Summary
Joe Hudson defines empathy as being with somebody’s experience without losing yourself in it — distinct from watching, analyzing, or wanting to change someone’s experience. He explains how highly empathetic people (especially children of alcoholics or abuse) can lose themselves in others’ emotional states through mirror neurons, mistaking others’ feelings for their own. The simple question “Is this mine?” can clarify this confusion.
The episode explores how empathy transforms decision-making, since all decisions are ultimately emotional — removing the emotional center of the brain eliminates the capacity to decide. Joe explains that our capacity to empathize with others directly mirrors our capacity to be with our own emotions. When we can welcome all our emotions, our decision-making becomes clearer and our relationships deepen.
Joe also addresses practical concerns: how to prevent losing yourself in others (maintain attention in your own body), how empathy differs from sympathy (sympathy puts you above the other person), how genuine empathy actually prevents manipulation rather than enabling it, and how to ground yourself between intense interactions. He shares stories of empathy transforming fundraising conversations, sales processes, and team dynamics.
Key Concepts
- Empathy is being with someone’s experience, not lost in it
- Asking “Is this mine?” clarifies emotional boundaries
- Maintaining body awareness prevents empathic merging
- Genuine empathy prevents rather than enables manipulation
- Empathy transforms business interactions by addressing emotional reality
- Emotional mastery moves from simplicity through complexity back to simplicity
Key Quotes
“Empathy is being with somebody’s experience without losing yourself in it.”
“If I take the emotional center of your brain away, you cease to make decisions. It would take you half an hour to decide what color pen.”
“If you’re here to help me, no thank you. But if you’re here to work together on our mutual freedom, let’s get to work.”
“Our capacity to love the parts of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love the parts of other people and other people in general.”
“I wouldn’t give you a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’ll give you my whole world for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
“Put some of your attention into your physical body during every conversation… it’ll rock your world if you do that for every conversation for a week.”
Transcript
when you have empathy with someone they’re more likely to be open because they feel that you’re with them and you can’t do anything to show to them you’re just empathetic and it just occurs welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease my name is Brett Kistler I’m an adventurer entrepreneur and a self-exploration Enthusiast I’m here with my co-host Joe Hudson Joe is a business coach who spent decades working with some of the world’s top Executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves each other and the world a good entry point into this model is a mindset called view vulnerability impartiality empathy and wonder through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the view State of Mind deepening self-awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us to learn more about this podcast or courses visit art of accomplishment.com
we often see a world where emotions are held inside and remain unseen by others filtered out as distractions we might focus on the business stuff that is the logistics and agreements that seem more relevant than the feelings behind them even in our personal lives intense reactions from others can feel like a distraction from the connection that we want what if learning to be acutely aware of others internal experiences can give us more useful information than the words they speak how can our personal and professional relationships change as we learn to notice and address the hurt behind an angry attack or the fear behind a hasty agreement this is the practice of empathy the e in view Joe how do you Define empathy so hard uh empathy is so much of a feeling more than it is an intellectual understanding but I would say it’s being with somebody’s experience without losing yourself in it that’s what I would say empathy is so it’s not watching somebody’s experience and it’s not wanting to change somebody’s experience it’s being with them in the experience without losing yourself in it give me an example so oftentimes when I’m working with clients for instance they’ll be all agitated around something and I’ll just ask a simple question like is this yours you know recently um there’s some covet anxiety that one of my clients was feeling and I was like is this yours and then like just immediately drop they’re like oh no it’s not mine so that’s one way that’s why when you’re in it um the other way is the other way to define kind of what it isn’t so to speak is like you see this all the time with babies crying so baby starts crying and some people get instantly annoyed and some people can be with that crime and that’s really a deep expression of their capacity to have empathy in that moment there’s actually something biologically that happens too after baby quest for an extended period of time for man their testosterone increases but in those first couple minutes of crying our capacity to empathize with that child or be agitated by that child uh is really is really kind of the that linchpin okay you said earlier this question is it yours what do you mean by that oftentimes highly empathetic people um kind of go beyond empathy what the way I would Define empathy and they would go beyond it and then they’re not being able to tell what’s their emotional state and what’s another person’s emotional state this really happens to people who were like children of Alcoholics or children of abuse people who had to survive by knowing the emotional state of somebody when they walk into the room and so they can very much get lost in the other person’s emotions and think that they’re theirs we have these things called mirror neurons in our brain and and they basically allow us to feel the state of other people on some level and and sometimes when we’re feeling somebody else we forget it’s that we’re feeling them that it’s not us that’s feeling that way and in a weird way we start feeling that way so then it’s really even more confusing because then you’re like oh I’m feeling it but if you ask yourself the question hey is this mine and then that can clarify a lot yeah that