Episode 37: Empathy in Communication with Deborah Needham, Part One

00;00;10;01 – 00;01;29;23
Rick Hoaglund
Have you ever noticed that it feels like people are becoming more self-centered and less caring about others? Well, science backs this up. There was a study done at the University of Michigan where they looked at empathy levels in college students from 1979 to 2009. They found that empathetic concern dropped by 48%. Students looking at issues from someone else’s perspective also dropped 34% over that time span. So it seems like we’re not as sympathetic as we once were. But is it really such a big deal? Turns out it is. Especially when it comes to our relationships, jobs, and even making tough decisions during a crisis. Empathy is a glue that holds our social connections together. Research shows that strong relationships not only keep us physically healthy, but also mentally sound and empathy, it’s like our secret weapon against stress and loneliness. But when we struggle to understand other people’s perspectives, or we just don’t care about their interests, our relationships take a hit and that’s no good for anyone. Today we’re going to talk about empathy. Not only is Deborah Needham interested in this, she’s made empathy a huge part of her professional life. Hi, Deb, welcome to our podcast.

00;01;29;25 – 00;01;31;12
Deborah Needham
Thank you so much.

00;01;31;15 – 00;01;44;17
Rick Hoaglund
We’re going to be talking a lot about communication today and what I wanted to let our listeners know is, is why why would you want to talk about that and why why would I select you? Tell me a little bit about your background.

00;01;44;19 – 00;03;35;14
Deborah Needham
Sure. Well, and I think it’s hard to to get to know me without knowing where I’ve been career wise. And so I started out very young. My very first career was an EMT paramedic, which I was in for four years. So I saw a lot in the field. I saw, a lot of death. I saw a lot of suffering. And I had a lot of connections that that I was making with patients and with their families. And I was in that field for about four years, and then I was injured. So that was my own little personal crisis because I really loved the work. but I was finding myself getting a little burned out on it. It’s, you know, not exactly compassion fatigue. I think that’s different. We can talk about that later, perhaps. But what I was finding is that the stress level on the constant on was, was very wearing. It was it was very hard. So then I shifted careers and I became an Emergency Manager, which I’ve done for the past 25 years. And after I took my current directorship, I was originally started with the fire department in, in the city that I work for. And while I was there, they were about to go through a major organizational change, and I thought it had about a 95% chance of failure as a culture change initiative. So I didn’t want to be part of a sinking ship. So I went out and I enrolled in grad school at age 50, and I got my Masters in Organizational Systems with an emphasis in leadership on Organization Development. And I started looking at that and going, wow, I really love this stuff. And so I started my own business. I started my business. Crisis Optimist is the name of the business: Crisis Optimist Coaching and Consulting. And I realized when I, when I put that together, the name actually meant something to me. I looked back over my life and I was like, you know what? My whole life has been something about, coping and grappling with crisis, but also being irrepressibly optimistic about: we’re going to make it through this, we’re going to get through it. So I decided to choose that name. I know it’s a little weird, but that really sort of summed up my approach to life.

00;03;35;16 – 00;03;52;29
Rick Hoaglund
So tell me, you’re an optimist. I mean, basically, I can tell I’ve talked to you. You are an optimist. But during a crisis situation or a difficult time, we don’t even say it’s a crisis. People have a tendency sometimes to not be so optimistic. Why is it important to be an optimist?

00;03;53;02 – 00;04;51;20
Deborah Needham
Well, being optimistic is keeping yourself future focused. What happens when people are not being optimistic is they’re they’re getting bogged down in the present, and they’re creating a lot of what ifs in their brain. They’re saying, what if it doesn’t get better? What if I die? What if everybody I love, I can’t reach them. They create this, this catastrophizing in their head that is probably, you know, to some extent it’s a little protective because they’re mentally trying to prepare for the worst, but it also has the effect of really bringing them down. And when when they do that and they don’t have that hope for the future, it allows their brain to go into what people often call amygdala hijack, and they spin and spin and spin with all the stress hormones raging, they’re they’re just not able to think clearly then. So it’s a very detrimental thing to allow oneself to get to that point where you can’t see hope, where you don’t have any optimism for the future.

00;04;51;22 – 00;05;06;19
Rick Hoaglund
And is that hijacking something similar when you’re under a crisis situation and you’re you’ve got all these hormones raging in your body and all kinds of stuff going on in your brain, and it can affect the way that you behave and the way you communicate. Right?

