The Align Your Purpose Program STEP SIX: EMPATHY KNOWING & SOLVING UNMET NEEDS
Light For The Souls Copyright Vladimir Kush
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y IN THIS LESSON: Empathy as Emotional Intelligence If Nothing Else, Know the Need The Downside of Empathy The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other. Meryl Streep Welcome to Step 6! Where we learned last lesson that the essence of asking questions could lead us into receiving and a genuine opening of our hearts, in this lesson we look more closely at how to continue heart expansion: through both receiving and giving. Such heart expansion helps us further awaken and step into our personal power while also helping us intuitively align our purpose with our actions because where the mind can become confused or choose the wrong path at any given turn... the heart always knows its own Truth. We only need know our own hearts. Empathy becomes a beautiful next step to this end as it is one of the heart s most exquisite talents. Through it we sense the mysterious connection we have to all beings and to all things. Through it we can also give our own gifts, love and actions in ways that transform those we care for... and which have the opportunity to create massive ripples of change across the planet. Additionally, empathy helps us understand an aspect of our world that lies beyond data and factual information: through it we can understand people and to achieve anything in your personal or professional life, it is vital to understand the people in your world. In fact, researchers, doctors and scientists often point to Empathy as a key defining characteristic found in successful people and those in leadership positions. The other side to empathy is that in order to give the essence of ourselves, we first learn to receive the essence of those we choose to serve, assist and love. And we learn to do so from a place of healthy openness meaning what flows into us can be felt and recognized, but then also allowed to flow out. We do not let another s suffering become our own suffering, for then rather than lifting another up, we have instead brought ourselves low... and we become unable to truly serve or assist them. Misery, in reality, does NOT love company. So what precisely is empathy and how can we use it to not only further our understanding of the people in our lives, but to also continue forward into our purpose and achievement of our pusuits? 3 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
Copyright Cameron Gray
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y E M PAT H Y A S E M O T I O N A L I N T E L L I G E N C E The primary reason empathy is highlighted as a key characteristic of leaders and successful people is because it presents the flip side of good listening: beyond fully listening to those around you, empathy allows you to discern what those around you most want to listen to. Empathy helps us craft our conversations, presentations and proposals in ways that communicate in another person s language. Through empathy we can determine what another person wants or desires so that we can explain what s in it for them to participate with us. These are very rarely logical positions, though logic is a factor. What comes first however is the emotional need the other person wants fulfilled... and once we ve communicated that we (or our venture) can meet that need, it becomes an easy journey to justify that emotional position with logical support. In his book on Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the five crucial skills to perceive, command and evaluate emotions. Rather than repeat his valuable work here, we d like to build on the power of emotions to also establish a rarely-discussed form of empathy that can take your own communications and ventures to additional heights: Needs Intelligence. 5 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y I F N O T H I N G E L S E, K N O W T H E N E E D As you ll notice if you read Goleman s work on Emotional Intelligence, you can learn a great deal and exponentially increase your effectiveness when you understand the emotional drivers at play in the people you serve, the people you collaborate with, and of course even the people you love. However emotion in itself, though useful, is tied to a deeper driver: a person s core need. As I have often taught in my own practice, and as we understand it here at Choice Point, there are 7 Human Needs that underlie core emotional response and drive. Knowing which one or two needs are paramount for a particular person, or for your overall audience, dramatically increases your ability to communicate your position in a language they can hear... as well as your ability to serve and heal the greater essence of any person s desire or pain. This is because while defining an emotion is useful, such as whether someone primarily identifies with grief or if it presents itself more as anger... you can glean massive amounts of additional information if you know the underlying needs those emotions are attached to. Because almost always an emotional reaction is triggered because a need has just been met, or clearly not met. Armed with such information, in addition to echoing back their emotional experience for rapport and relationship, you can now go a step further to speak to their primary need and how you can help them meet it. Such information is priceless in all forms of communication! We all possess some degree of all 7 needs, however in relation to you or your venture, you will find the person or people you re dealing with will often have one or two primary needs you can address. As you will see, some of these needs are complementary and others are contradictory. Knowing which needs are paramount will keep you from presenting a message that violates that person s true driving need (such as communicating a sense of certainty when your audience seeks uncertainty in the form of variety!). 6 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y The Seven Human Needs Are: 1. Safety & Certainty This need is often expressed as a need to control as much as one can, to know how something will turn out before it actually happens, or to only want to make safe decisions or participate in safe relationships. The unknown or uncertain is incredibly stressful and often such a need is closely tied to our survival instincts and fears. 