makes a lot of sense the idea of mirror neurons is a is a little bit interesting it’s the way I see it is that basically our entire system all of our Consciousness is kind of mirroring our reality in some way it has it mirroring and like correlating perfectly with it and then losing ourselves or are we correlating with it and being with it and experiencing it and learning from it yeah I think mirror neurons and neurology is such a mystery still you know what what is it that allows is this some form of mirror neuron that allows a whole bunch of birds to know how to turn at the exact same moment like like it’s a it’s there’s something particularly around mammals where there’s most mammals communicate without any words and so they’re really relying on their ability to sense the experience of the other animals yeah the social nervous system yeah so tell me tell me how practicing empathy will benefit us what does this do for us uh well one of the great benefits is that if anything that you have a hard time empathizing with means that you have a hard time with that emotional state for yourself so that’s fantastic um because our decision making process is really based on emotions right if I take the emotional Center of your brain away you cease to make decisions it would take you half an hour to decide what color pen so we’re really making decisions based on trying to feel or trying not to feel certain emotions whether we like it or not whether we think we’re being logical or not you know if that emotional Center of your brain gets taken away you still have all the intellect you still have all the rationale but you still can’t make the decisions so it really helps us clarify our decision making it um really allows us to help us be with our own emotional so and to discover where we’re having a hard time being with our own emotions and if you think about your life in this way if you think about like how much of your life has been decided by you know I don’t want to feel like a failure or I want to feel like a success or I don’t want to feel unhappy how many decisions have you made based on that criteria and to be able to be with all of your emotions what will that do if you look forward to all of your emotions what will that do to your decision making and how does it change your emotional state right if I have sadness and I don’t want to feel it it feels very different than if I have sadness and I want to feel it so those are like a lot of the things that will benefit us on an inward perspective externally obviously you know people like it when other people are with them you know I if you think about your friends and the people you feel closest to in the world you can find that they’re more able to be with you than people who you don’t particularly like and if you look at your friends and you say what is it about your friends that you want to have changed you know oftentimes it’s it fits into the category of their inability to be with you or see you for who you are um so there’s that whole thing too right where it’s just like we want to be empathized with most of us want to be empathized with and and so it just uh creates deeper connection more loving more capacity to love seems like the the first half of what you described is like feeling into our emotions to find out where our thoughts and rationale are coming from and then in others being able to see behind that too so if somebody if somebody’s presenting you with a solution or an idea um whether it’s a business context or you know relationship to be able to see behind that what the feeling is that that’s coming from can allow you to address a deeper root cause or need yeah at least it gives you the capacity to do it um you know sometimes people get upset if you do that you know it’s like wow it really doesn’t seem like you’re angry it seems like you’re hurt no I’m not you know that kind of um right but but generally it goes pretty well and people want to deal with the underlying thing you know so many so many logical arguments are really not at all about the logic it’s not really about the tactics or the facts I mean just look at most public discourse it’s not really about the facts it’s it’s about the emotional state of people and their fear and what they need and what they want and what they’re angry about so yeah to be able to connect with people on that level and to not tell them that they need to be different but to actually be with them it’s a huge capacity it really allows you to have a much deeper authentic relationship or communication with people yeah I think the public discourse is a great example because a lot of people get so triggered around other people believing different facts than them and I think that that’s really just coming from a lack of feeling seen yeah or or a feeling of that they’re out of control in their world or that they’re helpless or that there’s forces Beyond them that are controlling them or right so many emotions are happening there yeah so earlier you said you said this a couple of times to be with somebody in their experience without losing yourself how do you prevent that the easiest way to do it I mean it’s just a really simple way is just put some attention in your own body while you’re with somebody if you’re if you happen to be that type that has that deep empathy in you lose yourself in the person the kind of the traditional way people do it is they become defensive they just hold a level of defense and they’re like and that works um but it doesn’t allow you to be empathetic it just prevents you from getting lost in them to be empathetic in a successful way is to maintain a certain amount of your awareness in your own body so like right now when you’re listening to me you could also be paying attention to the bottom of your feet where you could also be paying attention to how the sound of this podcast feels in your ear in your inner ear and then that allows you to be with yourself while listening to me and being with me in my experience it’s about as easy as that just putting some attention in your own body and the other kind of more intellectual way is to just be aware of when it’s happening I think that’s the biggest challenge for most people is that they just don’t know when it’s happening and a great sign that it’s happening is if you buy into the story of whatever anybody is saying you know let’s say you have a friend and they’re like oh my boyfriend the world my boss and if you’re like yeah you’ve been victimized and we need to do something about it it’s like you pretty much