1 Empathy, sympathy and compassion
Empathy is a skill that can help you better relate to whoever you come into contact with. Knowing how to be empathic can help you improve communication with others, making for a positive workplace environment and your relationships inside and outside work.
In general, empathy is when you make yourself vulnerable to share the feelings of another, and you listen without judgement: for example, ‘Can you tell me how this feels for you?’.
On your journey to building empathy skills, you might discover that you are actually being sympathetic rather than empathetic – be aware that they are different. When building empathy, you might think that saying things such as ‘I know how you feel’ or ‘I understand’ are helpful, but these statements express sympathy, not empathy, as you place yourself as centre rather than listening to understand.
A study by Forgiarini, Gallucci and Maravita (2011) found that white people experience weaker empathetic responses to persons racialised as Black. Many instances of biased racialised empathy have been evidenced, for example, medical staff perceiving Black women as being able to stand more pain in childbirth or Black communities being policed more aggressively. ‘Race’ can be defined as an ideological concept and a social construct as humans share 99% of DNA. But, while people continue to perceive humanity as belonging to different races, a racial bias towards empathy can have detrimental effects on individuals, groups and relationships.