00;05;06;21 – 00;05;42;25
Deborah Needham
Oh, 100%. Exactly the same thing. There’s really no difference. Our bodies don’t really know the difference between kinds of stress. It experiences stress, and it has that fight flight response. And the adrenaline is surging. And you’re you’re trying to get yourself to safety and your brain doesn’t know the difference, even in fact, psychological safety is one of those issues. I know that you had David Daniels on your podcast, not not that long ago, and I think that same, the brain doesn’t know the difference. And so it just puts you into this heightened state of stress. And it’s got all kinds of mental health as well as physical negative effects on a person.

00;05;42;27 – 00;06;06;19
Rick Hoaglund
Well, I know that when I get stressed, I have a tendency to become sort of I’ll call it task oriented. I don’t know what else I would call it, but I become very like logical, ultra logical, almost, almost robotic. I’m just being honest. That’s the way I am. And and that’s not necessarily a good thing. What? Why is that happening to me? Do you have any ideas? Well, I think a lot of people are that way.

00;06;06;21 – 00;07;55;16
Deborah Needham
And I think that you say it’s not necessarily a good thing, but what it is doing is it’s getting you through. So I remember as a paramedic, when, when I would be on a call, one of the things I was taught by my senior partners in the field was that if you get someone who’s panicking or getting upset in the middle of a call, typically it’s the family member who’s the one who’s upset, then go give them a task to do and go have them write down all the prescriptions in the medicine cabinet for you, or have them start. Just start taking down what’s the address? What’s their Social Security back in the day when you could share that sort of thing and trust people with it? it’s kind of the equivalent of, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the the cartoon Shrek, but do you remember, do you remember the scene where where, Princess Fiona sends donkey off, Shrek got an arrow in his butt, and, Fiona sends donkey off to go find a red flower with a blue thorn, and he’s running around going. Red flower, blue thorn, red flower, blue thorn. Well, what she did is she gave him a task to keep him busy. And so that that, logic that that trying to actively engage the prefrontal cortex and in doing a task does actually undo or unhook amygdala hijack to some extent. And so what you’re what you’re trying to do when you’re doing that, you by being logical, you are forcing yourself into your prefrontal cortex so that your amygdala, that thing that drives you to just take panic action. Instead, you’re trying to use your logical executive brain, and that’s not a bad thing. So I think where it becomes problematic is that when people stay in that purely cognitive space, they can forget the necessity of that empathetic, feeling connection with other people who are around them. And that’s essential to people, to getting through a crisis.

00;07;55;19 – 00;08;04;15
Rick Hoaglund
So let me ask you about empathy just in general. I guess I’m going to start with something really simple. And that is what do you consider empathy?

00;08;04;18 – 00;09;18;06
Deborah Needham
Well, what I consider empathy to be is the ability to accurately sense another person’s emotions. And I know that you’ll you’ll look at literature and they’ll say, you can never truly know what another person is experiencing. this is true, but with empathy. That’s why I, you know, we can talk later about some of the important skill sets that go with managing empathy. Well, so you can never truly 100% know, but what you can do is you increase your ability to be skillful in accurately predicting what is the person’s feeling. And to some extent, it is possible to actually feel the other person’s feeling like there’s this thing that’s called emotional contagion, and you can absorb the other person’s feeling and begin to experience that feeling yourself. And so that’s a little bit of a way of being able to maybe get a hint of what the other person’s experiencing, but without having the skill to differentiate yourself and to be able to tell. Is that my feeling? Am I having, a sad reaction? And maybe that’s not coming from them, but I’m feeling it. You have to be able to tell what’s yours and what’s theirs, and if you can’t differentiate between them, then you’re making wrong assumptions about their emotion and you’re not interacting appropriately with them.

00;09;18;09 – 00;09;24;08
Rick Hoaglund
You could actually gain their trauma if you’re doing it incorrectly. If you were, oh, you’re taking another…

