How to Show Empathy: 4 Techniques to Practice Empathizing

Empathy means taking on another person’s feelings as your own. In a broader sense, empathy is a cognitive and emotional skill to understand, relate, and mutually share in another person’s experience to better understand their emotional pain. For example, an individual might use empathy to build trust with others or help loved ones through a hard time.

Here are three common types of empathy and how to implement them in your personal life:

1. 1. Cognitive empathy: Also known as perspective-taking, cognitive empathy relies on the listener’s capacity to relate to another person’s perspective without imposing their own experience, point of view, or biases. Interviewers often use cognitive empathy to help their guests or subjects open up and share more guarded views and feelings.
2. 2. Compassionate empathy: This technique is valuable in problem-solving situations when someone asks for your advice. Compassionate empathy requires analyzing the underlying cause and effect of a situation. After someone explains their circumstances, you can demonstrate that you understand their situation on some level in an unbiased manner. This might even provide the speaker with insight or an alternative perspective. Compassionate empathy is a hybrid of the cognitive and emotional empathy techniques.
3. 3. Emotional empathy: You can sum up the underlying difference between emotional and cognitive empathy with an analogy—cognitive empathy is an attempt to walk a mile in another person’s shoes, while emotional empathy is screaming in pain when someone else steps on a nail. Therefore, emotional empathy is a mirrored emotional and occasionally visceral form of caring for another’s well-being through shared experience.

Consider using one or more of these techniques to practice empathy with family members, coworkers, or people in your social circle whom you trust.

1. 1. Be an active listener. This multifaceted communication skill utilizes aspects of body language, such as eye contact and facial expressions, to convey to others you are engaged and present in a conversation. An empathic person can use open-ended questions and active listening to motivate others to share more and validate the thoughts and feelings of others.
2. 2. Offer advice. Being an empathetic listener means withholding judgment, even when offering advice. Note that you should give advice only after someone has requested your input; otherwise, the person might perceive your unsolicited advice as judgment. Such an unequal standing forces you into a sympathetic role because you’ve demonstrated you cannot share in the person’s feelings and perspective on the same level. If you have never experienced the same hardship as another person, you might have sympathy for them, but you have no common ground to empathize with them.
   
3. 3. Provide emotional and physical comfort. Empathy does not rely solely on emotional and intellectual understanding between people. Sometimes human touch, such as a hug or pat on the back, can be a powerful empathic tool. You can use appropriate physical touch to communicate specific, shared emotions. Human touch can also create a neural response that releases mirror neurons, dopamine, and serotonin into the body. Studies have shown that these neurochemicals can raise moods and improve a person’s mental headspace.
4. 4. Validate the person’s experience. Validation is a powerful empathizing tool. Humans are social creatures who seek out security and strength in numbers for survival. These instinctual grouping patterns still exist in modern society. When you listen to and validate someone, you are metaphorically accepting this person into your community. If you are an empathetic person, you can take these new partnerships a step further. An empath can accept the emotions that someone else feels and adopt these feelings as their own emotions—in effect, sharing the emotional weight of the speaker.

Practicing empathy can help you lead more effectively while building stronger relationships across the personal and professional facets of your life. Challenge your perceptions with the MasterClass Annual Membership and take lessons on emotional intelligence from Pharrell Williams, Roxane Gay, Gloria Steinem, Dr. Cornel West, Walter Mosley, Robert Reffkin, and Robin Arzón.