A little housekeeping- my book, How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely, arrives September 1! You can now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble! Pre-orders are really valuable for authors trying to get their hard work read so I would really appreciate the purchase if you find my work interesting.
Now on to the meat—Research says that empathy is both an innate human skill and something you can get better at. Digital empathy* isn’t exactly an innate human skill, since our caveman ancestors were definitely not trying to read each other’s nuanced emotions over Zoom, but a lot of the skills and trainings still apply.
Never fear! I’ve got some suggestions to help you get better at taking people’s perspectives, both online and off.
1. Try to explain a skill of yours to someone who’s never attempted the task in question, bonus point for testing out different mediums. Are you better over email? Does Zoom make it easier for you to use hand gestures to emphasize points? Where are your communications blind spots?
2. Shake up your social media feeds. We all have a vacuum of content that reinforces the points of view and belief systems we espouse. To open up your perspective, go down a few social media rabbit holes of people you disagree with and follow a totally different, new set of people on social media, Twitter or Instagram, and when they post feelings or opinions you don’t understand make a real effort to see their perspective. You could even ask them to explain more to you in detail why they feel that way or value that opinion.
3.Test out the daily lives of others. What would a religious service be like in a faith that you are unfamiliar with, a walk through a neighborhood very culturally different from yours? A trip to another country. A staycation in your own city can also give you the perspectives of people who may only live a mile away but worlds apart. All of these activities create exposure to different ways of thinking.
George Orwell is an inspiring model. Orwell spent several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma during the 1920s. Subsequently, he returned to England determined to discover what life was like for those living on the lowest rung of society. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed,” he wrote. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result was his book Down and Out in Paris and London, cataloging a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. Orwell developed new friendships, changed his views on inequality, and had the greatest travel experience of his life.
4. Check out Change My View on Reddit. There’s a forum on Reddit called Change My View, for people looking at issues from different perspectives. A real eye-opening read. It’s also great for parsing which tones of voice, word choice, and argument types you find most useful for changing your opinion or at least getting a better understanding of an opposing argument.
5. Read fiction. Reading literary fiction can help improve our ability to understand other people’s mental states, as opposed to pop fiction or nonfiction. Fiction is a great way to embed yourself in another person’s perspective and it’s definitely easier to achieve than Orwell’s experiment.
6. Join a theatrical group - Studies of kids and teenagers who joined performing arts programs showed increases for participants in their measurable empathy for those in the theater, but not the visual arts. This makes sense, if you look at the playbook of great actors, who are known to work through the three stages of sensing, processing, and responding. This is also true in normal human interaction, on a much less intense scale.
What’s an example of a time you changed your perspective or saw something in a totally new light?
*Digital empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another virtually.
I recently had the pleasure of appearing on the Love as a Business Strategy podcast discussing all things digital empathy. I twas great conversation, covering many of my favorite topics including my hesitations in using newsfeeds for work communications (cough, cough Slack). Have a listen here.