When you’re in the worst moments of a head cold, do you forget how it feels to be healthy?
And when you’re healthy, can you truly remember what it’s like to be sick?
In the middle of an illness, it’s easy to imagine you’ve always felt…and always will feel…like this.
This is the challenge of empathy. If it is so hard to remember how you were feeling a week ago, how much harder is it to put yourself in a colleague’s shoes? To truly remember what it was like to be in high school? To respect the conviction of someone with different political beliefs?
But hard isn’t impossible. We can cultivate empathy by recognizing our essential sameness, our humanity.
Today’s challenge: take a full minute to observe someone whose life experience is different than yours. What can you do to understand the world from her perspective?
Subscribe to my mailing list