Pixabay image source below:
https://pixabay.com/images/id-1518647/
Putting yourself in other people’s shoes is essential for growth and thriving in this life.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s position mentally. In life, we deal with and interact with individuals from all walks of life.
Thriving and growing depends upon our willingness to examine our position in our environment and see where we want to go next. Empathy helps us help others and it also helps us examine career and life paths. Do you want to become a CEO, engineer, doctors, craftsman or something else?
I have personally been focused on building my empathy this year. I work at a company with many different roles and am a manager. I have a middle-management job positon, and am contemplating taking a more technical role. I use empathy to gage the job’s potential impact on my work environment and to treat my coworkers with the respect they deserve. Empathy humanizes others, and so much of life tries to push people apart. In a way, empathy allows us to be saner in a crazy world where division is a real issue. My personal empathy-building exercise and journey includes talking to people with an open mind and actually listening. Recently, I talked with some techs at work and tried to fully understand their work, career goals and how they viewed management. Classism is something that many experience, and it dulls empathy in such a way that division is almost guaranteed.
The Golden Rule is essentially treating others as we wish to be treated. In order to thrive, we need to recognize that we part of a community at work, in our own community where we live and everywhere else. It goes beyond making friends and making strides in our career- we need to understand our obligation to help others and this helps us grow.
Empathy is essential as a member of the graphene blogging community we are participating in. This new social network we are building is a growing and maturing community. We understand the opportunity we have here, and to be effective in growing we need to communicate and be empathetic to other’s experiences and lives. Reading heartfelt blogs helps to build empathy, and it’s fun to learn about other cultures and ways of life.
Thanks for reading my blog. Let’s build together and make this place great.