This document discusses three types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person's perspective and worldview. Emotional empathy involves sensing another person's feelings through facial expressions and body language. Empathic concern describes caring about another person and conveying support for them. The document argues that all three types of empathy are important for leaders, teachers, and parents to possess in order to effectively communicate, build rapport, and support others.

1. Empathy
By
Col Mukteshwar Prasad(Retd)
Based on inputs of Daniel Goleman

3.  “I like to understand how people see the world,” A CEO tells . “It’s
always different for each person. I’m fascinated by the ways people
think about things, what’s important to them, how they put their
world together.”
 That natural curiosity about other people’s reality, technically
speaking, signifies “cognitive empathy,” the ability to see the
world through others’ eyes.
 Cognitive empathy is mind-to-mind, giving us a mental sense of
how another person’s thinking works.
 It’s one of three kinds of empathy, each with a premium in the
workplace and in relationships anywhere in our lives.
 This way of tuning in to another person does more than give us
an understanding of their view – it tells us how best to
communicate with that person:
◦ what matters most to them,
◦ their models of the world, and
◦ what even what words to use – or avoid – in talking with
them.
Cognitive Empathy

4.  And that pays off in many ways.
◦ Managers with excellent cognitive empathy, for instance,
get better than expected performance from their direct
reports.
◦ And executives who have this mental asset do well when
assigned to a culture different than their own – they are
able to pick up the norms and ground rules of another
culture more quickly.
Cognitive Empathy…

5.  But emotional empathy, a second variety, has different benefits.
◦ With emotional empathy we feel what the other person
does in an instantaneous body-to-body connection.
◦ This empathy depends on a different muscle of attention:
tuning in to another person’s feelings requires we pick up
their facial, vocal, and a stream of other nonverbal signs
of how they feel instant-to-instant.
◦ This variety of empathy, research shows, depends on our
tuning in to our own body’s emotional signals, which
automatically mirror the other person’s feelings.
 Daniel Siegel , a UCLA psychiatrist, calls the brain areas that
create this resonance the “we” circuitry. Being in the bubble of a
“we” with another person can signify chemistry, that sense of
rapport that makes whatever we’re doing together go well –
whether it’s in sales or a meeting, in the classroom, or between a
couple . Dr. Siegel has even written about how to do this with
your teenager .
Emotional Empathy

6.  We see the third variety, empathic concern, spring into action
whenever someone expresses their caring about another person.
 This kind of empathy partakes of the brains’ circuitry for parental
love – it’s a hear-to-heart connection.
 But it’s not out of place at work:
◦ you see it when a leader lets people know that he will support
them,
◦ that she can be trusted,
◦ that they are free to take risks rather than maintain a too-safe
defensive posture.
 In the classroom you see empathic concern when a teacher
creates a similar atmosphere and students feel free to let their
curiosity roam freely.
Empathic concern

7.  All three.
Which kind of empathy should a
leader, a teacher, or a parent have?