10 Exercises To Develop Empathy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Empathy is conscious empathy with the current emotional state of another person. This means that you recognize the feelings and emotions of other people, know how to comfort and help them get out of difficult psychological and emotional states.

The benefits of empathy

• Empathy brings people together. When a person is treated with empathy, they tend to reciprocate. If you are empathic, people are drawn to you: you can be a great leader.
• Empathy heals. Negative emotions destroy the psyche and physical health of a person, while showing empathy helps to heal wounds.
• Empathy builds trust. Anyone, even the most distrustful person, begins to trust you over time, if you take a keen interest in him and understand how he feels.
• Empathy is incompatible with criticism. Most people constantly criticize loved ones, without thinking about how it hurts their pride. As you develop empathy, you begin to understand what needs to be said and what not.

Most modern professions require strong empathy. But even if you are a programmer or a builder, you still want to learn how to build good relationships with other people. Can you learn to be empathic?

Psychologist Daniel Kieran presents ten empathy exercises for children and adults. Some tasks require help from other people, while others you can do yourself.

1. Building your emotional vocabulary

Description: The leader introduces the exercise, saying that creating a vocabulary for different emotions and feelings will help create effective sentences for expressing feelings. You can find a large list of emotions on the Internet - psychologists count from 200 to 500 emotional states.

Emotions can be categorized as positive, painful (negative), and neutral. Happiness, excitement, serenity, calmness, hope can be considered positive. Negative - fear, anger, guilt, sadness, emptiness, low self-esteem, despair. Neutral - surprise, curiosity, interest.

In turn, painful emotions can be divided into heavy and light. Heavy can be anger, frustration, irritation, while light is sadness, guilt, emptiness, low self-esteem.

If you are doing the exercise yourself, then take a piece of paper and write down all the emotions and feelings that you experience throughout the day. To do this, first determine exactly what kind of activity you are engaged in. For example: I woke up, put myself in order, did my exercises, got dressed, smelled coffee, went to work, heard people argue, heard people laugh, entered the room, sat down at the table, listened to the teacher, completed the task, had lunch, saw the parents, played with friends, had dinner, went to bed. As you can see, even small activities matter. The fact is that any change in activity in one way or another changes your feelings, mood and emotions. Notice everything you feel throughout the day and try to define exactly how you feel.

Results of the exercise:

1. What new things have you learned about your emotions and feelings?
2. Have you understood the point of being aware of the emotions you are experiencing at the moment?
3. How has being aware of your emotions influenced your understanding of the feelings and sensations of other people?
4. What conclusions can be drawn regarding the relationship between specific emotions and specific activities? Why do you experience positive emotions in one situation and negative ones in another?

2. Recognition of emotions and thoughts

Description: In this exercise, you will complete a sentence that begins with the words "I feel …" followed by an emotion. Remember, you can find a list of emotions on the Internet. Your best bet would be to write down emotions in and refill periodically when you encounter a new one.

Examples:

• I feel happy when I see my friend.
• I am delighted when I paint.
• I feel sad when I realize that autumn is coming.

Remember that thought, as opposed to emotion, is expressed by the phrase “I feel” in the context of “I think”, “I believe”. For example, when you say “I think playing the guitar is interesting,” then this is your opinion, your thought, but not emotion.

Results of the exercise:

What is the difference between thought and sensation?

Thought is an idea and an opinion, a sensation is an emotion.

3. Create proposals

Description: your task is to create an offer, having a template and substituting your ready-made list of emotions. Template for a team and one-on-one exercise:

“You feel _ because _. I'm right?"

"I feel _ because _."

Remember that you can substitute absolutely any emotion: anger, irritation, happiness, depression, emptiness, confusion.

Examples: Here are two examples of situations in which a person creates the correct sentence in terms of empathy.

Jill frowned her face and said that her friend just picked up and left

Empathic response: “Jill, do you feel sad because your friend left? I'm right?.

My father came home very tired and said that he had just lost his job

Empathic response: “Dad, do you feel worried about losing your job? I'm right?"

These examples are so simple that they may seem too obvious. However, if you carefully analyze your life, you may notice that you often ignored the emotions and feelings of other people, being inundated with your problems.

Practical examples: For each of the following situations, come up with an empathic response.

1. Your brother came home in tears and said that he had been given an offensive nickname at school.
2. Your classmate, who was given an offensive nickname today, sits quietly with his head down.
3. Your friend said he didn’t want to go home because he had failed the exam.
4. Your friend said that he could not invite you to his place because his mother was ill.
5. Your employee is sitting alone at the dinner table, not eating their lunch or speaking.

Results of the exercise:

• What questions and difficulties did you have when creating sentences that demonstrate empathy?
• Why is it so important to check if you interpreted a person's emotion correctly?

4. Rearranging roles

Description: Empathy manifests itself when you imagine yourself as another person. You can do this exercise as a group or separately, but then you have to strain your own. Remember all your friends and relatives, make a list of these people. Then take turns getting used to these roles.

