The Huddle Wisdom Blog

How do I teach my kids to empathise?

Empathy is critical for authentic human connection.

It helps you became much more impactful in the world because it facilitates trust - which is crucial for winning hearts and minds. 

Empathy as a construct is multidimensional. I’ve talked about various attributes that comprise empathic ability before www.huddlewisdom.com/blog/3partempathy

...but there's still a lot that we are learning about empathy and its expression.

...we're also learning more about how we can effectively systematise and foster skills to improve our empathic capacity.

A myriad childhood experiences influences the development of empathic skill. The manner in which carers relate, communicate and transmit mental models of the world across to us. Cultural factors and social medial influences also can’t be ignored. All such things shapes young minds.

Parents/teachers clearly then have a critical role in the world....

At a foundational level, accurate empathy in my mind involves recognising and understanding 3 major components that characterise it.

These 3 components comprise of cognition (thoughts), affect (emotion) and perception (feelings).

Perception speaks to feeling through your senses. This is intangible but it is real.

For example; we can feel the effects of the wind but we can't see it, though none of us are in any doubt that it exists.

Like the invisible pull of a magnetic force for example, when you feel connected and drawn to another person.

Perception however is only part of the equation; if too much weight is placed on perception we are likely to empathise inaccurately because we have neglected the other components.

All 3 components need to be attended to in order to reach a place of optimal balance; and that's when you will be able to find that your empathising will be most influential.

If you are able to train yourself to be sensitive to the relative 'weight' of each component, moment...

At a basic level empathy consists of 2 components; that is, an affective (feeling) and a cognitive (thinking) part. 

There's a common misconception that folks with so called ASD/Autistic Spectrum Disorder cannot empathise. That's not true. It's not that they can't, its that they struggle to reconcile their understanding of thoughts with feelings in other people and also in themselves. 

Life as you know is not black and white...well. Actually I take that back. Yes there is black and white but there's also all sorts of shades in between and not in between. Life is colourful. And people who have problems with social reading tend to also struggle to appreciate and perceive the shades of colour in between more primary/obvious ones. For example: anger, sadness, joy are relatively more easy to understand compared to shame, disgust, disappointment etc.

People with social reading problems also have problems with self-awareness; they almost...

I just wanted to let you know that you can get a FREE mini-training course about how you can improve your ability to connect with kids while also learning how to handle some tricky but common scenarios like the silent treatment, how do you deal with a kid who says "I Don't Know" all the time, or who doesn't want to talk to you. 

Come and Check the course out now. I think it'll save you heaps of time, energy and headaches!

The key to being influential is connection. You need to be able to connect with someone before they will trust you. If they don't trust you, you cannot be influential. Clearly; this is a critical hurdle for any business person, teacher, parent, doctor, human being. But the connection between people is more porous than you might think. 

Humans are supposed to connect but we've somehow unlearned or suppressed this; perhaps because in order to connect to another person it means we need to let our guard down. We have to open up so to speak. The implications are great...because we become vulnerable. But if our intention is to be more authentic and genuine in the world, then we have to somehow find a way to get out of our own way and start building bridges with people. Sometimes, it means getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. Now; I am not saying any of this is easy, and I acknowledge the complexity of our lives and relationships but there's no way around this - in...