Latest / RiseUp - Live Joy Your Way / Strategic Empathy: Distinguishing Resource from Vigilance
Transcript
- Voiceover: [00:00:00] Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Kamini Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit. Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live. Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. Kamini Wood: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening, thank you for spending some time here with me today. Now, there's a particular kind of leader I wanna talk to today. You are the one your team brings their, their feelings to. You're the one who notices when someone in the meeting goes quiet. You read the room before you speak, and you almost intuitively know the tension in your partner's voice means stress or when it [00:01:00] means hurt. You can sit across from a stranger at a dinner party and even have them telling you their entire life story by the end of the night, as though you have known them for years. Now, people may even call you a natural leader. They may even say, "You know, you're just like a, you're like a therapist, right?" And they say you have this gift, and let me say, you actually do. Because if you are somebody that people can talk to and you can pick up on what they're kind of putting out there, it is a gift. But I, I kinda wanna talk about where this may have come from. And I do say, like, I definitely feel like I can relate to this because I know it very well. Uh, I happen to definitely say that I am a high-functioning empath for sure. Uh, because a lot of... And, and I will say that, um, a lot of people who feel that they are that, that person that people can talk to, um, it feels good and it can also feel really heavy. And a lot of people that I work with, um, what it looks like, I think i- it looks like leadership, right? But from... And [00:02:00] it looks like leadership from the outside, but it really did start from somewhere different, and I think it's important for us to name where that started from because a lot of us learned it as a survival skill. Now, stick with me here 'cause you may think, "Oh my gosh, Kamini, the fact that I can listen to people and people like to talk to me, it's not a survival skill." Yes, and also there's a possibility that there's a little bit of a survival skill, and I'm saying this from my own personal experience. So I'm gonna name it something. I'm gonna call it strategic empathy. It's a kind of attunement that isn't given freely. It's one that was, um, developed and became this automatic ability to read a room because if you didn't read the room, it meant the difference between safety and danger. Uh, it meant the difference between peace and conflict. So strategic empathy, it definitely looks like leadership, but it... And it often gets called leadership, but underneath something else is going on. So here's what nobody really means about this idea of empathy that you're praised for. The ability to read a room, again, [00:03:00] it's, it's, it's a gift, it's a strength. But like any strength, it can turn into a weakness. I just wanna say that. It, but it's not a personality trait. It's definitely a skill, and skills are learned, and they're learned when the cost of not learning them is too high. So if you grew up needing to know whether the person in the room, uh, that you were walking into was safe to approach, you, um, or you needed to know whether, uh, silence at the dinner table meant that, um- This was the calm before a storm is about to happen. Your nervous system trained itself to read micro sys- uh, micro signals, micro expressions, um, little tiny ver- non-verbals, facial tension, vocal tone, vocal speed, breath rate. Your, your nervous system learned how to read that, where you could read that small shifts in somebody's pitch in their voice meant that, oh gosh, uh, uh, something was about to change, a mood was about to change. Now, you couldn't articulate what you were tracking at the time, you just [00:04:00] seemed to know. And so that's what people don't really recognize. They call it a gift, and there's part of it is a gift. I think that we can use it as a gift again. But you've learned to attune to other people's nervous system because your own safety depended on how they were showing up. You learned to predict moods because being caught off guard would cost you something. You learned that I need to soothe the system before, um, before I ask for something because I needed to keep the temperature down, right? You needed to keep everybody's, um... nobody getting too hot, right? You need to keep them cool. You learned that it's better to absorb someone's feelings because if you absorb their feelings, then it felt less dangerous And then you brought this into adulthood and you became someone who is really good with people. You're, you're good at, um, anticipating needs in a relationship. You're really good at leadership because you can, you can kind of read how people are. You might even good at, at-- you're good at things like coaching people. Um, [00:05:00] you're good at, at, at sales. Um, you're actually really good at parenting, and it's because the world has rewarded this skill, um, where you make... Okay, here's the thing. It is a great gift. I think it's a great gift that, that we're able to meet people. I, I do this for a living. I think that's a huge strength of mine. However, the skill itself, I think sometimes it's important to understand where it came from because sometimes that skill means that we're tracking in all situations, and it can cause exhaustion when we're constantly tracking and we're constantly on guard. Because when somebody is running strategic empathy, what ends up happening is when you walk into a room, you're automatically scanning, not consciously, but you're automatically scanning, and sometimes it's going faster than you're even thinking, and you're picking up on the mood, the energy, and even these small tensions between people and, and you nee-- you kind of figure out like who, who might need reassurance in the moment. And because you're constantly scanning, it, [00:06:00] it can be, um, like I said before, it can actually be exhausting, right? And once you're done scanning, what happens is your system is readjusting, you know, to whatever you've scanned for. So if you're in a meeting and you're scanning, maybe your tone softens or maybe it needs to sharpen, your energy goes up or your energy goes down. So as an example, I was just facilitating the other day, and I recognized that I was scanning and I was noticing that the