Читать книгу Inspirational Presence - Jeff Evans - Страница 23

Empathy is the basic capacity of humans to relate to others through the emotional information we sense by tuning into others’ experiences. The absence of empathy creates the psychopath. Empathy guides us and allows us to join into groups with some feeling of safety or to steer away from situations that seem unsafe. It provides us with the opportunity for deep personal connections. It creates emotional bonds in groups. Expanded empathy leads to heightened intuition. Empathy is an absolute requirement for effective leadership.

Empathy is a complex set of behaviors and processes that we learn over time. To understand it, we must realize that it comes into play through an interaction between the frontal lobes of our brain and our amygdula, the most primitive part of our brain, where our fight-or-flight responses live. When we are born, our amygdula is nearly fully developed, whereas it takes our frontal lobes until we are in our twenties to develop fully. During that time, we learn about what our experiences mean and determine the useful information for us in life. Through these interactions, we create a set of beliefs that forms the basis for internal conversations between the frontal lobes and the amygdula about what actually occurs around us.

Our amygdula is the first part of our brain to perceive information from our feelings about others. We look at another person, and our feelings respond first. The amygdula is the fastest processor in the brain, although it takes in less information than other areas. It is high speed and low resolution. The amygdula processes simultaneously with the frontal lobe, which is low speed and high resolution. Because of the dynamic between the two parts of our brain, most events that we encounter that have an emotional content are first interpreted by our amygdula and then by our frontal lobe.

Our first and potentially strongest emotional response is sometimes one that we learned earliest in life, maybe as young as age four or five. When we begin thinking about our thinking and thinking about our feelings, we begin to teach our amygdula new responses, and that allows us to move into a stronger and more mature state of connection with others. When we were four or five years old, our responses were dependent in nature. With maturity, we learn to be independent, then interdependent. Through mindfulness, we learn how to feel what is happening with others and have it guide mature and connected action on our part. This is how we begin to lead in confusing or chaotic environments.

We learn to train our minds to take on our belief sets and expand our ability to connect with others in meaningful and powerful ways. Through this, we can consciously choose how we engage with other people and how we use the power of empathy to relate to others. As a leader, this skill is fundamental to leading and influencing others. We first understand where others are by stepping into their experience and understanding how it would be for us.