Why Is Empathy Important? Tips From Esther Perel

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist, author, and relationship expert. Esther’s bestselling titles include Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, available in twenty-five languages, and The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Esther has a therapy practice in New York City and hosts two podcasts, Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work?

Empathy means taking on another person’s emotions as your own emotions. 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.

According to Esther Perel, empathy is the opposite of self-awareness.“It’s that ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes,” she says. “Empathy is the counterforce, if you want, of self-awareness. It is the yin-yang: One makes you able to think about yourself, the other makes you able to enter the reality of the other.”

Empathizing with others is crucial for personal and professional relationships and can benefit your emotional and mental well-being. Empathy is “essential to our understanding of others,” as Esther says. Empathy can promote communication, trust, and collaboration with loved ones and colleagues. A lack of empathy can lead to misunderstandings, biases, and conflict at home and in the workplace. Being empathetic is a vital attribute of a leader.

Here are three common types of empathy:

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 proves 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, also known as affective empathy, is a mirrored emotional and occasionally visceral form of caring for another’s well-being through shared experience.

Follow these tips to help you increase your levels of empathy and emotional intelligence:

1. 1. Avoid making assumptions. Assumptions can lead to conflict with loved ones and coworkers. “One of the very interesting things that we do in relationships is we look at sameness or difference,” Esther says. “Who resembles me? Who is different from me? Or who are the ones that are alike and who are the ones that are different from each other? And one of the interesting mishaps that often occur in relationships is that we can assume similarity when, in fact, there is difference, or, in reverse, that we can assume that we are quite different when, in fact, we are much more similar.” Esther advises to “look for ways to connect with each other” to prevent a misunderstanding.
2. 2. Be aware of cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions describe the tendency “to see ourselves as complex and the other person as more simple.” In essence, people usually believe their behavior arises from particular circumstances, while another person’s behavior is a personality flaw. Esther advises you to give your partners “that same benefit of the doubt” as you give yourself.
3. 3. Correct your mistakes. Avoid blaming the other person if you take a misstep in a personal or professional relationship. As Esther explains, it is typical for a person to say, “I meant well. And it didn't work. And therefore, now I'm mad at you or upset with you that you made me fail.” Instead, Esther advises course-correcting the situation: “I learned something about you. This is not the way to go about this in my experience with you.” This can help bolster personal and professional relationships and promote teamwork.
4. 4. Give others what they need. Be aware of the feelings of others. In relationships, “we tend to give to the other what we would want the other to give to us. But it isn't necessarily what the other one needs,” Esther says. For example, you might prefer someone at work ask you about your feelings and think that’s something you should do for a coworker when they are upset. However, your colleague might prefer to be left alone. Communication skills are key for identifying needs. Esther says “pay attention” to their body language and facial expressions. Active listening and asking questions is also a great way to figure out needs in any type of relationship.
5. 5. Let curiosity lead. When it comes to being more empathetic, avoid assuming your experiences and your own perceptions are the standards. “There are many languages on this planet; there are many relational languages as well, so don't take yours as the norm,” Esther says. “And that will help you be curious that other people think, feel, react, and do differently from you.”
6. 6. Shift your perspective. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive filter where people look for things in their own life that reinforce expectations and assumptions and ignore anything that doesn’t line up with expectations. For example, you may think your colleague dislikes you, so you actively look for evidence of this while disregarding the ways they help you. To avoid this pattern of thinking, Esther advises a shift in perspective. “Look for everything the other person does (your manager, your colleague, your partner) that you felt was attentive and caring and warm towards you,” she says. “You will begin to see how we miss those because we are so focused on finding the ones that we expect to see.”
7. 7. Steer clear of totalistic thinking. Totalistic thinking is when a person assumes someone else “always” does something or “never” does something. In reality, “the totalistic aspect of it is inaccurate much of the time,” Esther says, and is “a subjective receiving” of how the other person behaves.

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