Empathy

Empathy arises from the ability to listen, and is an inseparable part of social, affective and cognitive skills. A good communicator handles in unconscious terms these skills, thus constituting personal tools to be used in any type of situation: family, professional, etc. In this chapter we will talk about empathy, the different types that exist and how this term differs from sympathy.

Let's avoid having what is called "Burnout Syndrome", with the devastating repercussions that this entails. Let us understand empathy as the cement with which the blocks of "listening" are joined to establish a safe and secure fortification called: assertive communication.

Mirror neurons and empathy.

What do you look at when you stand in front of a mirror? Yourself, right? Keep looking at your reflection and raise your hand. What do you see again? You, with your hand raised. Is there a difference? Mirror neurons are activated when we perform some movement, or see and imitate the behavior of the other person without differentiating whether we are doing it or seeing it. Let me explain:

A person is falling down the stairs. We perceive the expression of pain, astonishment or fear on their face. Mirror neurons are activated, reflecting what we see as if we were involved in that fall. A part of us connected with that other person to "discover" what they were feeling.

Sympathetic or empathetic. Differences

An empathetic person would ask:

• -What happened to you?" on a plane ready for genuine understanding.

• He/she understands from the perspective and emotions of the person and therefore is there to know the emotional state without judgments induced by his/her "self", only by entering into the "other". It is understood as a sporadic act, knowing how to take an emotional distance. Sympathy abrogates this distance and gets involved body and soul in the emotion, without providing a solution, only living in excess the motive, intentions and suffering of his interlocutor.

• Expressions such as: "I sympathize with her" means that we manage to feel and turn HER problem into OUR problem.

Burnout Syndrome.

Placing yourself in an emotional "distance", you are able to think with a cold and accurate mind, without making the suffering your own and therefore appreciating the objective impact.

To avoid the consequent Burnout Syndrome, awarded by the World Health Organization in 2000, as "physical or emotional exhaustion", and dragging the adjacent stress in your life, we must take into account a series of questions, so that just as physical illnesses have an emotional root that somatize in our body, stress, product of poor management of emotions, alter our perception of reality and therefore the same reality.

It would be incongruous for a person to come to you in search of a "healing" method so that, from your professional responsibility, you fail to help him/her and you get sick too. We can resort to these questions, as long as we want to delimit whose problem it is and what is your role in this regard:

• Do you think the situation you are involved in can be fixed?

• What degree of responsibility do you feel you have?

• Is there any action you can take to fix it?

• How would you feel about fixing the situation?

• Is the situation worth fixing?

Cognitive empathy.

When we mention the cognitive level, we are referring to an "intellectual" interpretation of the knowledge of emotions. At this level, we identify the person's perspective, his or her opinion regarding what he or she is experiencing. It is not necessary to "feel". As a coach, this type of empathy redeems the attempt to draw hasty or unelaborated conclusions from a context, delving deeper into the causes, effects and origins of the conflict with the head set completely in the "here and now". An example of this type of empathy can be seen when we say, for example:

• ¨I have not lived that kind of experience but I think I understand what you are going through¨.

Emotional empathy.

Emotional empathy or, as we could call it, the contagion of emotions is produced, already expressed previously, in an instantaneous way, being able to understand without judging the emotional universe of others. Transmitting, in the final stretch, with our verbal or non-verbal language the effect that caused us.

In most of the bibliographies on the subject, they exclude: either the cognitive or the affective in empathic processing, but the truth is that if we want to have a comprehensive understanding of empathy, it is valid to understand both processes as a whole, in an interrelated way. To be able to feel the "discomfort of others" and to infer perspective and context. To be integral.

Accurate or subjective empathy.

This integrality is framed in an "exact empathy", you understand the cognitive and affective sphere, being always the maximum object of interest the "other person". Your brother is sad and you approach him, you offer him your support and you believe that this sadness can lead to depression if he does not act immediately. You are analyzing the problem from an objective point of view.

If in the same case, your brother is sad, but you rethink your strategies regarding how you would like to be treated when you are sad, it reduces the possibilities of understanding the other's experiences. Being a subjective method, you are inferring a personal nuance that would work only for you without taking into account diversity.