A COO shares an empathy exercise from a 2021 event where employees anonymously wrote personal struggles, then listened as each was read aloud. Divorce, financial trouble, health issues. The point: everyone carries invisible weight, and naming it shifts how teams treat each other.
Chapters
You're talking about the empathy and how, you know, everybody's going through something or they're about to, or they just did. And it reminds me of an exercise that I did at the beginning of one of the events that I hosted in 2021. It was right after COVID and wanted to help to level set the room because emotions were high and tensions were high. At the advice of Cameron Herold Herold, I had gotten a clear fishbowl and handed out a piece of paper to everybody. And said, I want everybody to write one thing that they're going through right now. Maybe it's a divorce, maybe it's financial troubles. Who knows? It could be anything. Write it down. I said, if you think I know your handwriting, use your left hand. I had everybody hold them up and they all handed them to the front. And I stood in front of the room and I read aloud with no names just what everybody was going through to really help people to realize that you have to understand It's not just what's going on in this room, it's what's happening in your life that you might not know about, but everybody's going through something. So I really love that you teach that to your teams on a regular basis because I think that that's a really important thing for organizations to be cognizant of and to teach their teams to be mindful of.
