Are you Empathetic?

There is a strong argument that empathy is key to being successful in sales (and many other areas), even more so as the selling/buying landscape changes.

In a recent session with my mentor, I was asked the headline question. Now as someone who doesn't come across as particularly emotional, my initial assumption was that I didn't think I was. But as with many assumptions, it didn't pan out quite as I expected.

To answer this properly, I’d first needed to understand properly what ‘empathy’ is?

“Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position. There are many definitions for empathy that encompass a broad range of emotional states.”

Not to be confused with sympathy, which I used to do:

“To sum up the differences between the most commonly used meanings of these two terms: sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, or pity for the hardships that another person encounters, while empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of another.”

I often struggle to ‘feel’ what another person is experiencing, unless I have experience. For example, if a relative had died, I would feel the same sadness as other in my family. But if someone else’s relative had died, I wouldn’t (I don’t think), be able to feel that person’s sadness. However, in this instance, I could understand what that person is experiencing. In this case I could say I was empathetic.

If, however, I haven’t previously experienced this other person’s situation, I would find it difficult to ‘feel’ what they are experiencing, and in that case, it would rely on me seeking to ‘understand’ through questioning.

And here lies the crux of what I suspected I was being asked. The above relies on me as a person being interested enough to question in those situations, in order to be empathetic.

When it comes to clients, I am always empathetic, because I very much care what they think of the company I work for, about what they think of me as a person and about the service they believe they are getting from me. Not just because there is potential commission on the end of it, that is the way I’ve always been. The money is just a bonus.

When it comes to internal dealings, my drive to do what’s right for the client, sometimes causes me to be short with people (which I’m working on) as I perceive them to be hurting my relationship with the client. It’s in these cases, where I understand my shortcomings, and have been seeking to improve greatly. I still have a long way to go.

One of the catalysts, would have to be the birth of my daughter. In a short space of time, my day to day interaction with her has taught me that there is little place in anyone’s life for being short tempered. I learnt very early on, when we had trouble with re-flux and getting her to sleep, that she picked up on mine and my partner's emotion and mirrored it. Relaxing at bed time and ‘rolling with it’ was far more successful than stressing and worrying whether she was getting to sleep.

Since then, my general demeanor, or my starting point in meetings and dealings with colleagues has been calm. That’s not to say, it always remains calm, but like I said, it’s a work in progress, and one of the things I sort out the mentoring program and yourself for.

So in answer to the question, yes, I’m empathetic. Are you?