Empathy is a skill which underpins relationships. Often, it happens intuitively, but there is much that can be done to cultivate more empathic workplaces and this week’s Squiggly Careers podcasts looks at the actions we can all take to achieve that. Helen and Sarah explore 3 different types of empathy at work and talk through 5 ways in which we can build more empathy into our work.
About this week’s episode:
This week’s podcast is all about how we can practice the skill of empathy more at work. We talk through Daniel Goleman’s identification of three different types of empathy (cognitive, emotional and compassionate) and our top 5 tips for bringing more empathy to your work.
Here are the different resources we mention on the episode:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33287727
https://hbr.org/2016/12/the-most-and-least-empathetic-companies-2016
https://www.romankrznaric.com/empathy-a-handbook-for-revolution
Finally, we’ve started to transcribe our podcast episodes so that they are more accessible for people. You can full the full transcription below – please be aware that it’s not perfect, but hopefully good enough
Epiosode 75 – Empathy Transcription
Sarah: [00:00:03] Hi everyone and welcome to this week’s Squiggly Careers podcast. I’m Sarah and I’m just about joined by my co-host Helen who is very croaky Helen. Are you there?
Helen: [00:00:12] I am here in all of my croaky style and I’m in Chester and your at home.
Sarah: [00:00:18] I am in London so we’re very different places and our voices sound quite different.
Sarah: [00:00:23] So you’re probably going to hear a little bit more of me today. We’re sort of persevering with our commitment to do it weekly and this is episode 75 which I don’t know why that feels like a milestone but it just sort of does. And today we’re going to be talking all about empathy and what empathy is why it matters within a squiggly career how to think about empathy. And probably most importantly what you can do to build and learn empathy for yourself. And I was doing some research into this. It’s an area that I found interesting for a while and there it’s not like me to start with a quote but I was reading about empathy and in To Kill a Mockingbird there’s this line that says you never really understand another person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it. And that is what really provoked to me the point of sound and what empathy really means and what people are talking about when they describe empathy which is not just about understanding but really that kind of step further in terms of walking in somebody else’s shoes. And it’s one of these things that is a real cornerstone of emotional intelligence. And though there were things that threw me a bit is apparently 98 percent of people have the ability to empathize and then I was just thinking so who are this 2 percent who is a sociopath like people that just don’t have been a teacher it’s quite extreme. I think that might be it. So I think we should all sort of assume everybody listening should assume that we we naturally have the ability to be empathetic and to build this skill even more or less to see more in the 98 percent. So I will say it was I wasn’t quite clear what would make you into that 2 percent. And the reason I first started to get really interested in empathy is actually as a result of something called the empathy museum. So this was a concept that was developed by actually a philosopher at Oxford University a guy called Roman and it was a physical museum where you turned up and you took a pair of shoes like physical sheaves so there was somebody else’s shoes and you put them on see the ones that were the same size as yours and then you walked along with a like a mini recording device with your headphones in for a mile and for a mile you listen to somebody telling their story and you were listening to the story of the person who shoes you were wearing. And I just thought it was a really clever are actually really literal way of going you know like you’ve never really understood somebody until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. It was actually making you do that and you’d think Oh you’re not going to know somebody that well just by walking a mile in their shoes. But I can still remember the stories now because it was so compelling as something to do to actually was like just feel like you were kind of pretending to be somebody else. And it was like getting into their world and they were just describing things that were really important to them.
Sarah: [00:03:16] So that sort of started my interest and empathy and I think some of the work that we’ll talk about in a bit around Daniel Goldman’s work on emotional intelligence where he talks about empathy as being such an important kind of cornerstone part of developing emotion intelligence.
