3.2 Interpersonal relationships and empathy
Building up relationships and connections across your workplace is likely to be key to supporting workplace wellbeing effectively. Aspects of this highlighted by Fit for Law interviewees included practising active listening, understanding differing personalities, learning and sharing a little about personal lives, and being empathetic.
The following video provides more information on empathy and how it differs from sympathy. The references to clients also apply to working with colleagues.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 4
Transcript: Video 4 The value of empathy
RAJ:
Empathy is about understanding another person's perspective, emotions, or experiences. It's useful in the workplace because it helps us develop relationships with people. And in the legal workplace, that will be developing client relationships and co-worker relationships.
People with good emotional regulation can use empathy to strengthen bonds, and also defuse difficult emotional situations, which will be helpful with clients, too. Research also shows that if you have an empathetic manner with clients, that they're more trusting of you and more willing to share information.
There is a difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy comes from a perspective of caring. And it can be defined as concern for another person's wellbeing or welfare in the face of a threat or obstacle. But empathy is about understanding and recognising another person's experience or perspective. And you're not required to feel the same feelings as them.
If you experience a lot of sympathy in your role, it's important to note that that's not that productive for you or the client and it can contribute to burnout. So it's important to note that you should be working within your professional role and thinking about how you can make a positive difference to someone using your training. And that's legal. And you're not there to be their therapist or friend, so just focusing on your professional role.
It's also important to note that our feelings, our empathy, our detachment, our sympathy will change over time. This is known as professional desensitisation. So materials and cases and clients and encounters that we experience, we may not have the same reactions as we get more experience in our role. And we may become desensitised to them. So if you're finding something particularly difficult, the light at the end of the tunnel is it may not always be that way.
However, it's also important to note that if you have a lot of experience in your role, then you may be desensitised to something that is very difficult for the client. And so you have to be aware that you have to offer that empathy, because they may not know that you've experienced this many, many times and you've heard this story. So you have to take note of that.
Video 4 The value of empathy
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3.1 Developing emotional competence and professional resilience