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Do you take the “fig leaf” posture when addressing a group?

Do you move around or pace back and forth when talking informally?

Do you rock from side to side or back and forth when talking?

Do you use a “quick” smile with people?

Do you talk to others with your arms crossed?

Empathy

The concept of empathy was discussed with respect to effective listening.
An effective communicator is someone who has real empathy for those
being communicated with. Carl Rogers defines empathy as seeing the
expressed idea from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him.
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An empathic listener tries to hear the messages as the source of the

message is hearing them. The difference between an empathic listener and
others is the attempt to understand how the other person thinks and feels
as the communication is occurring.

If one is listening with empathy, you should be processing what the other
person is saying, how they are saying it, and what their body language is
really telling you. Again, you are listening so that you can understand

what is being communicated, and people communicate so that they can be
understood.

Empathy is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy usually means to “feel
sorry for.” Empathy means to “feel with” another. You can empathize

with both positive and negative feelings. Sympathy is usually extended
only to persons with problems. To empathize with another is to experience
his or her world. When you sense another’s feelings and attitudes as if you
had experienced those feelings and attitudes, you are empathizing.
Empathy is the ability to see as another sees, hear as another hears, and feel

as another feels. But empathy always retains the “as I understand your

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Carl Rogers, “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation,” in Communication Concepts and Processes, ed.
Joseph DeVito (Englewood Cliffs NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 182-188.
David Kolzow 145