Joel Silverstone defines empathy as acknowledging someone's emotional state without judgment, separate from sympathy. He shows how to spot emotional cues through facial expressions and tone, then de-escalate by listening, maintaining eye contact, and acknowledging the situation rather than labeling the person.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Joel Silverstone, and welcome to 5 Minute Mastery. We're going to spend the next 5 minutes looking at a skill that's going to make you feel more comfortable and more confident to be able to use with your colleagues, with your team members, with your customers by the end of these 5 minutes. Today's skill is going to be empathy. Now, if I was to ask you, what is empathy? A lot of you might say, put yourself in the other person's shoes. Yes, there is a lot of truth to that. The most important truth to that is that you are taking that pause to acknowledge that something has happened, that there is an event going on for the other person. Where I'm going to put a twist on that is that you don't necessarily have to share that feeling. You may not feel the same way. When you feel the same way, that actually becomes sympathy. Empathy means you don't necessarily have to agree with the emotion. You are not judging that emotion. You are simply acknowledging that a person is feeling that. So let me give you an example. Paraphrasing, right? Paraphrasing is to acknowledge what, what we hear, what people say. We summarize some of the words. We summarize the facts. Empathy then is to acknowledge the emotion. Empathy is to acknowledge the emotion. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you see? What do you hear? So what do you see? Is it a facial expression? Confusion? Not sure? Is it body language? The body language starts to get a little bit tense or starts to close up. Is it the words that you hear? Frustration? I'm really irked. I'm disappointed. I'm upset. So what do you see? What do you hear? Are the keys to be able to acknowledge the emotion. Now, what does empathy do? It does 3 things. The first, and this is quite important, is that it starts to just build your awareness. It builds your emotional intelligence, if you'd like, that there is something going on for the other person. Forces you to pause in that moment to drop your agenda. And when that happens, the second thing happens is a shift in the conversation. That's right, it becomes a turning point in the conversation because we start to go towards collaboration. And because there's collaboration now, you are showing an interest in the other person. Your own temperature is going to lower as well as you lower the other person. And when that happens, we can really get into a much more genuine dialogue. So when we are at the bank, we are often dealing with quite crucial life events. So empathy is definitely an important skill to be able to feel comfortable and confident about doing it. Now, when I was saying about the emotions, some of you might have been thinking, well, I'm uncomfortable to tell someone, I could see you're frustrated. We don't necessarily have to label the other person. What we can do is we can talk about the situation. And say, I can see that this situation has been frustrating for you. I can see that this situation has been difficult for you. I can see that this situation is disconcerting to you, is making— is upsetting you. So we're talking about the situation. We're not labeling the person, but we're picking up on those clues. Now, how do we do this? There's many ways we can do this. One is to slow down. Down. By slowing down and genuinely listening to the other person, that in itself can be empathy. We don't even have to say anything. If we see a body language or a facial expression or some of the words, if we just listen or slow it down, they— the other person will feel acknowledged, that their emotions are being acknowledged. The second part is to be making eye contact with someone, to not be distracted. When we're making eye contact with them, people feel much more connected and they feel acknowledged when we're making eye contact with them. And the final one again is to acknowledge the situation. What do you see and what do you hear? And we don't have to label that. Again, thinking on a personal note, when you see when a young person has fallen down and they're tripping and they're crying, our instinct is maybe to go get a Band-Aid and solve the problem. When in fact all they really want is that their emotions to be acknowledged. That really hurt, didn't it? Yeah, it did. And so when we acknowledge those emotions, temperatures are lowered— yours and the other person's— and we can get to a much more truthful and heartfelt dialogue. This has been 5 Minute Mastery. I'm Joel Silverstone. Good luck and enjoy using empathy.
