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The flip side is that extending empathy is part of the process of feeling ready to interact and, in many cases, to lead a situation. I’ve had the experience of giving
a keynote speech to 10,000 people in the Washington DC Convention Center. My goal was to be empathetic with what it felt like for them to be in a room with 10,000 people. By extending empathy to them through having them stop focusing on me and talk to the person next to them, by understanding that this was a very different, unique, and large setting, and by giving that empathy as part of my presentation,
I felt empowered, I felt connected, I felt I had a feedback mechanism, and I felt as though I was authentically engaging – even though it was one person to 10,000. I think that’s true every time we lead. We must understand what empathy means for the recipient and for the person who is extending it.
: Can you share any stand-out examples of empathy that you’ve shown or that’s been shown to you in the past year?
: There are so many, but here are a few that pop into mind. In mid-summer 2020, as the country was engaging around the issues of racial injustice, we invited very diverse people to be the featured guests on one of our Empathy Concerts. One was a black songwriter and performer who had some very powerful and targeted songs about the pain of racial injustice. I also invited a police officer from the Norfolk police department, which had done a wonderful lip sync a few years prior, to share his perspectives. In that moment of a police officer and an activist, who would not normally be in the same conversation, empathy drew a connection between them. They heard, they listened, and they plugged into each other’s very different perspectives. That was, for me, an overwhelmingly powerful moment.
On another Empathy Concert, we had a six-year-old girl who wrote a song called “Stuck at Home”. It was a wonderful song about the realities of being stuck at home! I found that I was feeling an enormous amount of empathy for her and for what it’s like to be
a kid with her family – and no one else – constantly together.
There were a few painful moments, too. I had one conversation with a learning colleague early in the pandemic. I actually said, “Why don’t you turn on your video? I’d love to see you and say hello!” They responded with a very low level of enthusiasm about doing that. I later found out that this person was
living with many relatives in a small apartment and
did not want to reveal her environment. That was a powerful moment for me of almost feeling I had been inappropriate to say, “I really want to see your space.” We need to understand that part of empathy is respecting what people want or don’t want to share.
Melinda Doolittle (American Idol)
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