empathic receptivity

A Rigorous and Critical Empathy t-shirt, courtesy of the UChicago Community Outreach Program and Xavier Remy

Top 7 Empathy Lessons in Leadership: The Video Replay

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In the webcast the participants will engage how to:
•    Distinguish empathy from compassion, forgiveness, pity, and “niceness”;
•    Establish and maintain boundaries with bullies, slackers, difficult individuals, and friends while still honoring one’s commitment to empathy, to client service, to flourishing financially, to inclusiveness and community;
•    Identify failures (breakdowns) in empathy and what to do about it; and
•    Expand or contract empathy on demand by overcoming obstacles to empathy.

Review: Extreme Empathy [I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy by Cris Beam]

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Beam is a would-be “bad girl,” who has written a very good book. In a world of constrained, limited empathy, the empathic person is a non-conformist. Beam is one of those, too, and succeeds in sustaining a nuanced skepticism about the alternating hype and over-valuation of empathy over against those who summarily dismiss it. Most ambivalently, she calls out the corporate infatuation with empathy. I paraphrase the corporate approach: Take a walk in the other person’s shoes in order to sell them another pair.

Top four (4) empathy breakdowns – and how to overcome them

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Empathy breaks down into emotional contagion. Empathy breaks down in conformity and the closing off of possibilities for flourishing. Empathy breaks down in projection. Empathy breaks down in devaluing and cynical language, in which our humanity literally gets lost in translation. These are not the only ways that empathy fails, but they are the Big Four. How to overcome them?