Helen: [00:03:31] I like a quote that Daniel Goleman said as well and he’s that dumb without empathy, a person is emotionally tone deaf. I really like you because it kind of they’re just not they’re not hearing they can’t hear other people’s emotions if you’ve not got empathy. And I also if I think about why is it important in the context of squiggly careers which is what Sarah and I spent a lot of our time talking about about how careers are no longer this kind of linear predictable thing and actually is a lot of movement in a squiggly career. And that brings opportunities and challenges. But when I think about some of the challenges squiggly careers can bring all of the movements some of the uncertainty some of the ambiguity and it can give rise to challenges like stress or loneliness which we talk it on a podcast previously. I think that’s where empathy then starts to really come in as a powerful career skill because it can help you to build relationships and build bridges with other people who might need that level of support in the context of a squiggly career. I feel like it’s no longer just a nice thing to have you know just being empathic person actually. People need this. This is a way that you can help and support your colleagues and maybe help them deal with some of the challenges it’s not there shouldn’t be someone else’s problem we can all help each other by developing skills of empathy.
Sarah: [00:04:44] I was reading actually today that for the first time ever now pretty much we’ve got five generations of people in the workforce. And so that’s a really good argument for why empathy is so important because just the diversity and range of people that we are now going to be working with and that’s only going to continue to increase as people continue to work longer. That ability to empathize with lots of different kinds of people with different backgrounds experiences different ages will mean the things that we work on together will be better because again within squiggly careers of health mentioned very few things I think now are individualistic. Very few of us do things where you just get on with it by yourself and you don’t ever interact with other people. I think those jobs are pretty rare. Even if you do something where it might mean that you sit and do something for three or four hours by yourself usually it’s still you’re part of something bigger. And so again the ability to build empathy means that when you’re working as a collective the likelihood of a kind of positive outcome of performing better is much higher when everybody kind of has empathy with everybody else. So you kind of have to start I think with you. But then if other people around you can also have it I suspect it’s going to be one of those things that will become a signal or indicator of the best teams. I think the bag the best teams will show empathy for each other. And Daniel Goleman talks actually about three different types of empathy which I thought were worth just touching on briefly before we get into kind of how to build empathy for yourself. And he talks about cognitive emotional and compassionate empathy and we’ll just perhaps go through each one and just about each of them in turn. So cognitive empathy is as we’ve described empathy where you understand how somebody else feels. So you have kind of been able to understand kind of get in their shoes understand their world. And he talks about how this is really useful in terms of motivating people getting the best from people negotiating with people. And when I was reading this I was thinking actually here there’s quite a close link I think to things like values close thinking how do you make this practical. So if you like I want to build my cognitive empathy. Actually if you understood the values of the people around you or even more basically what’s important to the people you’re working with if you think about then that correlates really closely to how to get the best from people or how it’s going to motivate people. You know it’s really important to them you can help them with kind of making the right decisions you can also make the right decisions that’s going to support that person. So I think that the cognitive one is probably the one that you think of first when you think of being empathetic.
Helen: [00:07:21] And I think that’s the mode for me when I was a manager in a corporate environment rather than working full time on the lovely amazing if I think I probably demonstrated cognitive empathy than most of the three terms of cognitive emotional or compassionate that I’m going to put myself in your shoes. Where are you coming from. What can I do to help you. What would you do. How do I get the best from you in this situation. How do I help you to be your best thinking through all those different contexts in their perspective. That was definitely how I operated as a manager.
Sarah: [00:07:51] Yeah. And it’s important say that these are not really positives or negatives they’re just different types of empathy so you can imagine some of these things actually take into their extreme. And I think he does give this example is that because cognitive empathy is good for things like negotiation. At its worst it can go into things like manipulative behaviors. So it’s almost like not these are not necessarily all good or bad it’s just these are types of empathy and then it’s kind of using them like responsibly. I think in terms of using them for yourself in kind of the right way. So emotional empathy is when you almost feel that you kind of absorb and feel the other person’s kind of emotions as part of having empathy with them. And I’ve actually learned this previously using kind of a different word through learning to be a coach which is something called transference which is essentially it’s not only you understand how somebody else feels but almost then you feel it yourself. So you feel it quite keenly. And so whether that is their energy you feel their positivity or you feel somebody who’s kind of motivation or it could be if you kind of absorb other people’s stress around you and at its most extreme emotional empathy can lead to almost you experiencing burnout because of the people you’re spending time with and always having overly high emotional empathy isn’t necessarily a good thing or it’s something that if you do have you have to work out how you going to manage that for yourself so that it doesn’t impact you negatively. And often when I chat to people about this one you can see that it resonates with some people could have really strongly that they go Yeah I really fear and absorb the emotions or maybe the energy of a room or a meeting. And it really impacts me rather than seeing as well that’s how they’re feeling and I understand that which would be cognitivevs. emotional. That’s how they’re feeling and actually now I’m almost feeling this way because I’m I have so much kind of empathy with it it kind of becomes part of who I am. And so actually I can see how I’m sometimes like this because I’m a very positive person I’m always very positive and optimistic and upbeat. I often find if I spend time with people who may be looking at the risks or the challenges which can sometimes feel negative. I do find myself thinking Oh no I’m feeling like that and then trying to work out. Do I actually feel like that or do I just feel like that because other people feel like that does not make sense.