if you’re in them now or just the opposite you know these people are bad yeah and then you’re in them uh if you buy into the story if you are with them emotionally but you know that the story that they’re telling is true within their context but not true within everybody’s context then you’re pretty much not lost in them this sounds very non-intellectual and a lot of people a lot of people are going to want to try to understand this more what would you say to folks who want to understand or analyze emotions or just have that have that tendency or just want to analyze this process yeah yeah you’re you’re screwed is I would say I mean we can we can tell you good story I mean we’re doing it right now we’re telling you good stories about it um but it’s not going to really help empathy is a felt sense uh it’s like say you close your eyes and you know where your left foot is right that that’s called proprioception it’s knowing where your body is in in space like how do you describe that logically right you can describe what it is logically potentially but you can’t really describe how to do it logically so similar with like going to the bathrooms like how do you know when you’re done going to the bathroom like where’s the logic are you measuring something you know are you are you timing it no yeah there’s just a felt sense oh that’s done so it’s the same thing empathy is a felt sense and felt sense can’t really be described by the intellect with any kind of um accuracy like it’s like looking at color how do you how do you describe seeing green you know that it’s like it requires a label that is arbitrary so so logic isn’t really going to do any good here for that uh and it’s why it’s so easy to dismiss things like empathy and um energy or whatever words people are using um but there’s a felt sense to it and I think you find this in a lot of things um prayer or meditation it’s really easy to dismiss those things even if you hear the logic behind them until you feel them and then once you have a felt sense of what prayer can do whether you believe in a God or not um or what the felt sense of believing in a God is like and what the felt sense of not believing in a God is like you know all those things they’re very felt sense and so you can argue it night and day but it’s why nobody changes their mind on this stuff until they have a change of felt sense so if you want a logical conversation about empathy go and feel people go and be empathetic and stay in yourself while you do it and and that’s a far better way just experiment that seems to be you know I mean that is true across all of these uh view podcasts is that these are all pointers intellectual pointers to something that you ultimately need to feel into yeah they’re all I mean that’s why often times in these conversations they could be logically contradictory it’s because we’re just creating Frameworks that make it easier to feel into or realize something um it’s it’s not about telling it like a a truth there’s no you know it’s not it’s not like there’s one way or there’s something that’s right here there’s just how do you want to be is the question and that question isn’t answered with logic I’m just feeling our way beneath any fear response we have which brings me to another question um we’ve been talking about losing yourself and the other person not being empathy as you’re defining it and losing yourself near that person sounds a lot like the flight fear response that we’ve discussed before um like fleeing from your experience into there is to try to fix it and then create you’ll dive into a story about why they have that experience and then you’ll create some idea of who’s the abuser or the Tyranny or the victim and I imagine there’s something equivalent that we do in the fight in the freeze responses as well how do these other forms of fear impact our ability to be present with others in their reactions right yeah so it’s I mean it’s if you think about it from an evolutionary sense uh right so we have fear it’s not if you’re really scared it’s really not time to empathize and so so that part of your brain goes offline and you know your fear response comes online um so if you are in um flight like you said you’re you’re uh looking at the the world around you the environment and the actors in that environment and you’re trying to figure out how to manage those uh if you are in fight then immediately that emotion that you’re starting to feel in your system is going to make you angry and you’re going to try to stop it like the angry uh person on the plane when the kid starts crying and the freeze response is is a disassociation it’s like a checking out you can just watch the eyes kind of haze over it makes sense that fear when we’re in fear it’s really hard to have any empathy at all so how do you how do you prevent this Spirit response or or let it pass through you or what what do you do with this when this when you know that you have a like a deep bodily patterning to fear in a particular business context or a relationship context you feel it that’s the that’s the trick to all of this stuff is like how do you feel the emotion and and I say feel it I don’t mean like be taken away by it you know there’s just some saying that I heard the other day it was beautiful and I think it’s from some Supreme Court Judge I don’t know but it said I wouldn’t give you a fig for the Simplicity on this side of complexity but I’ll give you my whole world for the Simplicity on the other side of complexity and what it’s speaking to is that before we start our learning process things are pretty simple then we started learning processes it gets really complex and somewhere along the line it gets very simple again and with emotions it’s very simple for a two-year-old I feel angry and so I’m gonna yell at you or punch you or and then there’s the complexity of actually learning what those emotions are what’s happening identifying them in your body feeling them expressing them expressing them in a way that doesn’t hurt people letting them move without resistance finding out that they’re very similar to one another finding out that you can love all of them getting to the other side is wow you just have emotions again and it’s just they’re just fluid except for you’re not run by them you’re not controlled by them you’re not hurting other people with them so the only way to do that is to actually learn how to feel the fear so if you have a fear response feel it and invite it in don’t put it at anybody and most fear is not wanting to feel something