A Case of Empathy.

Can you tell me what empathy is? I hear various definitions going around these days, but one that burned itself in my mind like no other is this: ‘empathy is stepping into somebody’s shoes, walking all across town, then telling them that, if the shoes do not fit your feet, then you’ll recalibrate the latter to make for a perfect fit’. Paints a very vivid picture, doesn’t it?

So, empathy is important for us. It enables us to go places that we couldn’t otherwise visit – places of the heart and the mind located inside those with whom we interact on a daily basis. Stepping into someone’s psyche and understanding their needs and desires is a failsafe way of connecting with them. As interpersonal relationships is what makes the world go round, investing in them the crucial trait of empathy, is the equivalent of taking out emotional insurance on our social give-and-takes.

Let us now take empathy and transfer it to the professional world. Anybody who has a client-facing role, whether it be a doctor, an architect or the owner of a mom-and-pop store, stands to gain from employing and deploying empathy. Knowing what your clients want and attending to their needs is the key to professional success, just like 1+1=2. The way a doctor reads a patient’s concerns and delivers her prognosis in a bespoke, comforting way or how an architect moulds his blueprint to create the dream house of his customers, even before they ask him for that extra room, says volumes about the power of empathy and its resulting redemption into success. After all, empathy, when applied genuinely and properly, will translate into trust and confidence, given in spades by the recipient of this attribute – the cumulative effect of positive personality traits in action.

One profession that has trust and confidence at its core is none other than insurance advisory. When embarking on a journey to provide insurance to someone, you want them to trust you and to invest their faith in you. How do you achieve that? By carefully listening to them. By feeling what they are feeling. By reading behind their spoken words and trying to make out what their unspoken ones say. And by taking all these readings of the heart and soul, packing them together, and producing an exact solution to their needs and desires.

Just like theatre, there are no second chances in a sales pitch. It’s all or nothing from the get-go. The minute you sit down with a client to discuss a potential collaboration you must be ready to give it your best, most genuine, most empathetic self. Empathy borders on the genuineness of your personality thus, to be truly empathetic with your business prospects, first you need to be truthful within, otherwise it comes out as fake. And, even if you manage to persuasively exhibit empathy at that very first meeting, if such is not genuinely possessed, same as trust, it will show along the way, and the relationship will come tumbling down. All or nothing. Genuine or not. Empathy vs. apathy. Your choice.

Empathy is indeed a choice. And those insurance advisors that opt for it are the most successful among their peers. As Jeffrey Gitomer, the so-called King of Sales, famously said ‘people don't like to be sold, but they love to buy’. The difference between “being sold” and “buying” lies in those tiny spaces of the heart where empathy enters, observes, and comes back knowing exactly what the holder of that heart wants. That’s true success in my book, the win-win kind.