Helen: [00:10:16] I think since I’ve gone to amazing a full time I am now coaching far more people either in groups or one to ones or responding to lots of people’s e-mails and they’re sharing often quite personal things. I definitely feel this emotional peace a little bit more intense the transfer it’s like it’s not so easy to just read an email or have quite a emotional conversation with somebody and then just switch it off actually in order to help more people like myself. I’ve got to develop that resilience and it reminded me actually I was on LinkedIn the other day and I was reading an article at Bruce Daisley had posted. Sarah did a podcast with Bruce about his book and The Joy of Work a while ago that he’s someone that we both know and has a great podcast called eat sleep repeat. But he had happened to post an article on Linked In. But it was about the people who do content moderation on Facebook. Basically these people will have to watch very distressing videos.
Sarah: [00:11:22] Yeah it’s an awful day.
Helen: [00:11:23] It sounds dreadful and they watch this and they basically delete it and they they are assaulted with these images all day every day so that the rest of the population that use Facebook don’t have to see them but they are getting like some of the things that that article reports show the damaging effects on like emotional contagion or transfer. When I mean at this extreme that’s yeah that’s not the situation everyone has but it’s a very sharp example of the impact of this.
Sarah: [00:11:50] Actually my friend is a psychologist and I think because of the nature of his job it’s really interesting that when you chat to him this kind of two things that he does in terms of managing his emotional empathy it. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. I think it just means you need to kind of manage it for yourself and the two things that he does is a as a psychologist. If you’re actually helping other people you actually have to have therapy yourself so you know that. That’s kind of part of the process which I think is a really good thing. You and I were talking about this you that day talking about something that we were helping people where the guy we always feel like we need some of that some of the time. I think that’s something that will by think about and then the second thing is that he plays a lot of sport and I actually it’s one way I guess of almost like releasing adrenaline but also the positive endorphins that are released as a result of doing kind of physical exercise helps you to feel positive and he has actually a very tough job in terms of what he does in the patients that he sees and so it’s interesting I think plays football like four times a week. And I think that’s partly because he loves it but I suspect it’s partly to make sure that he manages his emotional empathy throughout the week. Given the nature of what he does so I think if this is you. It’s not about thing to feel these things for yourself. It’ll give you a level of empathy but just ask yourself firstly is that how you feel and if it is something that is causing you stress or burnout or you feel like you are absorbing kind of very strongly. Think about what you could do what techniques you could employ for yourself so it doesn’t become something that hinders you will get in your way and then the last type of empathy is compassionate empathy. So this is where you understand how somebody else is feeling and actually you take action and you help almost on that person’s behalf. And lots of the examples that are given around compassion. Empathy is always outside of kind of the day to day business work. It’s often where people suddenly come into contact with a charitable cause and then actually feel propelled or compelled to then take some action to do something about that cause that they wouldn’t have done previously because they feel kind of so much compassion for something.
