Will the empathy of the human coach soon be challenged by the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT?

Something we were asked so many times in the beginning of our journey of creating coaching chatbots was: "but what about the empathy of the coach"?

Being on the neurodiverse side of life, I never really got this question until I realized that this question was mostly driven by lack of knowledge and fear. But it made me curious to dig deeper into what empathy really is, what kind of empathy is needed to be a good coach and if AI chatbots can be as empathetic as human coaches or even replace certain parts of the coaching process in the future.

Ready for this journey?

About the ME and the OTHER: Separating Sensitivity, Sympathy, Empathy & Compassion?

Ok, so let's get started by defining the actual meaning of the individual words quite often confused by people when we talk about empathy and how to move from the ME to the OTHER (and sometimes back):

Sensitivity - starting with your feelings (ME)

Sensitivity is the degree to which you can feel things and react to external stimuli of physical or emotional nature. In coaching it is often the extend of how we can feel the emotions of others or any disturbances within a person or system based on our own experiences. It is about the ME!

Sympathy - responding to others based on your feeling (ME)

When you show sympathy you stay within the ME and respond from your personal "ME" perspective. Showing sympathy you need to connect with something in yourself respond to the other person based on that feeling.

Empathy - recognizing emotions (of OTHERS)

Empathy is taking this now to a whole different level: the OTHER. This is where we enter the Coaching sphere. Leaving your own thinking, biases and experiences out of the picture and really connecting with the client's situation, underlying needs and feelings.

"Empathy is the degree to which you can 'imagine' or relate to the feelings, thoughts and states of others, and perhaps even the causes of those feelings. Empathy is an emotional skill set and one of the most powerful tools of compassion. It allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding." (Brené Brown)

As stated by Brown, most researchers agree that there are at least two elements to empathy:

• Cognitive Empathy: the ability to recognize and understand another persons emotions.
• Affective empathy, sometimes also called emotional empathy or experience sharing: One's own emotional attunement to the experience of another person.

In order to recognize and connect with emotions in others, you do not have to be able to feel their pain or have felt the same way as they have. If you do feel their pain, or perhaps have felt similarly, or think you have felt similarly before, it can also push you back into your ME state. True empathy requires you to take on the other person's perspective without judging. No one knows how the other person feels and thinks except the other person. So staying interested, open and curious by asking the right questions to understand the other persons perspective could be key.

Brown discusses the following 4 attributes of empathy:

1. Perspective taking, or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.
2. Staying out of judgement and listening (taking on a non-biased approach)
3. Recognizing emotions in another person that you have maybe felt before but not necessarily.
4. Communicating that you recognized these emotions.

Here also a brilliant video from Brené Brown on empathy vs. sympathy from 2013.

If you want to explore the concept of empathy further I highly recommend reading this article reviewing and critically appraising a range of different definitions of empathy.

Compassion - taking action (for/with the OTHER)

If we bring empathy to the next level, we reach the level of compassion. It entails action and is not just recognizing, it's doing. It's fueled by understanding and accepting that we are all made of strength and struggle (Brown). According to Pema Ch?dron, author of "the places that scare you", compassion is a relationship between equals. It means offering support of any kind, whatever the other person might need in their current situation. From a coaching perspective, this could involve supporting the client in identifying their needs and finding ways to meet those needs.

Here a visual summary of all the above trying to structure it for a better understanding.

So how can we truly be empathetic as a coach?

What can we take from this to apply it in a holistic coaching environment of radical acceptance* of the coachee's feelings and needs?

*By radical acceptance I mean fully accepting the needs and feelings of the coachee without bringing any kind of but's, judgements or biases in.

Here a short summary of possible conclusions I took from the above:

• Being sensitive as a coach can be helpful if we are able to distinguish between our own feelings and those of our client and accept that they may not be the same.?
• Showing sympathy is a response based on our personal feelings and may not be helpful to the client. Listening to the client's response (verbal or non-verbal) can be helpful in checking the helpfulness of our action.
• It might be necessary to establish boundaries between our personal feelings and those of our coachee.
• Being empathic does not necessarily require the coach to be emotionally involved.?
• Compassion, as a relationship between equals, could be a great way to practice

OUTLOOK: Can AI be empathetic and replace coaches soon?

Thinking this further, AI-based voice, text and facial emotion recognition can identify peoples emotions already quite well. Human beings themselves in general show a great deal of variability in their skill to recognize emotions and are known to be less reliable. They also do have difficulties separating their own emotions about a situation others experience, from the actual emotions of the person involved.

Rephrase algorithms as used by ChatGPT and other AI Chatbots can already support people in their self-reflection process, using paraphrasing techniques replying to what the coachee said or wrote in a very natural and highly professional way that does feel empathetic to the user.

Other technologies such as intent or pattern recognition might even take this feeling of an empathetic conversational coaching chatbot or intelligence further, once we will be able to identify coaching intents better based on high quality coaching-specific data-sets. Thinking of how many coaching videos are maybe currently recorded and transcribed by different coaching platforms, it might be something not as far away as we might currently think.

But even though powerful AI chatbots like ChatGPT might be able to take over parts of the coaching process better than the average coach, show cognitive empathy and recognize patterns, beliefs and emotions and can maybe even guide people through proven coaching models, this just means that as coaches we need to concentrate on our human side and our ability to deal with complex and diverse situations. As human beings we do long for human interaction, we long for being seen by others, connection and compassion. The experience of a well trained coach who is able to integrate different coaching styles, models or tools according to the need of the client will be the superpower human coachees will bring to table. And I am not even getting into the complex system of coaching teams.

Last but not least: Please share your thoughts!

Thank you for your interest in this topic and managing to follow me on this journey to the very end ??. I would love to hear your thoughts on this so feel free to share them with me and others below! THANK YOU!