which is pretty cool when you think about it like you know I’m scared that I’m gonna get fired but if I told you hey if you get fired you’re going to feel awesome I feel like would you would you be scared of me being fired anymore so it’s really us not wanting to have emotions that we’re we’re at the core very scared of and and when I say feel the fear I mean welcome it I really mean like invited in breathe it in what’s a good way to tell in the moment if we’re working on empathy and how do we tell if what we’re feeling in the moment is true empathy and not one of these uh coping mechanisms or distortions and another one that comes up is sympathy there’s a lot about how sympathy and empathy are different and often confused it’s a wonderful question the the main thing is are you putting yourself outside um it’s not quite outside it’s above or yeah I guess it’s above the other person that’s often sympathy and empathy the difference is in when you’re putting yourself above the other person like subtle ways like you want to fix them but you know for you to fix them you have to be less broken or you want to like help them not feel it you know which is assuming that like not you’re not feeling it is a better solution um so right and that means buying into their story and being within the story like oh yeah yeah exactly so so it’s just you’re with them and and when you’re with somebody the way that you know we all want to be with it’s like we’re supporting we are with but we are not saving there’s this great phrase that uh I think it was from an Aboriginal Community or a native community in South America um it says hey if you’re here to help me no thank you but if you’re here to work together on our mutual Freedom let’s get to work and that’s really the essence of it another thing that’s that happens a lot is that um like being empathic is is often associated with being manipulable or easily taken for an emotional ride and how could it be that that deepening our empathy in the ways that we’ve been talking about makes us less likely to fall into a fear response and abandon our needs or our boundaries yeah right there’s there’s a you get that fear a lot from people that are like oh if I empathize then I’m going to fall for them and I think that what they’re they’re thinking about is that is that person who’s like fully into the other person’s reality and they they’ve lost themselves in it and if you do that yeah you’re you’re more likely to be um taken advantage of I mean if that’s what the person wants to do on the other side or is capable of doing um but you know in all cases we don’t want to feel something if we’re if we’re allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of right so I’m going to sell you you know this magic pill and it’s going to make you skinny in two days right like if you buy that it’s because you don’t want to feel something anymore or you definitely want to feel something so there is something that you want to feel or scared of feeling to allow yourself to be taken advantage of and to have empathy it really requires you to be willing to feel whatever is arising for yourself and that other person so it actually prevents you from getting taken advantage of because you’re welcoming of everything and you’re not trying to get rid of it and it doesn’t matter whether you’re non-empathetic or like you know where it’s like I’m not going to feel that person that means you don’t want to feel it means that you can be taken advantage of pretty easily I mean just look at the most non-empathetic people in on our planet and they are the most likely to be um manipulated by politicians or you know authorities are advertising and then the other side of that is someone who’s totally like in that other person’s world and then they’re going to sacrifice themselves for it but if you’re actually like oh I can feel you I can be with you and whatever you throw at me I can feel I can be with what makes you need to do anything that is contrary to your truth yeah it seems another example of that is you know in a business relationship or somebody’s coming at you with a bunch of emotion and making you responsible for something that you’re not responsible for well if you’re if you’re with them in that emotion but you’re like buying into their full story then you’re gonna think that they’re entirely right you’re going to lose your boundaries and be taken for a ride yeah absolutely if you agree with if somebody thinks that you’re bad and and you get locked into their emotion then you start thinking you’re bad yeah that’s exactly a great place where you’re going to be taking advantage of by somebody who doesn’t think they’re taking advantage of you it’s my it’s by somebody who who feels like they’re a victim in that moment typically right yeah so so back to back to what you were saying about the people who are you know the least empathic are the ones that are most likely to be taken for a ride uh many of us simply don’t seem to feel emotions in others as much as we’d like um and when we start doing this kind of work is when we start to notice this uh when I when I started to work with you I experienced certain emotions in others when we were doing exercises like kind of like I was watching them as an ant colony like I could see and recognize the patterns but I wasn’t in it with them like oh I didn’t have an alcoholic father that’s not my problem like I’d like I can see what that does in you and now I can see your problem and I think I can try to analyze how to fix you and how can we tell the difference between observing someone’s experience in a non-empathic way and genuinely being with them yeah the body is a Telltale sign here um I mean I think I remember that when we were working together and you’re doing that and I believe I came up and shook you a couple times and you’d like and then you could feel a different way there’s a rigidity that happens in the body when you are trying not to feel no matter how you’re trying not to feel whether it’s by creating distance or disassociation which is somewhat of what you were doing um being The Watcher or or wanting it to stop any one of them it just creates rigidity in the system so if you and this often happens in the belly shoulders a jaw is locked oftentimes when when I do a workshop like this one I’ll walk around and I’ll like hit people’s Jaws so that like tap their jaws to remind them like oh they’re holding all this tight or their belly is really tight so that’s a that’s the main way is to keep your body loose and you’ll have