Transcript of a podcast episode in which Dr. Ed Torrey reflects on journaling and reads a journal entry titled “Toggling Empathy.” He describes being an extreme empath, the costs and benefits of intense empathy, and a practiced skill of toggling empathy between ‘full on’ and ‘standby’ to avoid emotional exhaustion while preserving human connection. He also explains how he structured his coaching practice to focus on high-performing clients and ends with a listener call-to-action.
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This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good. Hey, this is Dr. Torrey with another episode of the Influence Every Day podcast. Today, I was starting to journal. Now, here's the thing. I know journaling is sort of in vogue, right? Like people are saying journal, journal, journal. It's really important. It's important for gratitude. It's important for your well being. It's important for this. Well, it's something I've tried, but to be honest, I haven't been very consistent at it. So what I started doing recently was switching it up a little bit. I started journaling in much, much, much smaller entries, like three or four or five lines. And in particular, I keep a couple different types of journals. One is for more like deeper thoughts, and another one is for what I call Shine, from the book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Something really bothered me about the word proud. That's like arrogance. And so I never really understood. I'm proud of this accomplishment. I feel like it's a different emotion. It wasn't until I read the book Tiny Habits that I saw it described as shine. And so I created a Shine journal where something happens and I feel good about it, but I don't feel good about it in an arrogant kind of way. I'm happy that the thing happened. In a way, it's like a form of gratitude and appreciation and job well done, like fist bump, high five kind of thing, but not from an arrogant position. I created a Shine journal so that I can celebrate the wins because I tend to be pretty hard on myself. So anyway, that's a little backstory about journaling. Nonetheless, this brings us to today's episode, which I was sifting through my other journal, where I document a little bit more. Like, maybe if I have a thought and I want to expound on it or explore it, I happen to have stumbled upon a journal entry of mine about a skill that I wanted to have. I think over time, I've mastered it. So I wanted to share it with you, this journal entry, because I think I could. I think I said it better then than I would right now if I said it to you in this episode. So let me read it to you. The title is Toggling Empathy or Sliding Scale Empathy. Not sure which. That's what the title says. The journal entry starts this way. I realize why I never became a psychiatrist, despite becoming very, very good at it and despite gravitating towards it as a career path. It's the Same reason I find my work in care for the caregiver or peer support to be so taxing. It's the same reason I choose to coach, consult and teach on high performance more so than on self help. And it's the same reason I find higher leadership roles to have extreme peaks and extreme pits and valleys. I am an empath. An empath extremist. In fact, I feel what others feel and I extend it beyond them. If it's joy, I can see its downstream implications and I feel that too. If it's trauma, I can see downstream and extrapolate and extend. And I feel that too. This is a simultaneous superpower and kryptonite. It's a strength and a strength overdone. Anyone with this trait would run from leadership. When things are bad, they feel really bad. But yet people will pull us to leadership because when we see good, we really feel and see the downstream good. If there's one thing I want to master is how to toggle my extreme empathy from full on to standby and back again. The times I have been in flow have been when I successfully toggled empathy as a leader, as a parent, as a colleague and as a friend. Feel what others are feeling and then show them that better place and help them get there. Feel what others are feeling, assess and feel the potential downstream toggle from full on to standby and back again. When you're on standby, you then see and feel the paths to better places. You use reframing and other influence tools to move them there and you get them to see and experience that better future. The danger is if you leave it full on during negative emotions, it can be devastating. And if you leave it full on during positive emotions, you can miss a negative potential future. The ideal empathy mastery is to be able to put it on standby, to see the positive when all is negative, and to assess for negative when all is positive. So I hope you found this helpful. This is something that I have tried to work on because personally I found that when I would coach or counsel somebody through a difficulty, I often found myself still feeling that thing. I experienced something at work and then I come home and I'm bringing that whole thing home and I'm feeling that emotion still at night. Like it's almost like I've taken their emotion and I've weighed it onto my own shoulders and realized that is not a healthy way to move forward. It certainly wouldn't be healthy if I were in a like a heavy leadership role and experiencing all that stuff. Or if I Were in a psychiatric role where I'm just hearing negative, negative, negative or dysfunction, dysfunction, dysfunction, disease, disease, disease, then that would be too much. Same thing with when I do care for the caregiver and peer support to help people through stress. I can't live in that space all the time because this is just me personally, because I, I found myself taking it on and finding it too exhausting, too taxing. I found myself being in care for the caregiver where we help nurses and docs and NPS, PAs and healthcare workers. We help them with the stress of day to day or the stress of the pandemic or the stress of politics and staffing shortages and all these things while we're helping with that stress. Sometimes I would have to call another care for the caregiver person. In fact, all of us have to do that. We would call each other and be like, hey, I'm having a really tough time. I just heard this and this and this and this and it's really affecting me. And so you talk through it. I found that this is my own thing. I take on too much. So what I've done was I've designed like my coaching practice, for example. I'm not just coaching people through dysfunctional relationships. I'm coaching people who are already successful and they want to have more success. They're successful at work and they want to be more successful at work. They're successful at home and they want to be more successful at home or they're successful at work and they're not as successful as they want to be at home, but they're motivated and they see a brighter future. I help them get there rather than staying in the dysfunction. That's my own thing and that. So what I've done is I've carved out my own practices to shape it so that I don't fall into the negative too much. It's just something I've done over time. I wanted to learn how to toggle empathy because I felt like I'm often asked to do, to be a leader or I'm often asked to help somebody with something they're going through. And when I do that, I don't serve them well if I just avoid it. So instead this skill was the skill that I set out to master. And it's something that I've asked a lot of people about multiple disciplines. How do you do it? How do you handle this and then go about this? Basically constantly learning, Even if like sitting at a basketball game, my kids are playing basketball and I meet somebody and they say, oh, oh yeah, I do xyz, but oh, well, tell me about that. I want to learn because I want to learn from what other people are doing. What are they finding successful, what's helping them find success, and how can I adopt some of it or try it and maybe I try it and doesn't work for me, but this toggling of empathy is something that I found that's really worked for me over time. I hope you find it helpful because also it's something I want to be clear about. You're not ever turning empathy off. You're putting it on standby. Empathy is what makes us human. Empathy is what makes our relationships whole. Empathy is a huge part of our human, human connection. Empathy is what makes us work in groups and work in teams and work toward a common good. Don't ever turn it off, but put it on standby so that you still have access to it. You don't want possibility blindness. And sometimes in extreme emotions, we can't see other possibilities, extreme celebration. We can't see that potential danger, extreme negativity. We can't see that potential benefit or a good future. Sometimes we need to toggle the empathy to stand by and then bring it back again. This is only the end of today's show if you let it be. Who needs to hear what you just heard? Go ahead and share it with them right now. The Influence Every Day podcast is free. 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