00;09;24;08 – 00;14;59;13
Deborah Needham
Absolutely, yes, definitely. And I know vicarious trauma is a thing as well. It can be just from interacting with the person, who is emotionally upset, I, I can’t tell you how many times I experienced that as a paramedic. In fact, I can think of like the calls that I was on where the family member was intensely upset. I found myself extremely distressed afterwards. I remember one was a 14 year old boy who was skateboarding in a parking lot of a store, and a delivery truck hit him full on about 25 miles an hour. And it was it was terrible. And I, we were working on him. We were waiting, you know, for help to arrive. We were waiting for a helicopter. There were some errors in the helicopter dispatch we ended up transporting by ground, and it was a long transport, and I remember I it was my partner’s patient care. And so he was in the back with the patient who I believed was not going to survive. The father showed up on scene in the middle of the scene and began, swearing at us, telling us to take our blankety blank hands off of his son. And he was clearly traumatized, and I had to get in his face and eyeball to eyeball, connect with him and tell him your son is in critical condition. We’re doing what we can. I need you to step back. And if you do not, I need to have this police officer restrain you. So I had to be very command and control with him. And he needed that in that moment. But on the way to the hospital, the part that traumatized me as a responder was the whole time, I’m breaking every speed limit. I can confess this now because the statute of limitations has run out on this law. Breaking that I did, but we were not supposed to exceed the speed of the posted speed by more than ten miles per hour in a private ambulance, and I was doing 70 in a 50. So I was in fact, it might have been a 40. I was going really fast. And the whole time the father is slapping the dash of my ambulance like it’s the rear end of a horse trying to get it to go faster. And so I felt his anxiety. I felt his hurry in his rush, and I just absorbed it. It was it was intense for me. So we got in. We delivered the patient. You know, the dad was shepherded off into, you know, a room for family while, you know, medical care was provided to his son. And I found that I had absorbed that so much that it just was like I was keyed up inside because I absorbed it. And that’s what I would consider vicarious trauma. It’s not just witnessing a traumatic event, but it’s it’s being in proximity to someone who’s having, a strong, intense emotional reaction. We absorb it. And I think the reason that we do, I I’ve never finished reading this book. I have true confessions here. I start a lot of books, and I don’t finish them because I get the gist of them. And then I’m like, well, it’s pretty big and I’m pretty busy, but I started reading The Empathic Civilization. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that, but it is a it’s a huge I mean, it’s like a four inch volume. It looks like War and Peace, basically, and I started reading it, but what really captivated me in the first part of the book was the the premise of the whole book is that we are, as humans, wired for empathy. And that’s the example they give at the beginning of that book was was an example of World War II troops, where they had people at the front line and, and there was, it was Christmas Eve. And all of a sudden, someone they were they’d been shooting at each other. Right. And then all of a sudden, someone starts singing A Christmas carol. And the Germans began singing it back and in German. And pretty soon they all come out and they meet on the front line, and they start showing each other spontaneously, without approval from their commanding officers. They stop firing on each other, and they go out and start showing each other pictures of their families, and they enjoy a basically a Christmas Eve cease fire spontaneously generated by humans themselves. And and they tell that story in that book to, to remind us that we are wired for empathy, that we are wired to connect to one another. I like to be really, I know I definitely have my woowoo side. people, people who who know me only in one area are like, whoa, Deb’s got this wild and crazy spiritual side as well, but, I believe there’s science behind it. I believe one of the most important mechanisms that humans could use better is the fact that we have these mirror neurons in our brains, and mirror neurons read things like microexpressions and subtle shifts in the way, like someone holds their shoulders really tense. And we read that about people and we are receiving empathic signals, you know, basically, signals that feed our empathy for the person. So our mirror neurons, when they sense that in another person, it recreates the same emotional state in us as that person is experiencing as our mirror neurons interpret it. And that automated process in the brain happens without us thinking about it. So it’s like you walk in the room and it just feels really tense, like the air is crackling. And what you don’t know is that somebody in the room had just had this major blow up or fight, but you walk in the room and you feel it. That’s what’s happening. You’re feeling their emotions, you’re absorbing their emotions, whether you’re conscious of it or not. It affects you. And I think that’s why oftentimes responders have burnout is they have not adequately learned how to shield themselves from that, how to, open to understand, but then be able to sort of close those channels down in a way that they can then stay a little bit insulated to be able to remain in the helper role.

00;14;59;15 – 00;15;35;22
Rick Hoaglund
So I have a question. You were talking about seeing some things physically, probably hearing orally as well. but how does technology work with that? So if you can’t be in a room with somebody, but maybe you’re doing you know, we’re recording this on zoom and I’m watching watching it. How how do I pick up that? Or if I’m on a phone or and I would, I would even go as far as to say in a text message, is there anything do you, do you feel that, do you lose it. Is it, positive and negative or do you not? Is there no research around that?

