Have used this approach years ago when I worked retail and it works really well (as an aside working retail for at least a year will give you a sound grasp of customer service and introduce you to the 10/80/10 split, 10% are lovely to deal with, 80% are somewhere in between but fine and 10% are jerks).
I also learnt not to take it personally, some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see and a little bit of empathy goes a long way.
I think this is a big one. When I am upset and calling Comcast (as an example that I think most people can relate to) it's always a frustrating customer experience. When I catch myself getting angry, I always try to tell the tech I'm talking to: "Listen, I'm sorry I'm snappy. It's obviously not you, it's your company's process that is making me angry" and try to make sure they understand that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but as a customer, I try really hard to make that difference clear.
> You've described their entire day. I'm sure they know it's not them
It's more about demonstrating that you (the customer) don't blame them (the agent of XYZ faceless corporation) that you know where the blame lies. They know they didn't create company policy, but they deal with a lot of people who don't appear to realize that. I find that showing empathy for the person on the other side of the dialogue while politely reiterating my frustration with the situation goes a long way toward them going the extra mile to try to help me out rather than trying to end the interaction as quickly as possible.
I began operating this way after my own observations working in a support position and it works a lot more often than not. Also, as an aside, remember to use the name of the company when stating an issue rather than saying "you." For example: "Comcast over billed me," and not "You over billed me."
Yes, I do believe everyone growing up should work in retail for at least a year. It's a valuable experience (my experience was working for a year in a Toys R Us).
Absolutely true. I wasn't a jerk to people in retail before I worked a crappy job as an ice cream server, but I didn't really care about how they were treated. One summer dealing with customer bullshit changed that real quick.
I learned that I hated a business where there are cycles without positive feedback. Put away christmas displays, put up valentines, cycle through the holidays, never see the benefits (people might enjoy their purchases, but you'll never know it).
I learned that terrible managers can be quite successful. The chain I was part of had 800+ stores, and MY store had the highest turnover rate of them all (because the manager was angry and mean). But we made our numbers, so upper management didn't care.
I learned there is a lot of risk being taken behind the scenes. When our accountant quit (because of manager), he had no one else to do the job so he stuck our newly hired 16 year old on the job (she came on a month after I did and had no more accounting background than I did, but he had no one else). One day I ended up doing an extra shift because it was a holiday sale and our asst manager was brand new. He relied on me a lot, and at the end of the day my register was somehow a few hundred short (honestly no idea how - probably accumulated errors over the 13 hour day, but I was normally dead on) and I never heard a second word about it even though that'd normally be an immediate firing.
I learned my coworkers (mainly 40-50 year old women) wished their husbands did more in the marriage. I also learned I'm a bit of an elitist snob. My favorite line: "Bill and I never go on dates anymore. But the tractor pull is this weekend so I'm hoping!"
The store bought overstock and sold it, and I learned a bit about what the difference between junk, junk with a brand name, and brand name goods that actually had value.
I learned that if you stocked unheard-of brands of condoms, people would still buy them.
Worked retail to pay for my BsCpe. I would definitely suggest working retail to anyone who has the opportunity. You'll never whine about another job again.
You can empathize with their feelings regardless the reason for them. If they are frustrated, you understand feeling frustrated, so empathize. If they are angry, you understand feeling angry, so empathize. The precise reason doesn't matter.
How can you know their feelings, if you do not know the reasons for their feelings? Empathy as understanding someone's frustration requires you to first know that someone is actually frustrated (otherwise you are just imagining).
Have you had a bad day? If so, then you can empathize with their bad day without knowing their reasons.
Personal note, empathy is SO much easier for me the less I know. If they share their problems, I instinctively start dissecting and analyzing their situation.. It's easier to just recognize suffering and to try not to contribute to it or lessen it.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I really don't understand what you're trying to say. My understanding is that we are talking about face-to-face interaction with a clearly frustrated person. Why wouldn't you know they were frustrated?
>some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see
It's not clear how you know someone is having a "really bad day" when you explicitly rule out knowing the reasons why the person is having a really bad day.
Maybe they told you they are having a really bad day? That is fine and fairly easy to empathize with.
Maybe you are just assuming someone is having a really bad day because of how you perceive their actions?
