Friday, November 8, 2013

Exploring Empathy

I think most of us believe somewhat in the power of coincidence. This past week I received an email from a blogger named R. Krznaric about empathy. I have copied it below. I questionned whether Tony Blair is himself a strong empathizer or a skilled negotiator who can draw empathy from the participants. If you have read my previous post about my empathy tendencies you will know why I asked this question. But then I followed up with Krzanic's blog and found his talk on outrospection which did connect with me. I have included it here as well. Let me know what you think?

 Empathy has a reputation as a fuzzy, feel-good emotion that many people associate in some vague way with everyday kindness. So it comes as something as a surprise when major political figures start talking about it as a key to resolving violent conflicts and peace building. This was exactly the point that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made in a recent article in the Guardian. Now reincarnated as a peace envoy in the Middle East, Blair was reflecting on his time as a mediator in the Northern Ireland peace process, which culminated in the Good Friday agreement in 1998. In the article, Blair argues that his success as a mediator was due to his empathy skills: his capacity to understand the suffering of the various parties in the conflict at an 'empathetic level' and then being able to 'pass on something of the pain of each side to the other'. He went on to say that what also made peace possible was that unionist leaders such as David Trimble and Ian Paisley, and their Sinn Féin counterparts Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, gradually got to know each other during the process, 'and started to look upon each other as human beings with a different perspective, not as enemies mired in evil and incapable of good'. In other words, the empathy began to spread around the negotiating table. In a follow-up to Blair's empathic disclosure, I was invited on to BBC Radio 4's Today programme last week to discuss the role that empathy can play in constructing peace in conflict situations. As I point in the following 4-minute interview, it's important that empathy plays a part not just in talks between leaders, but at the grass-roots, creating reconciliation between neighbours and communities that might have been embroiled in circles of violence for years. So have a listen, and discover why over 1 million Israelis and Palestinians have spoken to each other on a unique peace-building phone line. [podcast]http://www.romankrznaric.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Krznaric-Radio-4-Today-281013-edit.mp3[/podcast]


2 comments:

  1. I think empathy is an under-used tool in all of our toolkits. Most of want to solve our friends' and family's problems, but really, most people simply want their feelings acknowledged and to have someone say "I feel like that sometimes too."

    I suspect Tony Blair is quite empathetic; he is a religious man and I think when Princess Diana died he struck the right note because he could understand and empathize with what the public were feeling and wanting. How interesting!

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  2. Amazing how much "empathy" has been showing up in my life since I read your blog. I heard a presentation on John Peters Humphrey the other day and a great deal of it focused on empathy. And a couple of magazine articles I read recently were about empathy. It could be that phenomena of once you start thinking about something, it appears all over the place.

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