Page 40 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

When you take the time to ask “why,” you are allowing communication to

take place, and you are showing respect and consideration for the way they
act, feel, and think. This will help to create a better relationship and
understanding based upon empathy and compassion.

6. Communicate with skill.

When communicating with a person who is upset, or if you are upset, use “I”
statements. This removes confrontation. But you want to also make sure that

you give the other person a chance to share their perspective. This should be
done through simple questions, again, to make sure they don’t feel like you
are attacking them. You want to be curious and not accusatory.

Learning Empathy

What should you do if you aren’t that great at understanding what people are
feeling?

To a certain extent, everybody is designed to empathize with others. The
brain is wired to experience emotions that other people are feeling. This is
why you wince if you see somebody hit their thumb with a hammer, or why
you start to laugh when somebody else is laughing.

Unfortunately, only a handful of people have amazing natural empathy. Our

ability towards empathy lives on a continuum. There are some who have
amazing natural empathy and can understand how a person feels simply by
looking at them. There are some people who have very little natural empathy,
and they can’t notice that a person is angry until they start shouting. The
majority of people live in the middle of these two extremes and are able to
pick up on the feelings of others part-time.

Fortunately, empathy is half natural and half practice. Depending on where

you are starting at on the natural half, getting better at your empathy ability
can require more or less work than another. No matter where you have to
start, you can learn more empathy.

There are three steps to learning empathy.

1. Understanding Yourself

In order to understand the emotions of other people, you first have to learn