to feel our feelings are a muscular thing our feelings live in our um and our muscles if you’re the person who was told you can’t get angry and you are not angry all the time now and anytime anger comes up you either like give it to yourself or suppress it really badly your muscles have to contract in such a way and become distorted in such a way it’s why there’s a whole science behind just watching how somebody walks into a room you can tell like a tremendous amount of their upbringing you know like once once you know what you’re looking for and you’ve experienced it yourself you can the way a person’s face is you can tell what emotions they want to feel or they don’t want to feel by the way they hunch their shoulders by the way they tuck their butt by the way that they hold their lips how they purse them when certain things come up like they’re it’s it is why we have body language and it’s why we have Micro Expressions yeah something I’ve noticed over over doing this work is that I’ve started to detect when when somebody’s disconnecting from me in a conversation I can roll back a little bit and recognize that I had actually disconnected from them and then they’re like they’re responding to that yeah and it’s it’s as though the feeling for them is the difference between being with a friend with a good friend who’s there with them and their experience and being with a shrink who’s psychoanalyzing them yeah I think that happens a lot for people for people who want to be there to help others a lot of it comes from you know wanting to deal with their own their own pain their own history so I think this happens a lot in like therapeutic communities where where people take the therapeutic role but they’re really analyzing and they’re not being empathic yeah it happens definitely in some places there and it happens just with a lot of people who find themselves like the Savior or helper of their group of friends you’ll see a lot of that happen and and the truth is what sometimes what that is is they’re trying to manage their life by managing other people’s emotional states you know like if if you feel happy I’ll be happy if you if you’re angry if you’re not angry I’ll be happy you know if you’re in a good mood I’m in a good mood and um and then hey it doesn’t work and and B you can’t change people’s emotional states and see it’s just far more enjoyable to be with them in the emotional state yeah yeah which comes back to that self-empathy thing we were talking about like as I’ve experienced my my ability to actually have empathy with others has directly grown from my ability to actually feel that equivalent feeling in myself yeah that’s right that’s exactly how it works it’s uh our capacity to love the parts of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love the parts of other people and other people in general yeah sometimes being empathic with somebody and holding a highly charged emotion can leave us with a sort of static residue in our system and it can linger or put us on tilt and it takes takes time for integration yeah um or just leave us leave us feeling that thing for days um and for some people this is really strong yeah um the empaths the self-identified empaths will just avoid certain situations because they’re like well I just can’t I can’t handle that energy how can we navigate this and be deepening our empathy without closing ourselves off or avoiding situations especially if we’re frequently going from one high energy interaction to another in business or something else yeah yeah I had to learn that really the hard way um for me you know when I started coaching people and and you know the depth and which the coaching can happen and I would go from that to like a conversation with negotiating lawyers over like over like points on a contract and so and then back into a coaching session so I had to go into these like big highly charged thing one right after the other and similarly when I do like the seven day really deep Retreats it’s like one like emotional baseball bat after another in the best possible way it’s not like with real baseball right but not not obviously not hurting anybody and um and so yeah it’s something that I really had to learn um you know the the main thing is avoid it and the way you avoid it isn’t by not feeling the emotion it’s by being in your body right so it’s it’s just um putting some of your attention in your body while you’re with other people in their emotions so you’re not losing yourself that’s a huge thing um and if you do that as you get better at that it’s like it that takes care of about 70 or 80 of the problem and then the other stuff it’s really about grounding it’s about staying grounded realizing what’s yours and what’s not yours um and your body and your breath is the best way to do this so releasing whatever emotion residue you have letting the tears flow shaking it off grounding yourself in the different ways that people can ground themselves there’s some Tai Chi moves that can do that yoga moves that ground you um there’s just asking is this mine you know that was a really good one from earlier yeah is this mine there are some things to calm the nervous system down different breath um so there’s all sorts of things you can look into any if you go into any kind of system that says how do I ground no matter what kind of system from you know functional medicine to to this you can just find those things and they’ll work really well I like my personal favorites are like deep breath um walking barefoot um sitting in silence meditation those things I feel very grounded and those things massage I love massage will help me feel grounded probably quicker than anything else but if you’re going straight from like a Sprint planning meeting where everybody’s start got an argument started yelling at each other and you’re carrying that energy straight into a performance review and you really want not to take that out on the person that you’re reviewing yeah yeah I took out like five minutes between them yeah so first I wouldn’t buy into the story that you have to so I would say like I’m not prepared for this meeting right now emotionally and I’d rather give you the the actual emotional attention that you deserve so let’s postpone it that’s one thing obviously like so for instance if there is a big fight in the Sprint meeting I I would probably enjoy it because I could be with I could be with the anger the energy and I’d see like wow look at all these people who really give a they really care they really want it done right