Читать книгу Leadership in Veterinary Medicine - Clive Elwood - Страница 67

Empathy is ‘commonly defined as the ability to recognise the emotions of another person while maintaining one's own perspective’ (McMurray and Boysen 2017). Empathy is using one's emotional intelligence to step into someone else's shoes and see the world as they see it, without losing oneself in the process. It is a critical component of compassion. As a leadership function it assists in building a mental model of a situation and predicting responses to decisions, as well as being able to react in the moment to how someone else is feeling.

Too much empathy, allied with compassion, can overwhelm us and lead to a failure to look after ourselves, putting others needs before our own and becoming self‐destructive.

For some people, such as those with poor connection with their own emotional needs (e.g. narcissists), empathy can be a more difficult competency to achieve. Where this is the case, those in relationship may feel poorly understood, overlooked, or unimportant. Note that empathy and compassion are not the same thing; psychopaths can understand the feelings of others but do not truly care.