energy, um, was down because there was this announcement at their company, and so people were feeling bad about the announcement that had just come through, and I was picking up with that energy and recognizing that I almost was calibrating to that energy that they were putting off, and I actually had to do a reset to recognize, okay, that's what they're doing. I can stay within my own being, and I make an adjustment. I made an adjustment to just have my own energy within that room. So the cost that we're dealing with here is when you are attuned to everyone else's emotional state, what ends up happening is your emotional state can go offline. So it's important that we actually name what's [00:07:00] happening here, that we don't want to take on what other people are feeling because we end up losing the ability to attune to our own feelings if that's what happens, right? So if we end up-- as an example, in my example with the facilitation, had I picked up on their energy and had just attuned to that, I would have lost my own grounding and my own footing of, you know, the fact that I was, I was there, I was really excited. I had something that I was going to talk about and teach them about. So I had to do my own recalibration in that moment to recognize, okay, that's theirs. I can, I can have space for what they're going through, but I don't have to take that on as my own. So What ends up happening is if we end up feeling other people's feelings as our own, we end up, um, our, what, what, our own body will take on that energy, right? So if, uh, if our partner is upset and is really frustrated about something that's going on at work, for instance, and then we take that on as our own, and then our body starts feeling that, now our nervous system is all out of [00:08:00] whack because we've taken on their emotionality that they were feeling. And if we don't know how to discharge it or set that boundary between their stuff and our stuff, we're gonna feel, what I would say, uh, you know, we, we start to feel inexplicably tired as an example, or we start to feel really frustrated. Before we know it, we're snapping at other people, and it's because we took on theirs. The other thing that ends up happening is the people closest to you will... They'll experience you as deeply understanding, but, um, what ends up happening is we start to enable them to want us to solve things for them, right? And so it's important for us to be able to separate us from them, that we shouldn't need to take on, you know, what, what they're dealing with. We need to stay in our role, and they need to stay in their role. This can also have an effect when we're thinking about leadership in the workplace. Because if you carry your entire team's emotionality, um, while it may feel like you're smoothing tensions on the surface, what you're actually doing is, um, you're absorbing all of their disappointment or you're absorbing all of their [00:09:00] frustration and all of their unspoken resentment, and then you become the carrier of all of that. Uh, and because you're kinda doing it behind the scenes, so to speak, nobody actually knows how to support you through that as well, and the team becomes more and more dependent on you over time. Once again, we're enabling this behavior to continue. So how do you know if your empathy is more of a resource or more of vigilance? Um, 'cause it can kinda look the same, right? You know, the compassionate leader, um, and the strategically attuned survivor kinda look very similar. So here's what empathy as vigilant looks like. So its attunement is automatic. You don't choose it. It happens before you even are in the conversation. You scan the room before you even say hello. Um, you can't easily stop. If someone you care about is upset, you literally cannot put their feelings down. It's like a constant, oh, you're thinking about it, and it continues. Um, you lose track of how you feel. You know, after interaction, you don't even know [00:10:00] how you feel because you've completely taken on the other person's feelings. You may also feel completely drained. You know, after you're-- you meet with somebody and you've had that connection with them, you actually recognize that you're leaving that connection completely drained. Now, here's what empathy as a resource might look like. It's, you know, when you-you're able to attune yourself to somebody, but it's not automatic. So it's, it's the difference between going into a room and automatically scanning and going into a room and consciously pa-- like looking at what's happening with people in the room. So it's the difference between... distinction I'm making here is between autopilot and you're consciously doing it. The other thing that you'll notice is that you can hold concern, you can hold empathy for somebody, but you don't have to carry their energy state with you, and you can, you can name how you feel. And even after a connection with somebody, even if it's a really hard conversation, you don't feel totally drained after that connection So again, if we're gonna kind of give it a cheat [00:11:00] sheet, if the vigilance is automatic, um, that, and, and it depletes you, that would be more of a survival mechanism. If it's something that is available and you feel replenished after a connection, then that is more, um, that's more just genuine empathy, right? So the thing that I want you to just remember, and the thing that I work with my clients on, is that this isn't about making a sweeping change, and it is certainly not about me saying that I want you to become, like, less caring or that you shouldn't pay attention to what's happening in your room. I talk about this in communication all the time. You know, we pay attention to verbals and non-verbals. This is very important things. But what we're talking about here today is am I scanning because I scan to survive, number one. And the other thing is, is I don't wanna have to take on everything that's not mine. Like, I, there's gotta be separation between myself and the other person. If you'd like to discuss this or something else in [00:12:00] terms of how coaching can help you move forward, either professionally or personally, feel free to book a time with me anytime at coachwithkamini.com, and until next time, stay well. Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Rise Up Live Joy Your Way. For more information, Book a chat with Kamini at www.chatwithKamini.com, or visit her website at www.kaminiwood.com. You can also find Kamini on Facebook or Instagram username, it's authentic me. Thank you for listening!