00;15;35;24 – 00;17;23;29
Deborah Needham
I don’t know if there is research around it or not. I can tell you my personal experience is one I consider myself very, empathically sensitive. Like I’m very easily able to feel other people’s feelings. And I’ve done enough self work. I can differentiate between them. So I know when it’s them and when it’s me. And what I’ve noticed is that in the electronic environment that it is diminished. The signals that we’re getting are diminished. Part of it is that you can’t see the whole body. Whenever we’re doing zoom, you know, we’re bust shots. You know, it’s like you’re you’re like those Greek busts where you can see them from about the mid chest and up, and that’s it. So you’re not seeing what are their legs doing? Are their feet fidgeting. What are they doing with their hands. You can’t see it. And so what you’re relying on almost 100% is shoulders and face. The other thing though, is there is a lot that you can pick up in someone’s voice. And I don’t know how it works. I can’t tell you why. I know what I know when I’m talking to someone who’s stressed or irritated or or tense in some way, but I can feel it. And oftentimes I can get that even just from the voice on the phone. And I think what I have done is I have learned over time to trust my gut feeling, but then to verify it and to check it out. That’s an important part of the skill sets with using empathy is you can’t assume, you can’t assume omniscience, that you know what the person is experiencing. In fact, that’s very insulting to someone who’s going through trauma to have you just assume you know what they’re feeling. but I but I think that I do get a lot of signals. I think anybody could. But we often dismiss it. We often say, well, I can’t know that. How how would I know that? And so we don’t trust the gut feeling enough to be able to verify it further.

00;17;24;01 – 00;17;44;07
Rick Hoaglund
So is there, is there any tricks to that? And I know next time we’re going to be talking about tools or things. So when I’m listening to someone, what am I listening for to be able to determine like what? How to be empathetic? Is there a trick to that? Is there something that you do when you listen to someone? I guess tone of voice would be maybe an example tone.

00;17;44;08 – 00;19;47;27
Deborah Needham
Tone of voice is really important, but I I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one little trick. This one I got from one of my grad school professors who has been one of my chief mentors in my life, and he said, there is a there is a pattern of speech which you need to pay attention to when somebody is talking. So this gets away from not even micro expressions or tone of voice, but just in what they’re saying. And someone can be talking along, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And then they just say, yeah. And then, you know, and then this happened. They drop this thing in there that sounds kind of big. But then they move off of it really quickly, and then they keep on going as if they hadn’t even said it. But if you are listening, observantly you will hear when they drop those little things like, you know, and briefly, you know, I just wondered, you know, why is life even worth living? But then I just, you know, I got back in and I went back to work the next day, and then they just talk as if they’re as if they said nothing. But what you may have heard was that that little tiny, this is doctor Mark R Jones, of the Sunyata group, and he says that’s nugget hunting. When you are listening to someone to try to understand them and to try to empathetically connect with them, you need to look for the nuggets they dropped. They just dropped you a nugget when they said, and, you know, I was like, well, man, is life even worth living? They drop that little nugget. But the key is they moved off of it really quickly. That displays discomfort with it, that says there’s some suffering there, there is some pain there. And when people drop something that could be big and then they move off of it quickly, you want to circle back to that. That’s the that’s the nugget hunting that Doctor Jones advocates. So you go back to that, say, you know, you said something, a couple minutes ago and you said, you know, and then you repeat back to them what they said in so many words and say, can you tell me more about that? And so now what you’ve done is you’ve just said, hey, I heard you say something that sounded kind of uncomfortable, you know, you want to talk some more about that? And it’s an opportunity then to let the person, if they want to, open up that can of worms because it obviously had some feeling for them, or they wouldn’t have jumped off the subject so quickly.

00;19;48;00 – 00;19;59;12
Rick Hoaglund
And my guess is that shows them that you’re actively listening, that your being a true partner in this conversation that’s going on. That has to be a part of empathy, too, like being a partner in their expression.

00;19;59;13 – 00;20;56;10
Deborah Needham
Absolutely. And I think the, the other thing that you were pointing out was that you’re listening really well. I think people have forgotten how to listen. I am guilty of it at home. I think most people are, with our loved ones. We take it for granted that we can doom scroll on the internet and still be listening halfway to our loved ones. And the fact is, we have lost a lot of the art of listening. And I think this also happens, like you were mentioning about electronic formats, like being on the zoom call, people oftentimes multitask when they’re on zoom calls. They’ll try to like, take care of little details or respond to a text off to the side thinking it’s no big deal. When you split your attention that way, you are going to miss the connections you need to make with that person. So a lot of that empathetic connection is about just being present with the person, being fully 100% present and with them and that is the focus.