You are using empathy in a different sense than (I think) most people are in this thread. I'm no psychiatrist, but usually when I hear people discuss empathy (or more often, someone's lack of it), they mean it almost in the sense of a lower-level mental process. Empathy is more than just feeling bad for random strangers who feel bad themselves- if anything, that's just a side effect. Empathy is the thing that makes you feel bad when you hurt someone else, even if you had a good reason for hurting that person. Empathy is the thing that allows you to sense other people's internal states- it's not magic or psionics or whatever, it's just your subconscious maintaining a background thread that is paying attention to signals from other people, and communicating those signals to you by internalizing a distant echo of what that background thread has determined that they must be feeling. It's fundamental to human interaction and cooperation and is (IMO) one the biggest drivers of the development of civilization.
A sociopath is an adult who never developed this facility. Children don't have empathy- it's one of the things that makes them children. That's why some kids do things like torture or kill animals...in their minds, those animals aren't creatures with sensory experiences like themselves, rather those animals (or even other people) are perceived as meat robots, for lack of a better term. Lacking empathy means when they hurt someone, they don't feel anything themselves because there is no background thread in their subconscious reminding them that the person they are hurting is another thinking, perceiving, feeling being like themselves.
Psychiatrists can't diagnose someone as a sociopath until they're 18, by which time people's brains are expected to have developed some capacity for it. People on the autistic spectrum also have a lesser capacity for empathy, that's part of what defines them as being autistic. They can't perceive subtle social queues because of this lack of empathy.
There are plenty of people who are self-aware, functioning sociopaths- they've spent their lives having fundamental social problems, never relating to other people the way that everyone else seems to be able relate to each other. At some point in life they discover that their cognitive development wasn't perfect, and once they understand the nature of the issue they can compensate by making a conscious effort to do so. There are also plenty of sociopaths who never made this leap, and basically all you can do is stay as far away from them as possible, because who wants to deal with someone who thinks you're a meat robot?
In the context of this thread, people aren't talking about sociopaths or anyone with autism/Asperger's/etc., but imagine a seemingly normal adult with underdeveloped empathy- it manifests in all sorts of ways, from being jerks to retail employees to stiffing waiters to just being an unpleasant person to interact with. Those people don't realize they have an underdeveloped cognitive process, they just go through life wondering why so many people think they're jerks, and saying things like "99% of humanity is way too sensitive". I would attribute a lack of self-awareness to a lack of empathy as well- if someone is incapable of seeing themselves through other people's eyes, then they have no way of gauging their own behavior or feelings.
In the context of this thread, I don't understand why you brought up either sociopaths or autism/Asperger's/etc., especially when you specifically disclaim it in your last paragraph.
I think the problem with this conception of empathy is that it seemingly derives solely from the person experiencing it. This type of empathy requires a subconscious background thread to be keeping track of signals which may or may not exist in the external reality. If it is at all possible to know (whether or not such signals exist), it would appear to at least require some communication. Otherwise you are just trying to make inferences off of what you observe, which is probably a near insignificant amount of what the person you are supposedly empathizing with has observed (leaving the question: How do you actually know that the things you are feeling are actually, exactly the same as what the other person is feeling?). I believe this definition of empathy allows people to feel good about themselves, that they are not a sociopath, while still allowing for the possibility that the empath is not actually feeling the same thing as their target.
I'm honestly not sure how that's a personal attack (and I'm very much open to understanding your interpretation) but I definitely should have addressed it directly to you and for that I apologize.
That said, I do stand by the observation. Nitpicking small details that are unimportant to the overall point serves no one well and results in a waste of everyone's time.
Well, unfortunately your comment is gone now (I did not ask for it to be removed, nor did I 'flag' it [I can't]). If you repost it I could give a better analysis, but basically you were stating that I didn't "learn" anything.
1) You do not know what I "learn" or do not "learn" from any particular thing.
2) You do not know what lesson was being taught (or even if one was trying to be taught).
Your consideration that some things are "small details that are unimportant" is purely your consideration. While you may not see the importance of such details, others might. In this case, I think it is important that words actually have meaning and that if some words do not have an apparent logical meaning it should be explored more to come up with words that do have an apparent logical meaning (particularly when words, on their face, are self-contradictory).
Or, at least, it should be explored more what the author actually meant, or, might have meant to write in stead.
'Pity and sorrow' is one of the definitions of the word sympathy, but that's not the meaning generally implied when used in comparison to empathy.
"Sympathy (from the Greek words syn "together" and pathos "feeling" which means "fellow-feeling") is the perception, understanding, and reaction to the distress or need of another human being."[0]
"When you sympathize with someone, you have compassion for that person, but you don’t necessarily feel her feelings."[1]
Generally the difference between empathy and sympathy is the internal response to the feelings of others. If you personally are feeling the same thing as the person, then that's generally empathy, otherwise it's generally sympathy.
I also learnt not to take it personally, some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see and a little bit of empathy goes a long way.