Empathy is an essential skill for a good balanced life but also a master competency for highly effective management and team play.
If you want to be happy and successful you have to develop your natural Empathy.
In case of a public emergency, like the Coronavirus contagion the world is living right now, feeling empathy is a non-negotiable asset everybody should have, to overcome the crisis.
Our brain is equipped with a “Social Wi-Fi”
Good news: scientific researches show that our brain seems to be naturally “wired” for Empathy; actually our evolutionary history proves humans’ ability to be strongly collaborative and cooperative.
Through the centuries, one of humankind’s highest capacity has been to care about others and collaborate with them to fight illnesses, wars, natural catastrophes. Human beings developed abilities to communicate and collaborate to a large degree and could act in teams to defeat any kind of danger or challenge.
Empathy can be activated
Our brain is countless mirror neurons resourced, allowing us to imitate, to catch moves, actions, but especially to tune into other people’s emotions and intentions so deeply that we can “get in unison”.
The activation of these mirror neurons open a reciprocal wave that all the members of a group can sense and feel, acting like a sort of “social Wi-Fi”.
Displaying optimism or showing mutual attention can be spread by a single individual to a whole group of persons.
In the same way, disregard for others or resentfulness or pessimism can be very contagious.
“Be like you” mindset reduces over-competitiveness
When you get to identify yourself with people surrounding you, realizing that the others are just like you, caring about the same things, aiming for the same goals, fighting with the same problems, then your Empathy naturally arises.
If you can think “Uh, my colleague is basically not very different from me”, you can reduce any negative tendencies for common ego and self-centeredness.
By adopting this new open mind-set, you naturally want to be part of the team, letting the mutual “wins” to happen, for the group’s sake.
Fostering Kindness
Truly wishing people to be well, happy and successful makes you a kinder person.
This will bring you away from the narrow ego-centered part of our nature that nourishes self-survival and self-ambition (often at the expense of others). Becoming a kinder person will transform other people’s look on you and they’ll want to be more around you and with you.
Intentionally developing your capacity for kindness is a natural accelerator of interpersonal Empathy.We can win our fight against Coronavirus, together, unified, collectively, cooperatively, undivided, concerted, solidary, empathically.
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