Sarah: [00:14:15] I think the thing I have done is probably five or six years ago through something called the Marketing Academy which is something both Helen I’ve done which is almost a learning program that we both benefited from. There was a program that was kind of alongside that which was to support marketing apprenticeships for people who were very kind of challenged disadvantaged backgrounds people who would never get the opportunity to kind of come into the creative industries without some kind of support or help and actually want to things that they needed to give these apprenticeships full time fully paid for and kind of subsidised training roles was to actually raise funds and actually I did always understand and recognize that and actually set something up myself where a group of us together put on a set of learning events cross the air to actually raise money to fund these apprenticeships and that’s something that’s kind of stayed with me in various kind of ways shapes and forms we’ve got next big conference actually on the 11th of April. Facebook are very kindly donating their venue to us. I say that is probably my best example of where you go. You’ve not only understood something but you’ve gone way beyond that to actually help and take action even if it’s in a small way within your own world. And that’s different to suggest understanding which we the cognitive or just feeling which would be the emotional. Is this a step further forward. And I don’t think there’s necessarily going to be lots of examples of these things but I think you’ll probably build to spot the things where you’ve gone a bit further than you would usually think.
Helen: [00:15:46] I was just thinking about whether I had got an example but actually this week I spoke to Digital Mums. Digital Mums have a group of people who are now running their own Digital Mums training sessions to train other people to become Digital Mums. And I ran a Facebook life for them on how to basically these people were all organising their very first session. And so from a compassionate empathy perspective I know what that feels like to organise a session that you’re not sure if everyone’s going to arrive and you’re not thinking and you’re not 100 percent confident in your content. So I can compassionately empathize with where they’re coming from and how they would feel and then I moved into action mode in terms of helping them because I shared my experiences my tips what I had learned my vulnerabilities. So to be part of what can help them be absolutely brilliant on the day and there’s lots of other things that they’ll be doing that will ensure that will happen. But that’s kind of an example of where it’s almost like you can relate to it but you help someone to move forward in a kind of quiet productive way.
Sarah: [00:16:57] So let’s move on then to how to build empathy. Empathy is a skill it is something that you can kind of learn practice that you can consciously think about building you will base your your empathy muscle at work. And what that might look like and so we’ve come up with five examples that we hope are quite practical things that you could actually go and do that work next week next month or things that kind of inspire a thought for you about what you could do that might work better within your environment and as you are listening if you do have any other ideas about maybe things you’ve done in the past to help you build empathy that you could share with the rest of our listeners or things that you’re going to try that have worked really well please do go on Instagram we’re just amazing f follow the community there. And when we do our blog post for the podcast it was always great to hear when people have got other ideas and other things to share and that’s the joy of that community. We definitely have all of the answers but we try to have some of the answers or some thoughts at least to get everybody started.
Sarah: [00:17:53] So my first top tip is think about practically how you could spend some time at work understanding someone else’s world and my best example of doing this and it was a very much a moment in time example something I think I could proactively now think about how I do this again today that you just do this once and kind of it off your list is that when I joined the creative agency that I work in at the moment I sort of ran on was an adopt a Managing Director scheme where I asked people to adopt me for a day or for a week or for part of a day so that I could come with them and spend the day with them understanding their world and what they do. I’ve not worked in a creative agency before so I didn’t kind of naturally have that empathy having done their jobs previously perhaps or been in those kind of teams and I was very mindful of potentially there being quite a big gulf between my own experiences and some of the experiences of the people that I was working with. And it was a really small thing that I did but I think actually a people appreciated me taking the time to understand their world but also I just learned so much and it doesn’t have to be really time consuming you know a lot of those times it was spending an hour with somebody or a couple of hours with somebody I was thinking actually even within you kind of the teams that you’re part of this could be with someone else in the same team a pair it could be spending a day in the life of your manager a day in the life of somebody in a different team a day in the life of somebody who’s maybe just starting work maybe if you’ve got 20 years of experience actually having empathy with what it’s like to kind of start work for the first time would be really fascinating and once I got into this also I worked out you could spend all of your time doing this and it would just be really interesting because you’d just be exploring loads of different people’s worlds and I think that be fascinating and you’d never do any actual work.
Sarah: [00:19:39] But I do think you probably have to be quite proactive understanding someone’s World at Work days it just happens. I think you’ve got to prompt it or make it happen in some way that kind of works for you.