00;20;56;13 – 00;21;14;13
Rick Hoaglund
So the difference between empathy and sympathy and and I’m guessing that part of that is an empathetic person can sort of how do I say this deliver bad news. That’s a bad way to put it, but deliver factual news that the person may not want to hear, but it’s what they need to hear. Am I wrong about that?

00;21;14;15 – 00;24;10;03
Deborah Needham
I would I would frame it slightly differently. I think that empathy is more about the mindset of the person that is experiencing it. And I think that, any actions that are taken can be done from either an empathetic or a sympathetic place, but I will fine tune that in a minute. How I see the difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is when you hear something has happened to someone and you’re like, oh man, I oh wow, that, you know, oh, I just feel so bad that that’s happening to you. You feel sorry for them is kind of what it is. Sympathy in some ways, almost puts you into a superior position to the other person in a way. And so you’re like, oh, you know, that’s that’s too bad. You know, that’s too bad. You lost your job. Oh, I feel bad that you lost your job. But then I’m thinking to myself, I still have my job. So thank goodness. And I feel, you know, it’s not not superiority in a, in a mean kind of way, but it’s kind of like, oh, I feel bad. You know, they are less fortunate than me. So it creates this, artificial superiority. I t’s it’s like a breach between people in a way. So sympathy is not particularly helpful to people when they’re in a crisis. Empathy is an opening emotionally and a mutual, vulnerability is the word that comes up for me. There’s there’s an opening with the other person where you’re feeling, in a way, you are feeling what they’re feeling through all these other these scientific ways of, you know, mirror neurons and watching body language and understanding, you know, what does this mean? Empathy allows you to share in the pain. So sometimes when I’ve had a client begin to cry, they’re telling me this really, really intense part of their life and I will feel myself. I will feel I will feel that same pain. And I’m like crying along with them. And so, so that empathy is that I’m I’m feeling their pain in a way, and I’m almost putting myself in their shoes like, what must it feel like to be them? Rather than standing back like sympathy does, where you’re just standing off to one side and going, oh, you know, that’s so I’m so sad you lost your job, but you were personally untouched by it. Empathy means on some level, you are being touched by their pain and you are sharing in the pain. And I know that that may be hard for, some responders to hear, but that’s why I think the shielding is so important. You can have those moments with people with an empathetic connection, but you can’t live there 100% because you cannot take on the pain of the world yourself. You have your own stuff, right? And so you have to you have to be able to enter into and step back from empathetic connection for self-preservation.

00;24;10;05 – 00;24;30;10
Rick Hoaglund
So when we were talking earlier, you brought up that it’s, it’s a it’s it being empathetic. It’s almost like a tool that you can use when you’re engaging with others. And and I guess my advantage, my, my question is, what’s the advantage of being empathetic over being overly direct? I’ll just call it that.

00;24;30;12 – 00;24;31;06
Deborah Needham
Okay. Sure.

00;24;31;09 – 00;24;34;07
Rick Hoaglund
What’s what’s the advantage on that?