Answer the questions:

1. What is your name?
2. What is your age?
3. What are your favorite books?
4. Where did you go on vacation?
5. What do you love the most?
6. What saddens you the most?
7. What excites you?
8. In what situations do you feel nostalgia?
9. What are you afraid of?
10. What or who do you most often hope for?

The essence of the exercise is to stop thinking about your problems and think about how the other person is feeling and why. You can make your own list, or you can even embark on an imaginary journey.

Results of the exercise:

• Ask the person if your guesses about him are correct. Where are you right and where are you wrong?
• How do you feel acting as different people?

5. Duplication

Description: This exercise is performed in pairs. The first person (speaker) speaks of happy memories or excitement about a future event. The second person (duplicator) is, as it were, his real emotion, which the speaker experiences. The essence of the exercise is that the duplicator, knowing what emotion the speaker is experiencing, begins to consciously recognize the feelings of other people.

Example:

Speaker: "I want to visit my parents next week."

Duplicator: "And I feel happy about it."

Speaker: "My mom makes the best pies in the world."

Duplicator: "I love it when I eat them."

The task can be complicated when the speaker does not inform in advance whether he likes what he will say. Therefore, the duplicator has to guess.

Results of the exercise:

After the two people switch places and go through the exercise again, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is it like being a speaker and hearing from a dub about his guesses?
2. What is it like being a dub and guessing the speaker's real emotion?
3. What was the hardest part?
4. What emotions were the hardest to recognize? Which ones are easier?
5. How did this exercise help me get to know the person?

6. Empathic listening

Description: Another exercise for which you will need a partner. Its essence is to listen to the person about what is important to him and create a sentence that most accurately conveys what he feels at the same time. Remember that empathy means setting aside your thoughts and feelings, and then paying attention to how the other person is feeling and thinking.

Think of something intimate and meaningful to you. Talk about it, trying to describe the situation in as much detail as possible, without giving any clues. Take pauses during which your partner will tell you what you were thinking about and how you felt in the past and present. Repeat the exercise, reversing the roles. Remember that it is better to be wrong with your assumption than not to voice it aloud at all. It's also okay if you exaggerate the emotion the person is feeling - for example, call irritation anger and anger anger. You learn and only by trial and error you can achieve serious success.

Results of the exercise:

1. How does it feel to be a listener? What was the hardest part?
2. How does it feel to be a storyteller?
3. How did you feel when the person made guesses about how you felt?

7. Becoming a different person

Description: Seek help from two close friends to complete this exercise. Do the following:

1. Write a dialogue between three actors. For example: victim, bully, bystander or picky buyer, vulnerable salesman and bystander. You can come up with your own options.
2. Each scenario is played three times, and with each performance people change roles. Thus, you play the roles of victim, bully and observer.
3. After completing the exercise, all participants share their impressions of their thoughts, emotions and sensations.

Results of the exercise:

1. What emotions did you experience as a victim?
2. What emotions did you experience as a bully?
3. What emotions did you experience as an observer?
4. What decisions did you make at the end of the exercise?

8. Understanding history

Description: This exercise will teach you to understand another person's story.

1. Ask your close friend to think about (or write down) someone they fear or don't want to communicate with for whatever reason.
2. Ask the person to think about why the unpleasant person behaves this way and write down the reasons.
3. Ask him to share how the unpleasant person is feeling now.

For example:

1. I don't want to be friends with John because he rarely speaks to me.
2. I realized that John is a miserable and lonely person. And also that his mother is unable to pay the rent.
3. Now that I realized that this may be true, I want to be friends with him, because his silence and gloom does not speak about his attitude towards me, but about his feelings that are caused by domestic problems.

Results of the exercise:

1. Did this exercise change your opinion of the person you were afraid of or did not want to deal with?
2. Think about how understanding a person's life story affects your perception.

9. Imagining the emotions of historical characters

Description: List five historical characters. Then list the emotions the person has experienced throughout (or part of) their life.

Example: Abraham Lincoln saw people being sold in the marketplace, and at that moment he felt sadness that he did not have a family of his own, anger that people were being trafficked as animals, and helplessness that he could not do anything with to do it.

Results of the exercise:

1. Have you improved your understanding of the actions and motives of historical characters?
2. What feelings do these people evoke in you now?

10. Empathy and anger

Description: This exercise will help you deal with anger at another person through empathy. Create (or resurrect) a situation in which you were extremely angry with another person, and then create an empathic statement.

Example:

Annoyed person: "You never do what I ask!"

Empathic listener: “You get annoyed that I didn't do my job and you had to work for me. I'm right?.

Results of the exercise:

1. How did you feel when you came up with an annoyed phrase?
2. How did you feel when you came up with an empathic response?
3. How do you think an irritated person will feel when they hear an empathic response?
4. Do you agree that hostility will (though not immediately) disappear with empathic responses?