Empathy
Our Skewed Perspective
If you’ve ever marvelled at one of your ingenious creations — which probably took you hours, days or even months to complete, only to have it received by someone else as “meh”. That right there, illustrates one of our biggest shortfalls as humans — our lack of ability to see things from another perspective. At home it’s called being insensitive or inconsiderate, at work for me as a designer, it’s called designer bias. For all the effort that we’ve put in, we tend to acknowledge all of the positives and often overlook or disregard the subsequent negatives. Disagreements often occur where those negatives begin.
Awareness of Self
Before you can begin identifying with others, you must first understand and identify yourself. When you become more aware of yourself, you can become more aware of others.
My wife has a colleague at work, let’s call her Lucy for now. Lucy is fairly new in the office but gets along with all of her colleagues, while some of them have even become really close friends; going on dinner dates with their husbands and always having a good day at work. Lucy regards herself as a positive and conducive team player. In her mind, she gets things done effectively and is a productive gun. I’ve met her on several occasions and she seems like a pretty cool person. So I was quite surprised when my wife told me how every single person at the office is really tired of her, including her “really close” friends. It turns out that she’s living in a bubble of ignorance, blisfully unaware of how she really makes people feel. I’m not going to psycho analayse Lucy to try and fix her problems, God knows how many problems there are of my own that need fixing. But Lucy sets a perfect example of how we all, to some degree live in a bubble of ignorance, unaware of how our actions are received by others and the effects of how these add up to form the perception others have of us.
As kids, we were taught the basics of empathy and today, we teach our children the importance of sharing and being nice to others too. But unfortunately as adults, a great deal of us fail to exercise and practice it in our own day to day lives. Empathy is a very important tool for any adult, yet it is a tool that we often ignore, at our own peril and of those around us.
Empathy, NOT Sympathy
We often mistake the use of empathy and sympathy, but they are two very different things. One is a sense, while the other is an emotion. Our confusion with these terms may arise from the fact that sympathy cannot be exercised without empathy and so we hardly disassociate the two from each other, and so we often look at empathy from a sympathetic lens and associate the term with feelings of sorrow. However, in order to understand empathy, we must realise that while symathy can’t exist without empathy, empathy can exist without sympathy. At home; it’s sharing joy in your child's excitement or your sisters graduation. At work; as an entrepreneur it’s understanding the customers problem and then providing value in a solution, as a designer it’s understanding your users experience and then designing that to be fluid, as an employee it’s understanding that you’re a part of an organisation and then effectivly playing your role in the system for it to work.
As humans it’s understanding that you’re part of a larger ecosystem (perhaps several) and then effectively owning your roles within each of them, making the effort to be a contributing member of it, life.
Empathy is a very useful tool that empowers those who know how and when to exercise it. As a designer that engineers experiences, empathy is one of the most vital tools in my research kit and I can tell you that it’s much, much more than just feeling sorry for someone.
Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others (too). — Otto von Bismarck