00;24;34;09 – 00;29;50;26
Deborah Needham
Well, the difference is in what it makes on the receiving end for a person who is interacting with you. The… Well there’s two I guess I’ll say there’s two because the empathetic connection versus being like, overly cognitive with somebody, when you’re overly cognitive and you’re not empathetically connecting with someone, you’re really not fully understanding what they’re experiencing, and so you may make bad decisions. You may make bad recommendations because you aren’t really putting yourself in their shoes, that empathetic kind of becoming them for a short time. So that’s, that’s the benefit to you is it’ll help you understand them better. But this is really, really all in service of them, how it benefits them directly, it helps them buffer their own, I want to say mental health. I that’s the example I’m thinking of is from World War II when there were, there were a lot of troops they were studying and they were saying, wow, some troops from in World War II, didn’t experience the same levels of combat fatigue or battle fatigue, shellshock, what they called it back then. It’s what we know today as PTSD. And they were like, well, why is that? And when they were interviewing these troops, they found that they had high trust in their commanding officer. And so that was the trust was an important factor. But then they asked, well, why do you have high trust in your commanding officer? And the universal response was, because I know he cares about me. And so the value in empathetic connection is that when people feel you really care about them and they they don’t really believe that until you enter into that empathetic connection with them, when they feel that connection, they know you care about them and as a result, though, those troops then were buffered against the effects of PTSD, they had the same experiences as all the other troops that they had, ten times less the incidence of PTSD than troops who had a go ballistic and bark orders at ’em, kind of commanding officer. And I think I could give you an example from my paramedic career on on what a difference this makes to people. I had I had a patient who was a young man, probably in his early 20s, and his friends had called 911 because he had locked himself in the bathroom and said he was going to kill himself, but they didn’t call us then, they waited to call 911 because they didn’t believe him. In fact, they kind of mocked him. They thought he was being just histrionic, and so they didn’t call until they saw blood running out from underneath the bathroom door. And so we we arrived on the call and we got the door open, and he had severely wounded himself. and he had nearly bled out. And I remember my paramedic partner, he’s long since retired. If he hears this, he can know that I disapproved of this. At the time. We never talked about it then, because I was young and I didn’t know how to stand up to him. But he walked in and said, well, at least you did it the right way. A completely unempathetic reaction. I was horrified and and I was shocked and I then it was my patient. So I then began the process of forming the connection with him and talking with him. So we got the bleeding stopped. What what little blood he had left. He did survive, by the way. I just want, in case anybody’s hanging on that story and going, oh my God, did he make it? He made it. But the important part was that while we were on the way to the hospital, I was in the back of the ambulance with him, had an IV. There was nothing else I could do for him but just supportive care until the doctors, you know, could do some, do some repair and I asked him why. Why he tried to kill himself. And he said, and he looked at me and his eyes were just full of tears. And he said, because nobody cares about me. And I looked him right in the eyes. I’m going to get a little, see I’m very empathetic so I’m getting all choked up now just thinking about this. And this was, oh my gosh, 40, 40, almost 40 years ago. This was like 35, 40 years ago. And I looked him right in the eyes and I said, I care about you. I said, that’s why I’m here. And then he began to cry. And as we were rolling him in on the gurney into the hospital emergency room, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it really, really tight. And he looked in my eyes and he just said, thank you. Thank you. And and I realized that he had never had anybody look him right in the eyes and say, I really care about you. And I was a stranger to him. I felt sad, you know, for his life. So I had that that little piece of me that might have had a little sympathy. But because I was really feeling him, I was connected to him and I could I could feel his pain. He knew that he saw me seeing him, and that made all the difference to him. He felt connected. I hope, I hope, and I just want to believe that that was a pivotal moment for him, that that perhaps turned his life in a different way to say that, you know what? Maybe it’s not everybody who’s cold and shuts me out. Maybe human connection is possible in my life and I can hang on a little bit longer. So that’s why empathy is important, because it touches people in a deep way, that simply being brusque and businesslike with them doesn’t do anything for them emotionally or for their mental health. It might help them get through the crisis. Just barking orders. Yeah, you can get them to Red flower, Blue Thorn all day long, but that doesn’t do anything to alleviate that condition of suffering in the human soul. And that’s why I think empathetic connection is so important.

00;29;50;28 – 00;30;07;01
Rick Hoaglund
You know what? We’re going to stop right there for this episode. And we will be coming back with another episode. and in episode two, Deb, if you don’t mind, we will talk about some of the tools that you can put in your tool belt to make sure that you’re communicating in an empathetic way.

00;30;07;04 – 00;30;08;21
Deborah Needham
Okay. Thank you.

00;30;08;24 – 00;31;25;10
Rick Hoaglund
Thank you. While our biology helps us pick up on cues, there are a few extra tools we need to be really top notch empathizers. First of all, we must be open to new perspectives. That means getting to know different cultures, lifestyles, and beliefs without that broader understanding. Empathy just isn’t as effective. Next, we must be willing to open up emotionally and connect with people on a deeper level. Empathy isn’t just about understanding. It’s about genuinely feeling alongside others. And let’s not forget about our biases. We’ve all got them, whether it’s about race, gender, age, or other visible trait. It’s important to recognize and deal with those biases so they don’t get in the way of truly understanding others. Stay tuned for our next episode. Deborah will share more tips on how to really connect emotionally with people. Let’s face it. Empathy takes more than just relying on our biology to hear other episodes of On Topic with Empathia. Visit our website. Empathia.com. Follow us on social media @ empathia and subscribe to On Topic with Empathia to hear new episodes as soon as they go live. I’m Rick Hoaglund. Thanks for listening to On Topic with Empathia.