There are 3 types of empathy
- Emotional empathy: “You feel awful? Then I feel awful too!”
- Cognitive empathy: “I understand that you are feeling awful. That must suck.”
- Compassion: “You feel awful? I feel for you. How can I help?”
Compassion is what we focus on for emotional intelligence.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
- Self-Awareness: understanding of one’s emotions.
- Self-Regulation: it frees us from being prisoners of our feelings.
- Motivation: having an intrinsic desire to achieve things.
- Empathy: the ability to understand emotions of other people.
- Social Skill: the ability to build rapport and manage relationships.
It's the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions, to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships, and to manage your own and others’ emotions.
RELATED IDEAS
- Consciously notice how you’re feeling and study it as a scientist would.
- Label the feeling. But don't identify with them. It’s a thing you’re experiencing, not what you are.
- Make space for your feelings in your mind. Remember that trying to suppress them will not work.
- Turn your attention to the world around you. This way, the relative importance of your feelings will shrink.
Reframing our personal hidden bias and negative feelings into something positive can change our outlook towards the situation.
Example: If you are moving fast, you may think you are impatient, but it can be reframed as the enthusiasm of reaching earlier.
Everybody has bad days or weeks. To tell if someone is a High Conflict Person, we can look for four traits of behavior.
- Lots of all-or-nothing thinking: When problems arise, it is their solution or no solution. They don't compromise or listen to different points of view.
- Intense or unmanaged emotions: HCPs become very emotional about their points of view. Their responses are out of proportion to whatever is happening.
- Extreme behavior or threats: They engage in extreme negative behavior that includes physical harm, spreading lies about someone else, emotional manipulation, or obsessive contact.
- A preoccupation with blaming others: They frequently blame other people close to them or people in authority over them.
Nobody is perfect, but if someone has all four traits, they almost certainly are an HCP.