Helen: [00:19:51] Yeah I agree. I’m sure there’s a way to turn it into a job and then maybe write a book on it or something like that someone should do that.
Sarah: [00:19:57] Maybe that’s the next book I given we’ve not finished the first!
Helen: [00:20:01] Yeah sure. If our editor’s listening story she’d appreciate that! Moving on very swiftly to number two and the second way in which we think you can build empathy is to show gratitude to other people and to show it regularly. I’m a bit of a geek with gratitude actually I love. I think it’s about showing it to the people but it’s also about developing gratitude as a mindset. So one of the slightly geeky things that I do that will make Sarah cringe slightly every night when I’m in bed I think about three things that I am grateful for that day.
Helen: [00:21:02] And so it’s about cultivating a mindset of gratitude and I will try to find I quite like doing gratitude in surprising ways.
[00:22:27] I always carry cards with me in my in my handbag as well. So sometimes the staff that I work with as events sometimes I’ll hand write them a card give it to them because I think it is just a way of showing gratitude and appreciation. And sometimes that can be surprising for people because they might not get it from everybody. And I think it’s them is a really nice role that you can play for people in their day. You’re good at it. Sarah you often send little cards and things like that as well.
[00:22:51] Yeah. And I think the other thing of gratitude is sometimes try and show your gratitude in the hardest moments or in the things where it doesn’t naturally come to you. Mighty sometimes be things that are frustrating or they’re annoying you. But I think in those moments think about what am I grateful for. What is that person doing really well. These are indeed a talent is a very good job because I have a tendency to sometimes send Helen quite out of the blue ideas or musings and at times I suspect it’s not the right time or it just gets on my nerves. But you always come back and very positive aspects and sometimes that takes a bit of mental agility to say okay well I guess this might not be something I would think about right now or it could be getting in the middle of something else I’m trying today but hey you know what. I’m actually still grateful for something something within the I’m grateful that I’m working with somebody who has lots of ideas or he likes to think big or occasionally has some quite random musings that are sometimes helpful all of which is true. So I think just think about it not only when it’s very obvious but also in kind of the harder moments top tip number three. I’ve stolen from. I’ve seen a few people use it before which is something called the Human Library concept. I think that actually might be a movement called The Human Library where they actually come in set up in different countries. I think it is in multiple different countries but essentially it’s the idea that you and I think you could set this but work so easily that you borrow a human rather than a book. And I know I’m trying to think I think you might be Jack Graham who told me about this. He runs a brilliant social enterprise called year here which is amazing if you want to check that out. But I think they did what in Hackney of course because you know was the super cool thing that was happened in Hackney in London and say the way this works is you basically advertise yourself as people could borrow you to talk about. So I was thinking okay and this is not are your work related. So for example if somebody wanted great fiction reads or wanted some book recommendations you could definitely borrow me to do that I would be able to give most people some really good book recommendations. I love reading and I read a lot of fiction. And so that might just be something random someone’s like Oh I’d quite like spend 10 minutes talking about that and actually in a very practical way. I have seen this work well in Sainsbury’s. So in Sainsbury’s in the marketing team that I was part of we did something called a skills bank. Not quite such a cool name as a human library. But essentially everybody listed all of the kind of skills that they had to offer some of which they used in their day to day jobs and you probably could have guessed that they would have but some of the things were sometimes a bit surprising they were perhaps things that people had used in previous jobs or there’s something that was very passionate about. They happened to be really good at video editing or maybe they had a podcast that you just didn’t realize or they were brilliant cooks. So there was those just loads of different things and actually just by sharing those things the idea was that almost you could go and like borrow from the bank and you could be. Okay well I need somebody to come in as a facilitator workshop and that would have been in my skills bank. And so actually by people knowing that and it’s something I really enjoyed doing they could kind of borrow you to facilitate a workshop and I think there’s something about that in terms of that concept of appreciating everybody else’s skills all the different things that they bring to work that just helps build empathy between everyone. So I think this is one where this is not necessarily just about you building empathy is how you can build empathy in your small team in your organization so that actually you just have this kind of appreciation for everyone or the brilliant things everybody has to offer.