or they wouldn’t be fighting um and then my way better than a bunch of apathetic right exactly checked out people exactly and and and because I would be enjoying the tension it would also change the dynamic in the room of the anger because so much of the fighting that happens is based on a level of resistance because unresisted fighting you know feels very much like Clarity and decisiveness and a deep care so um so so again staying in your own physical sensation is a huge part to prevent it but I mean literally just shake your body for you know two or three minutes between the meetings can work um taking deep breaths can work uh getting in touch with what’s aware of your emotional state instead of your emotional state can work yawning 10 20 times in a row can work having a you know a quick cry crying doesn’t take very long can be a minute or two all those things can work can you can you tell me a couple of stories about how empathy transformed a situation for you in a business context something like this or different yeah uh yeah you know I I remember a time when I was fundraising um and you know we’re you know I can’t remember so you know somewhere in like that 10 million dollar range of fundraising and I just noticed that I was with the person who I was talking to and I noticed um that they were getting distant and um and I I just said wow I noticed that you’re getting distant I noticed something turned you off what happened and that is what allowed for a far deeper conversation about what they were looking for what about my attitude had scared them we could address it directly uh I could I got to learn that I was objectifying the person probably a little bit more than I would want to and and they could learn that they were in a past deal not in the current deal in front of us so that that’s a good example of one same thing raising money I have been able to empathize with the people on the other side of the table to realize that oh they see me as a they’ve objectified me or they see me as a employee rather than a partner and I don’t want that I think investors who see um peop their investees and employees I think that they are dangerous and you can sense it and by the way that they keep a distance from you or how they hold themselves emotionally with you instead of the way somebody who holds you as a partner so that is prevented me from having some really bad investors that way another example is like selling like oftentimes you see in a sales process a customer goes into resistance and then the salesperson tries to convince them which puts them into more resistance right instead of saying being like well I know I noticed something is not working for you what’s going on because if this isn’t working for you I don’t want you to do it and if it’s not working for you there’s a potential there’s a misunderstanding so I’d like to clarify it but I don’t want you doing something you don’t want to do because then I just have an unhappy customer and you know that’s not good for business right um You can’t really do that unless you can feel the person um what are some uh some other examples like working with peers for example yeah or teams within a team yeah yeah so for instance um you know I hear something from managers all the time where they’re talking about they’re like you know we all have alignment and then like nobody did it we all agreed we all sat in the meeting we all agreed and nobody did it and I’ll always say like let’s in that meeting did it feel like there was did you feel like they were excited no I’m like okay so What stopped you from saying wow I don’t feel the excitement in the room what’s preventing the excitement but you can’t do that with anything besides empathy so that’s a great experience of like if you are addressing the emotional reality instead of just intellectual reality because people like I said make decisions based on emotions that’s why people can all agree to something in a meeting but if they’re emotionally resistant they’re not going to go and do it so you can actually just feel into that resistance feel into where the excitement is feel into what’s being held where the rigidity is in the room and and clarified and that makes things far more good it’s the same thing with like product development you know we have the you know it’s a kind of a famous thing where people spend a lot of money on a focus group and then and the focus group goes this is great and then the product fails or right or vice versa has happened too it’s because they’re asking them emotional issues they’re asking them about emotional decisions through the intellect and so it’s not a perfect it sometimes works but it’s not a perfect um translator right it’s like yeah it’s really feeling your customer it’s really feeling what’s making that what what makes it important for them to buy it you know Henry Ford said if I gave my customers what they wanted I would have given them a faster horse but you put a person behind the car and you see them drive it and what happens to their face and you see the way people look at them and what happens in their faces it’s pretty clear who’s going to buy what I almost thought that one was interesting the faster horse thing because it’s not really what they wanted if you asked them what they wanted if you asked him the solution that they thought they would have like that would have solved their problem they might have thought a faster horse but really what they wanted was better transportation yes exactly but that that’s the that’s the exact point which is that the um that the intellect is limited in its capacity to see what the emotions want yeah right so Transportation was horse and feet you know at the time so that was the limitation of the intellectual part of it but if you got if you look at the emotional experience then you know that there’s other Solutions yeah I mean I think this happens in like product research all the time where the research will be will be conducted in some way where it’s like okay do what do you like better the red plastic or the blue plastic and you’ll get an answer and you’ll have a a meeting where there’s a graph that just shows you know how much of the market wants this versus the other thing but you missed the deeper question and the deeper emotional connection to the product yeah that’s exactly right yeah it’s why there’s a felt sense to Great design you know you see something that’s designed just with beauty and you feel it and you’re like oh that’s that’s beautiful not not just beautiful as in looking but