an amazing biological process that has allowed the evolution of Humanity. Its potential starts only recently being fully grasped and could revolutionise our approach to education and learning and the acquisition of skills at large. When empathy deals with emotions we need to remember that it may escape our control, and we'd better learn to be familiar with its functioning to avoid its manifestations generating unwanted outcomes, down to toxic work environments and negative loops.
We have the responsibility, as leaders, to move from a passive paradigm of empathy to an active one of Compassionate Leadership. Compassionate Leadership and action entail profound and unfiltered Awareness of oneself and others and Skillful Knowledge, and these can be fostered through the practice of mindfulness and cognitive competence.
Compassionate action, allows us to turn the detrimental effects of shared distress, and the lingering of negative believes preventing a positive change, into an active, empowered activity that leads to accomplishments and gratification.
This evidence can set the foundations for a culture driven and modelled by compassion, encouraging in people the cultivation of awareness and competence, and establishing a virtuous cycle of change.
We have the responsibility, as leaders, to move from a passive paradigm of empathy to an active one of Compassionate Leadership. Compassionate Leadership and action entail profound and unfiltered Awareness of oneself and others and Skillful Knowledge, and these can be fostered through the practice of mindfulness and cognitive competence.
Compassionate action, allows us to turn the detrimental effects of shared distress, and the lingering of negative believes preventing a positive change, into an active, empowered activity that leads to accomplishments and gratification.
This evidence can set the foundations for a culture driven and modelled by compassion, encouraging in people the cultivation of awareness and competence, and establishing a virtuous cycle of change.
1 Comment
Sander Tideman
29/11/2022 21:44:47
excellent summary of the leading scientific insights
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