Have you practiced or experienced “proactive empathy”?
Empathy involves active listening and understanding what the other human being is going through. This is important in building relationships and trust with employees and customers.
The proactive “addition” is the reaction of the person showing empathy and helping their counterpart deal with a particular situation.
First, there are two additional elements in developing an empathetic mindset:
Respecting the opportunity
Being compassionate
Respect
Respect the opportunity to speak to someone who most likely needs your support and assistance. They engage because they trust you to hear their feedback and revert with a response. If it is your first interaction with the person, assume they give you the first chance to make a good impression.
Respecting the opportunity means:
Come prepared.
You are focused on listening and capturing information.
You avoid common distractions (your mobile phone and other distracting applications)
Be compassionate
Think about the other individual. What is their emotion, then? For example, “How would you feel if you were in their shoes?”
Avoid judging the situation. Instead, ask questions and capture notes.
Later, evaluate the options in hand before responding.
In the long term, acknowledging someone’s strengths, weaknesses, fears, and hopes is instrumental in building trust and deepening professional and personal relationships.
You can then consider a more proactive empathy mode – by being Responsive.
Sometimes, someone seeks a partner to listen to and acknowledge feelings and thoughts. However, in other encounters and mainly in professional relationships, I found that empathy leads to building trust based on the ability to provide guidance or a suggestion. It can be a message, action, or another deliverable that either addresses a specific challenge or assists in progressing a more complicated matter.
Specifically, you may provide an answer that does not meet a stakeholder’s expectations in customer management. Still, at the same time, you may offer a suitable alternative (which is always better than having no response).
And then you close the loop: Listening-> Respecting-> being compassionate -> Being responsive.
This is “proactive empathy” in action
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