Helen: [00:26:37] So tip number four in terms of how you can build empathy is to develop something called radical listening and this is something that somebody called Marshall Rosenberg talks a lot about in terms of how important it is actually for reducing conflict. Talks about how radical listening is an approach that you can use to reduce conflict. And one of the things that he talks about is that in the context of like an employer or an employee so like a manager and someone that works for the manager in terms of that relationship occasionally that conversation can have some kind of conflict. Maybe there’s a disagreement or a debate going on between you and your manager when he talks about with radical listening is where that you you can trigger drastically reduce the amount of conflict that’s happening in that conversation simply by both of those parties repeating exactly what the other person has said. So let’s say Sara and I are having a debate a heated debate about what we think we should talk about next on the podcast. Sara could say okay. Helen so one of the things that you think is talk about is flexibility. Well my perspective is that we talk about this and I could then say well one case or your perspective if you want to talk about gender pay gap. Well I you know this is what I think about it. But actually just by listening and playing back to the person you can help to reduce that conflict. And one of the things that I liked when I was looking into Marshall Rosenberg’s work was he was saying that actually at school we get to a lot about reading and we get talk a lot about writing. We don’t really get talked about listening but it is such a fundamental skill in the workplace. And so we need to play catch up. And actually I think if you can start to practice radical listening tune and completely turn off your distractions play back what you are hearing is one way in which you can maybe play a bit of catchup on what might be a skills gap for many of us because we haven’t spent the same amount of time thinking about it.
Sarah: [00:28:31] And I think given within script careers we often talk about the amount of technology that we all have our fingertips. And often the way that we work we have to work quite hard to be present. I think if you can be very present and radically listen at the same time it’s going to give you a real competitive advantage because you’re not being distracted by different things to be able to repeat what somebody said. You’ve got to really listen to it.
Sarah: [00:28:54] And somebody who doesn’t like conflict the idea of just listening really hard and then actually just being to have a conversation where you’re showing empathy through repeating things sounds really appealing. That’s also something I definitely want to do. Is arguing with someone so I reckon I’m gonna start giving that a try. But in my continual quest to have challenging conversations constructively shall we say.
Sarah: [00:29:23] Number five in our empathy tip say the last one is around asking empathetic questions and I think a good question to ask yourself is when did you last ask a question to somebody at work where the motivation or the driver behind that question was to build empathy with that person. So it can be as simple as asking people how do they feel today grounding that in today which we talked about this before about how important it is not just to go how do you feel because average guys find any kind of I’m not fine but I’m fine dismissive way or they don’t really answer the question whereas actually if you ask someone are you know how are you feeling today or how is this week on for you really trying to get people to kind of explain how their wealth feels at the moment. I’ve done this before asking people as a team what one word would have been used to describe this week. If you do something what you do will get together at the end of a week. You know how people feeling a 50 percent of the people feeling stressed and anxious and overworked and 50 percent feeling motivated and energized and a case of what’s going on there is it that we’re not prioritizing in the right way are we not helping each other enough. What would it take for us all to have a positive word. By the time we get to an end of a week I would think that I think that’s a really nice way to think about ways every day and every week. What would it take to make sure that my words to describe that day and that week is going to be a positive one given all of the ambiguity and change and uncertainty within a squeaky career and helping other people to make sure that that word is a positive one is a really good thing that you can do for yourself and for others.
Helen: [00:30:55] A very Sarah build on that exercise would be to get people to draw how that week had felt and they can talk about it and it might unlock the people that might go. Yeah it’s been fine in two slightly deeper reflections on the week ahead so maybe maybe that’s the next version of the exercise.
Sarah: [00:31:12] Yeah the thing I really want to do which I’m imagining in my head right now if you kind of gangway everyone’s career risk quickly now pretty much as very few people who don’t recognize the relevance of kind of the squiggle. And I was asking people draw your squiggle for this week and I think sometimes you know we talked before about when you squiggly career can get knotty and you know if people are drawing tight squiggles and they look knotty and pressing down hard on the page I’d probably tell you quite a lotvs. a kind of more swirling free a squiggle where people are going oh you know I feel like I’ve had freedom to explore things. Yeah there’s been some ups and downs but I’ve come out of it positively. I mean you probably get into of psychology there about how do people even go about doing it. How quickly do they do it. But I would find it really interesting.
