Hello everyone, this is Coach Sammy with HME, and today we’re gonna talk about empathy, the importance of empathy, and specifically who you need to have empathy for in this business. So, let’s get started. Why is empathy so important? I know that we constantly hear that it is important, but why? Well, I’ll give you reasons that you haven’t heard before. We know that the basic reasons, right? It’s a, it’s a soft emotion. It’s, it’s something that, you know, softens you and humbles you as a person, which leads to less entitlement in your life, which creates a, a better life for you, right? It leads to more connection. But I wanna talk to you about imaging studies that were done that show why empathy is actually really, really, it’s good as a strategy in your business.
So in these imaging studies that were done, when one person felt empathy for another person, without the other person, even consciously realizing the parts of their brain that lit up were actually creating more likability for the person that was feeling the empathy for them. So, in other words, if you sit in front of me and I consciously create the emotion of empathy for you, for your situation, for what you go through, you will actually, this will target parts of your brain that will tell you Sammy’s a good person. Sammy’s nice, I don’t know why, but I need her in my life. Like, I need her as, as like, you know, like a business partner. I need her as a friend. And the reason why is because unbeknownst to you, there’s parts of your brain that are lighting up that are targeting the, the hypothalamus, which is creating and secreting hormones of likability like oxytocin. And the reason why that happens is because as mammals, we are tribal creatures, which means we are hardwired to survive in tribes. So whenever someone was from another tribe and they posed a danger, let’s just say they were a spy for another tribe, or they were somebody that was out to harm us, we got very good at detecting if they were feeling empathy for us or not. And that’s how we survived. So it’s a survival mindset that’s still within you. So if for no other reason, you know, generate empathy because it will actually reflect in your, in your, in your nonverbal communication with your referral partners and with your power partners and with your employees. So now that you understand the importance of empathy and why you should use this, almost like as a strategy, right?
Let’s talk about why we wanna have empathy work for our clients. Well, one of the reason we wanna have empathy is because they’re going through a major change in their life, right? And whenever you are going through a change, and you have gone through a change, starting from when you were a child to college, to when you started your business, to when you got married and had, you know, children every phase in your life, there was still a feeling of, yeah, but I can bounce back from this. I have time, right? Like no matter what was going on, you felt like there was time to turn over a new leaf. There was time for intervention from circumstances, circumstances could get better, right? Even the idea, like, I could win the lottery, something even as silly as that can give us hope. But when we are at that stage in our lives, when we feel like this is the point of no return, like nothing, no circumstance is gonna intervene and make me young again, make me youthful again, make me independent again. Now I’m just managing, right? I’m managing symptoms, I’m managing conditions. The best that’s gonna happen to me is that I, instead of being in a ton of pain, I will be in a moderate amount of pain, right? And some caregiver can come and help me out with my daily activity. So it’s, I’m basically surviving at this point. I’m not like super thriving. So those are feelings that are already there.
So we wanna have empathy because we wanna understand that this stage in their life, they don’t have the benefit of a lot of things that we have no matter what we’re going through, which is hope, which is things could get better, right? They’re in that state where it’s like the body is not recovering from these things. So, second person I wanna talk to you about is having empathy for your caregivers. And the reason why we wanna have empathy is because we are dealing with a poverty compensated, you know, class of, of the social class is poverty compensated, which means they’re barely surviving, right? And one of the reasons they’re there is at that place in their lives is because that’s how they grew up, right? So a lot of behaviors that were modeled for them, you know, have taught them that this is as good as it gets. So you wanna generate empathy knowing that there are actual, you know, changes in their mind that have taken place from a very young age where parts of their hippocampus are more shrunk, they don’t have as much hope, they don’t have as much pleasure, right? They are all survival base. You know, I’m, I’m getting kicked out of my apartment because I didn’t pay the rent for two months. My kid’s father hasn’t paid paid child support. Do I take him back to court? He’s like three months behind, right? My neighbor just gave me a dirty look this morning, and she usually watches my kids when I go work. You know, what’s wrong? Is it because there was this guy visiting me and now she’s upset because he was here late at night? Like, did I make too much? Like when they are about to go to work for you, right?
To go see a client, these are a lot of the thoughts that are going through their heads. So if they’re being, you know, what appears to you as like slacking off or late, it’s because they’re operating from that survival mindset. So we wanna have empathy for that so we can deal with that situation appropriately. That helps you be more solution oriented once you understand why what’s happening is happening, because it doesn’t feel as personal to you. The third person that we wanna have empathy for, other than your spouse and family members who are working really hard to support you and your business is actually yourself. When you have empathy for yourself, you can actually create a more, like, a more prosperous business for yourself. So one of the things that you wanna do every morning is instead of like that negative dialogue that you might automatically wake up with, which we all do because we have in our brains a switch called the negativity bias. And the reason we have that is because as human beings, we were on the bottom of the food chain.
So we were taught that, you know, perceive every situation negatively if you wanna survive. So, you know, anytime you see a rope or a cord, your ancestors would see a rope as like a snake, and then jump out of the way, right? And then rationalize that it wasn’t anything dangerous. So that mindset is still within you, which means that you already wake up with a negativity bias pursuing that everything is against you so that you can survive. But now we can evolve past that. We can take conscious control of that. So whenever your mind tells you, oh, you’re not doing good enough, you’re a failure. You thought you were gonna be at, you know, I don’t know, 1600 a billable hours, and you’re still sitting at like 800 billable hours, you’re a loser. That’s the mindset that your mind will wake up with sometimes. And that’s why you wanna have empathy for yourself. You wanna talk back to that part of your brain and say, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m trying my best. Do you see all these efforts that I’m making? And sometimes I have to reward my efforts more than I wanna reward the results, because that is a sustainable strategy. So make sure that you have empathy for all of the aforementioned people in your life, including yourself. And that is it for today.