the design is elegant and there’s a there’s a felt sense to that and it makes it appealing to us and there’s no way that you’re gonna use the intellect to describe that unless you’ve been trained and designed for you know years so so how how will we see our lives and our our work change as we deepen our ability to feel our emotions and empathize with others some of these examples are good good examples but what are some other things that would happen in our lives decisions become more clear because we’re more likely to feel emotions and be happy to feel emotions um we start caring for people instead of caretaking them meaning that we’re not trying to make them feel better we’re just being in support of them and therefore we get that in return as well you get more people who are happy to be with you um you also see the people around yourself and you become more and more empowered right like as you stop fearing all these emotional states then you just stand in your truth more and more and more and so there’s just a deeper level of empowerment that happens for you and for the people around you it you know one of these things that I was working with a a CEO of one of the companies and he he you know tended towards um caretaking and obviously because he’s caretaking there’s a lot of people that kind of fall into that victim thing in this company and there’s kind of like this victim mentality in the company because he felt responsible for them and has that changed for him as he could be with people instead of taking care of people all of a sudden the decisions that could Empower them could start to be seen so instead of coming in and saying like here’s how we’re going to fix the world he would say how do you want to fix the world yeah I clearly you’re unhappy how are you going to fix it you know he would Empower people to fix their own problems and uh changed everything for his company you know you can just use my name when you’re talking about me no that wasn’t you that you were not the person in my mind when I was saying no I know but I just like felt it as like yep that’s that’s exactly been my journey yeah so what what else happens are there a lot of times when we do these kinds of practices there are shifts in our lives that are like short-term uncomfortable or destabilizing is there anything like that that would happen with with practicing deeper empathy yeah as the emotions start to get felt and the resistance isn’t worked through it can be a bit turbulent you know it’s not the emotions that are uncomfortable it’s a resistance to them so um there can be a little bit of turbulence there can be you know moments of Tears where you were preferred that there wasn’t tears um they don’t happen very often they’re pretty rare like people kind of are like oh my God I’m gonna be crying all over the place and it’s kind of more like oh God I cried at this one place and and actually somebody came up to me and said something sweet but yeah it can be a little bit turbulent um there’s just also this idea that like if I allow my emotions and they’re gonna take over me and control me it’s like it’s the projection that you’ve been controlling your emotions so you think they’re going to control you it doesn’t happen like that I’ve never seen anybody at all of the thousands of people I’ve seen go through this process I’ve never seen any of them like are like I’m controlled by emotions now it’s just yeah yeah damn you Joe exactly never has never happened um so I’d say that um the biggest thing is what we’ve really harped on on this and this talk is you know if you empathize without with losing yourself that can be uh that can be really damaging so learning how to be in your own body while you’re empathetic is like so critical I just even recommend like hey for the rest of the week put some of your attention into your physical body during every conversation see what that like see what that does to your world it it will like it’ll rock your world if you do that for um every conversation for a week it’ll just rock your world and it’s also I just say it’s important to take it slow you know it’s like uh I would say it’s like if the emotional tube is kinked you know you just like be gentle with the unkinking take it slow yeah there’s the there’s the wisdom in the taking it slow and there’s also another side of that that I can see like a lot of times these these emotions are stacked on each other and so you get beneath one of them and you let yourself feel it like you might get yourself to feel the anger um but then if you don’t feel the hurt underneath the anger then a completely different thing starts controlling you yeah and so you get the you get the disruptive thing going on in your life and you’re entering another pattern and so there’s there’s like being gentle with yourself and taking it slow and then there’s also just like being curious about how far down it goes and what’s what’s beneath this one that I’m now feeling I would definitely agree with that to think that there’s an end is no good it’s not going to be servicing your journey at all so seeing it as endless being curious about it bringing the other you know being vulnerable with yourself about your emotional state um being impartial with how you feel you can use all of those tools and use it for this empathy and it might appeal and it might be like you know you might find yourself balling and crying and shaking and all that can happen while being gentle with yourself what are some ways that empathy can go like wrong um what does it look like when it’s uh if we’re like trying to be empathic we’re not quite there so it’s shallow or it’s sort of false or how could it be used directly as a weapon if somebody you know starts using these practices and they’re like oh wow I could actually use this to manipulate people what happens then how does that look creepy you can see it you know you like the difference between a good interviewer and a bad interview is one’s using real empathy and one is Faking it and you can tell it makes your skin crawl on some level you know so it might work for some people um but it’s not it’s going to only work on a small percentage of them whereas empathy is is creates connection consistently you can use empathy as a tool they do all these skills are based on that you know mimic their body language and nod yes when people speak and blah blah blah blah mirror the last three words of the thing they said use their name in the front of sentences and blah blah blah yeah um you can do all that stuff but if you’re