Sarah: [00:32:10] And if you are in a position where you are leading a team you can then think about with your empathetic questions Are you moving into kind of the area that we talked about in terms of cognitive empathy where you’re using the answers to those questions as a way to make sure you’re motivating people and getting the most from people. So was that the first step is to ask the questions and then the second step is to think what might you’re going to do with that entail what am I going to do with that response to help people do their best work to do even better work. The week after. So it’s sort of combining a few these things that we talk about in terms of listening saying thank you. Asking really good questions. And then in some way shape or form I think building this empathy does require you to take some action.
Sarah: [00:32:57] So as always we’ve got lots of interesting resources to complete a podcast this week. There’s a really good RSA animated film all about our section and empathy which refers to some of the work of the philosopher that I mentioned at the start of the podcast. In general the RSA animated films are brilliant if you’re trying to understand a concept to a topic they summarize them say beautifully and a few particular things to be drawn and visualized they cover so many different topics I’d look at these anyway. And then there’s our usual kind of range of articles in terms of how to build empathy some different ideas lots of things in terms of some of the work around Daniel Coleman that we’ve talked about
Helen: [00:33:37] I’m not it’s not on the list but there s little survey and it’s called I think it’s ‘in the mind’s eye’ obviously we’ll put the link on the blog post but it’s a I think it’s got 37 questions and the questions are you have to look at images of people’s eyes and guess the emotion they are expressing when you look at the eyes and it gives you a score and it compares you to an average. So if you want to get a view of how good you are understanding emotions by looking at people’s eyes it is quite a nice little test to do that really feels to me. I know I was quite happy with my score. I was 86 percent higher than the average.
Helen: [00:34:35] I’m going to send you the link to Sarah and then we can compare scores
Sarah: [00:34:42] Well the other one I was going to mention is something we’ve not really talked about today is always empathetic companies. So companies that have created cultures of empathy. And there is a good Harvard Business Review article of where there’s been some research done around what does it take to have a kind of culture of empathy what does that looked like and lady call Belinda Palmer who’s a real expert in this area talks about it talks about the companies that she spent some time in. They are mainly a sort of slightly skewed when I look at it towards kind of larger companies but certainly you can read the characteristics of those things and then almost think about how does that apply to the organization that you work in.
Sarah: [00:35:20] So we’re coming to the end of a podcast this week. Thank you as always for taking the time to listen we really do appreciate it. We’ve got over a hundred reviews now a hundred five star reviews which makes us super happy. If you’re listening to your seventy fifth episode or you’re listening to your first. If you’ve not had time just yet to go on and give us a rating and a review we would really appreciate it and makes a massive difference in terms of our ability to share the podcast. Make sure that we keep doing them every week helps with all our Apple algorithms. So if you take five minutes to do that we will show you gratitude and be very thankful
Sarah: [00:36:09] And if you want to connect with us you can always find us on linkedin as Sarah and Helen Tepper. If you want to be part of the amazing if community probably the best place to find as is Instagram with just amazingif. And we are on Twitter as well amazing underscore if (amazing_if) which is where we share more set of events often resources articles videos.
Sarah: [00:36:29] And next week we’re going to be talking about inspiration at work. So where do you get inspiration from. How to use inspiration to kind of do better work. What does it take to be inspiration or what does that kind of mean at work. And here are the inspirational people that we’ve worked with. What’s the impact they’ve had and how do we think we’ve been able to potentially inspire other people ourselves.
Sarah: [00:36:57] So really interesting topic for next week and something I’m kind of really fascinated by.
Sarah: [00:37:01] Thank you for listening and we’ll speak to you again in a week’s time.
Sarah: [00:37:05] Bye for now.
Helen: [00:37:06] Bye
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