Good Morning,
Happy Monday. Have an awesome start to your week. Have a great day. Enjoy.
Lisa
Always do your best……..we see the world as we are in it. Often empathy and compassion are confused. Feeling sorry for someone and their plight is not empathy. It is compassion from a distance. Empathy requires us to leave our space in the world and walk in the shoes of someone else, seeing the world from their perspective, and understanding the life choices from where they are. Ego makes this difficult because it reduces every moment as a means to an end. But by giving our full attention to a person, or a moment, an intelligence far greater than our egoic mind emerges. We tap into a special place where we have both the capacity to understand and to empathize.
From this special place we can see how important it is to understand life from a variety of perspectives. That sometimes our privilege has prevented us from seeing how it is for others that we share our journey with. So the next time you feel compassion for a situation or a person. Take that extra step to truly understand where they are. Stop and think about their choices versus yours. Ask yourself what would I want people to do if I or my family were experiencing something similar? We are all singing one heart song in our pursuit of love, harmony and peace. When we are mindful that not everyone can take the same road to realize their hearts song; we can lean in and truly understand their journey. Because the one truth is that when we feel understood, we feel heard and now grace can enter.
Stephen R. Covey said “Empathic listening is listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. Empathic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement. Empathy is not agreeing with someone; it is fully, deeply understanding that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.”
By Lisa Scott ~ Executive Life Coach