Empathy allows me to understand my own needs and those of others in ways that can help to build mutual understanding, even in tricky situations. This is something that took me a long time to understand.

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When I was in college I used to say "emotions are things that happen to other people." As an engineering student, I liked to think of myself as a purely rational decision maker. It wasn’t until my master’s program that I really started taking emotions and emotional intelligence seriously. At the end of a negotiation class, the professor told me that I should stop investing in my IQ and start investing in my EQ - emotional intelligence. I was dissatisfied with the fact that what others perceived as arrogance felt different to me, really much more like fear, so I decided to take my professor's advice to figure out what was going on.

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I often felt anxious and wanted to understand why. My journey began with learning to self connect, and over time I started to become more comfortable allowing myself to feel what was alive in me. I began to realize that underneath my anxiety there was hidden sadness and anger. Along the way I learned a lot about Non Violent Communication, which helped me lean into these feeling in order to understand the underlying emotional needs that I had been ignoring. This process of self empathy, has allowed me to develop the ability to empathize with others as well and to even support others in learning empathy.

 

This ability to empathize has become a key part of my work as I listen to others to really understand what is motivating their behavior in ways that help in finding creative solutions based on consensus.