Can You Go Outside for a Walk at Night?

How Cognitive Empathy Can Help Us Expand Our Own Perspective and Connect Across Our Differences

Want to grow your own perspective? Connect with people who have a different experience than you.

I was recently in a coaching conversation with a client who is a Black male. He described a scenario in which it would have been helpful to have some time and space away from the other inhabitants of his home. Sometimes we ALL need some physical separation, especially during a Covid lockdown. It was nighttime and he mentioned that his home didn’t lend too much privacy to remove himself. He felt kind of stuck and trapped. So, my instinct was… go outside for a walk????

I was coach-like enough to ask a curious question rather than impart my opinion and advice… right away??? I asked him: “If you were to relive this experience again, what, if anything, would you have done differently?”

“Maybe go out for a drive in the car,” he said, “but I was pretty tired.”

Then, I went for it. I asked him to do what I (a white male) would have done. “Could you have gone out for a walk?”

<Pause>.

“That’s a woke question," he responded.

While I’m glad (and relieved) he felt that way, I wasn’t trying to be woke. I was trying to be helpful. Turns out my instinct and experience wasn’t so helpful.

He went on to say that he doesn’t feel comfortable walking around his neighbourhood at night because of the color of his skin. He shared that,

“Walking around at night is not typically a thing I can do.”

Holy sh!t.?My mind was kinda blown and I’m glad it was. While I understood it and certainly appreciated his experience, I couldn’t really relate to it.

This is where empathy, specifically emotional empathy, can fail us. Emotional empathy is sharing in an emotional experience with another—being able to feel what they feel. Emotional empathy is pretty hard and sometimes impossible. I don’t know, and will likely never truly know, what it feels like to be a Black male, or to be female giving birth or to miscarry a child, to be a refugee, an Asian in America, or to be LGBTQ2S+ and the list goes on.

Turns out there are other types of empathy that can be more accessible to all, even if we cannot truly feel what another person feels. Enter: cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy is when we practice taking another person’s perspective, imagining what it might be like to experience and feel what they are going through.

While I’ve never felt like I couldn’t go for a walk at night in my neighbourhood because of just being who I am, I could imagine what that restriction and inhibition might feel like. I can even imagine and relate to other people’s similar experiences, like my Polish grandparents who lived under Nazi occupation.

Cognitive empathy helped me understand some of my inherent privilege being a white male.

While we sometimes cannot feel what another person feels, we can still work to relate to their experience. We can imagine how they might feel. We can attempt to take on their perspective. And, in doing so, we can act with greater care, concern, and compassion. We can become a part of the change we wish to create for ourselves and others.

So, how can you better use empathy (emotional, cognitive and more) to connect with others and become the change you wish to see?