Empathy and Sympathy, Feeling WITH and feeling FOR.
During a recent program with MSFDA, the course director Anupam Siddhartha shared a profoundly simple insight about empathy. He described empathy as the brother of sympathy, but it goes even further. While sympathy could be seen as "feeling for" someone, empathy, on the other hand, is about "feeling with" that person by tapping into our imagination.
At its core, empathy is the ability to recognise and understand the emotions and feelings of other people. It's a fundamental aspect of Emotional Intelligence, serving as the bridge between our own emotions and the emotions of those around us. Essentially, it's our capacity to grasp and share in the experiences of others as if we were personally going through them.
I love this quote,
Never criticise a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
- American Indian proverb
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Empathy filled with Zentangle patterns by damko |
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