Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

That insight suggests that it is possible to make tough decisions while still being empathetic. In fact, in many situations, the best way to make tough decisions is with kindness and empathy. In a business setting, if we have to make a decision that hurts somebody’s interest, it is easy to tell ourselves not to bring empathy to the situation, because if we do, we will just make it hard for ourselves to make our tough, but necessary, decision. I found this to be suboptimal. If we make tough decisions without empathy, we can more easily achieve what we want in the short term, but we also create resentment and mistrust, which hurt our own interests in the long term. If instead we treat the affected people with kindness and empathy, we create trust and understanding. With that, we may become more able to skillfully negotiate and manage their concerns. With enough trust and understanding, we may even be able to find creative ways that either solve everybody’s problems or at least mitigate some concerns in some major way. In sum, tough decisions still need to be made, but if people trust you, feel that your heart is in the right place, and understand that you are doing this for the greater good, you are more likely to win their cooperation. Better still, once trust is established, it becomes a foundation upon which you can build a strong long-term working relationship. Hence, you win in both the short and long term.

A great example of making difficult decisions with empathy is found in Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence:

Consider how employees were treated when plants closed at two companies. At GE, workers had two years’ notice that the plant would be closed, and the company made an intense outplacement effort to help them find other jobs. The other company announced the closing with just one week’s notice, and made no effort to help workers locate other employment .

The results? Almost a year later, the majority of the former GE workers said it had been a good place to work, and 93 percent lauded the transition services offered them. At the other company, only 3 percent said it had been a good place to work. GE preserved a large pool of goodwill, while the other firm left a legacy of bitterness .

When we lay people off, we are subjecting them to one of the most painful experiences in their lives. Yet it is possible to do even that with empathy, and even under those painful circumstances, trust and goodwill can be created. Some people call it “being tough without being an SOB.”

How to Increase Empathy

Empathy increases with kindness. Kindness is the engine of empathy; it motivates you to care, and it makes you more receptive to others, and them to you. The more kindness you offer to people, the better you can empathize with them.

Empathy also increases with perceived similarity. The more we perceive somebody to be just like us, the more we empathize with him or her. There is a fascinating study by Andrea Serino and team, aptly titled I Feel What You Feel If You Are Similar to Me , which hints at how powerful the perception of similarity can be for empathy. 7The study is based on the discovery that watching a video of your own body being touched can temporarily increase your sensitivity to touch. For example, if your cheeks are electrically stimulated at an intensity just below what you can perceive (called “subthreshold tactile stimuli”), you probably will not feel it. But if it happens at the same time you see a video of your cheeks being touched, you probably will feel it. In other words, watching your cheeks being touched makes you more sensitive to feeling your cheeks being touched. This mechanism is called “visual remapping of touch,” and it also works if you observe a video of another person’s face being touched instead of your own face. Amazing stuff.

Serino’s study explored the question of whether this visual remapping of touch works better if the face you see being touched belongs to someone you consider to be similar to you. In the first experiment, they used faces from each participant’s own ethnic group versus those from another ethnic group (in this case, Caucasian versus Maghrebian). Fascinatingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, it turned out to work measurably better for faces belonging to each participant’s own ethnic group.

The second experiment used faces from the leadership of each participant’s political party versus those from the opposing political party (all from the same ethnic group). Results show this visual remapping to work measurably better if the face comes from one’s own political party! This is jaw dropping. The mere perception of whether or not a person shares your political beliefs can measurably affect how you respond to him at an unconscious, neurological level.

Hence, to become more empathetic, we need to create a mind that instinctively responds to everyone with kindness and an automatic perception of others being “just like me.” In other words, we need to create mental habits.

Creating Desired Mental Habits

The practice of creating mental habits is based on a simple, intuitively obvious yet profoundly important insight. The Buddha describes it this way:

Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind . 8

In other words, what we think, we become.

The method itself is simple; invite a thought to arise in your mind often enough, and it will become a mental habit. For example, if every time you see another person, you wish for that person to be happy, then eventually, it will become your mental habit and whenever you meet another person, your instinctive first thought is to wish for that person to be happy. After a while, you develop an instinct for kindness. You become a kind person. Your kindness shows in your face, posture, and attitude every time you meet somebody. People will become attracted to your personality, not just your good looks.

The informal way to practice is simply to generate these thoughts every time you meet people. However, there is also a formal, systematic way of doing it, which many people find highly effective. We call it the Just Like Me / Loving Kindness practice.

Just Like Me / Loving Kindness Practice

There are two separate practices for seeing similarity and offering kindness. The first is a practice called Just Like Me, in which we remind ourselves how similar other people are to us, thereby creating the mental habit of equality. The second is a popular practice called Loving Kindness Meditation, where we create good wishes for others, thereby creating the mental habit of kindness. We combine both practices into one.

In class, we often do this exercise in pairs with participants sitting facing each other. For our purpose here, instead of finding somebody to sit down facing you, simply visualize somebody you care about in your mind while doing the exercise.

I urge you to read the scripts for Just Like Me and Loving Kindness slowly and with generous amounts of pause.

JUST LIKE ME AND LOVING KINDNESS MEDITATION

Setup

Sit in a comfortable position that allows you to be alert and relaxed at the same time. Start with 2 minutes to rest the mind on the breath.

Bring to mind somebody you care about. Visualize him or her. If you wish, you may use a photograph or video of that person. Just Like Me

Now, read the script below slowly to yourself, pausing at the end of each sentence for reflection:

This person has a body and a mind, just like me .