not being empathy it comes off as false fake and gross and and we’ve all been with that person but if you could do all that stuff with deep empathy and then it’s it’s actually quite appealing but it’s really the empathy that’s appealing and I think that the reason that those tools work when they do work sometimes is because they actually hack the Mind into empathy yeah yeah but yeah they’re disarming yeah and if the intent is to disarm then it can get you closer to it yeah to disarm yourself that is not to disarm the other person as a trick yeah so what are a couple of like summary bullet points on how all of what we’ve discussed would apply to a view conversation in this practice and with uh with the rest of this course yeah well one of the things that the clearly thing is that you can ask questions you can ask how what questions um that are based on non-verbal cues on empathy like oh wow it feels like you distance yourself right there what happened or you can say it looks like you don’t agree with that what’s going on or what’s happening with you right now or how did how did that feel you can ask questions like that people generally don’t they’ll stay up on the intellectual and they won’t ask questions down in the in the emotional and in a curious way not not yes no wait I saw you disconnect there I saw you disconnect I know it tell me tell me what empathy is an attack um yeah that’s right um also uh basically you’ll notice that when you have empathy with someone they’re more likely to be open because they feel that you’re with them and you can’t do anything to show to them you’re just empathetic and it just occurs um like I said earlier there’s this creepy thing where people know you’re managing them and when they do they back off hence how you don’t have as much data you don’t get as much truth you don’t get as you don’t get to see the problem as it is you don’t get their ideas for Solutions uh so with empathy you get all that stuff you get more data and more ideas for Solutions or the solutions you get from them are actually their solutions to get you to stop exactly managing them exactly exactly and also um uh if you’re in empathy you can catch yourself being partial right like if you’re using empathy and you see somebody like I have an issue with you you’re like oh wow it’s being partial like I’ll catch my own partiality from being empathetic to their response to me right like the way I was describing earlier when I met when I catch somebody disconnected like rolling back and be like wait a minute yeah okay let’s see what I did there exactly yeah yeah as we close um I’d love for you to to tell us about an impactful experience that you’ve had that caused the deepest increase in your empathy for others in the shortest amount of time yeah yeah I can I want to give you two uh the first one was I was having this experience where I realized that I really just did not want to be with people who were having meaningless conversations and it just was like so annoying like you know I was driving 65 miles an hour really 65 yeah 65 miles an hour down to Santa Barbara like like it was so frustrating for me and like what is it that I don’t want to feel what is it that’s happening for them for me that I don’t want to feel and I’m just open myself up to it it was awkward you know I’d be weeping in these conversations that were like seemingly benign and um I don’t know two or three weeks of that something maybe a month of that and um the personal recognition that came through was I was it it was so critical to my sense of self that I had to be valuable and that the idea that I might be spending time where I wasn’t valuable it was so hard on my system I didn’t want to feel that kind of sense of worthlessness and that was my internal thing and then to have the freedom to be worthless to be like oh yeah I like I’m happy to be worthless and I’m happy to be of value and having that freedom was tremendous and then my capacity to immediately be with people or having that level of conversation happening and what I realized was even in that level of conversation there’s different forms of connection going on there’s different ways that people are connecting that aren’t verbal that aren’t about the immediate intellectual thing that’s up front and then um I think the this one wasn’t as quick but it was bigger for me which was you know getting in touch with hand-in-hand parenting which is really um one of the main tools that I’ve learned empathy from and one of the tools in that is like it’s called Parenting by connection and it allows parents to be deeply connected with their kids kids to feel deeply connected in the thought processes when kids are feel connected they naturally want to behave in a way that’s that’s enriching for themselves and the family and all of the tribulations that we feel from children is just them being out of connection so how do you get them back into connection and one of the tools they have five very simple tools and one of the tools is is stay listening it’s like allowing the kids to have temper tantrums and and being with them in that temper tantrum and even encouraging it to move through and making sure it doesn’t get stuck and uh and you know I was not good with my a lot of my emotions when I started doing hand-in-hand parenting and I got good with them really quick and all of a sudden I had a tremendous amount of emotional Freedom that I didn’t have before and all of a sudden my decision making got so clear because I couldn’t be with my child’s temper tantrum until I could be with my own I couldn’t be with my child’s anger until I could be with my own or with their tears until I could be with my own and so that process of empathizing and being with my children gave me so much more freedom huh how did these two stories impact the uh your ability to have value for people but I don’t care if I I mean if I were to look at it seemingly I’m I’m more able to be more valuable to them because I’m I can be with them in a deeper way now and um I’m not judging them or myself so that it seems like that’s probably more valuable but the bigger the bigger answer is I don’t it doesn’t matter to me anymore you know it’s like I love I love that Paradox from you know from the like the driving wound of your first story yeah to just not carrying any more actually having that impact yeah oh man that was a great conversation thanks so much Brett yeah thank you thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US in your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com