2. Variety & Adventure Variety is basically uncertainty. This need is expressed as a desire for adventure, for what is different and new, and for things to not always be the same. Such a person desires novel experiences and is often bored if things always appear the same. 3. Significance The need for significance is directly tied to our human need to feel valued and to know that we matter; that we are worthy. At its worst, this can manifest as egotistical pride at any cost, however for most people this is a healthy desire to be appreciated and to know that somehow, by the time we leave this planet, we will have left a meaningful imprint on it that only we could uniquely provide. 4. Love Our need for love naturally goes beyond romantic love. Some people find that beneath their desire to save the world and their big visions for change... the driving need is simply a desire to be loved by those they would save. Sometimes religious or spiritual fervor is tied to a need to know we are loved by a divine parental or universal figure. 5. Growth & Evolution As human beings we are predispositioned toward evolution. This need is often expressed as a desire for more wisdom or knowledge, improving skills or evolving one s station in life. It can also manifest as a desire to evolve oneself physically into peak condition, or to evolve spiritually toward awakening or enlightenment. 6. Contribution We are designed as social creatures, and as such we desire to contribute to our communities whether the local tribe of our village, our personal family, or to a greater collective. This need often manifests in charity, giving, volunteering, or seeking a social station that tells us our place in the larger collective. 7. Oneness/God Our final need is also our first. However not everyone identifies with this need consciously quite the way each of us will at times identify with the previous six needs. That said, we will often see this need express itself in religion, spiritual seeking, philosophy and our desire to know the unknowable and answer the unanswerable. In many ways our fascination with the Mysteries of life even in our most logical and practical pursuits, such as in science is a need to know one way or another: are we One? Is there a God? 7 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
Awake In A Silver Land Copyright Cameron Gray
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y You can likely see here the obvious benefit to identifying one of the above needs as a primary driver in someone you need to persuade, collaborate with, or speak to. However, consider also the way two needs can interrelate. This is exceedingly informative because it helps us understand what can often be contradictory behavior or drivers in another person or in a larger audience. For example, consider that someone s top two needs are Love and Certainty. This means that in their approach to all things: whether their career, social contribution, or their own personal relationships... there is an underlying and perhaps unconscious need to feel loved. Ask yourself how a person with such a primary need would feel loved in a particular situation? If you re in a business presentation with a CEO who has this as her primary need... how can you communicate with that? Likely she will respond to language such as feel and your employees will be inspired to loyalty and a deep appreciation for your leadership, not just as their CEO, but as an individual they enjoy working with and for. Add to her desire for love a desire for certainty, and you see the waters get a bit muddier. Now not only does she need to know that she ll feel a sense of love if your project is approved... she also needs to feel an immense amount of certainty that the project will succeed, particularly in that specific way. You can do this quite easily with all the 7 human needs in any of their pairings. But how to determine a person s one or two top needs? ASK QUESTIONS! You won t necessarily ask outright, Is your top need one for significance? Instead, make a note of words, traits and ideas commonly associated with each need. Then to determine a person s top needs, ask him to describe his vision. What are his desires and fears? What problems does he see himself facing in this particular area of his life that you re focused on? How does he imagine it can be solved? Don t just pay attention to the information in his answers, but also the words he chooses in explaining himself. There is a language to love. A language to significance. A language to contribution and to Oneness. Don t analyze it too hard... know that you have each of these same needs in you, and with your natural ability for empathy you can instinctively or intuitively identify another person s top needs because they will echo the needs within you. And finally, I just want to touch on one other key aspect of empathy: it s downside that we can sidestep with our awareness... On the other hand, let s say that her second primary need was Variety rather than Certainty. In this case, you d want to communicate how she can be a pioneer in approaching her employees in the way you propose. How it will add so many new elements to her experience as a leader, as well as to the experience of her employees. Communicate to her as a trailblazer that is heart-centered. 9 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
Awake In A Silver Land Copyright Cameron Gray
A L I G N Y O U R P U R P O S E P R O G R A M - S T E P S I X : E M PAT H Y T H E D O W N S I D E O F E M PAT H Y To fully understand the downside of empathy, it may serve to first be clear what empathy is. By formal definition, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Yet most of us have learned that to empathize properly with someone is to actually match another person s emotional state or energetic vibration, and this can harm us as well as prevent us from doing the good we sought to do by empathizing in the first place. Although matching another person s emotional state allows us to more easily feel and relate to what they are feeling, when we do this their suffering becomes our suffering. Their anger gets stuck in our body as anger. Their grief seeps into and lowers our energy and depletes us as it has depleted them. The challenge with empathy is we ve been taught that there s no middle ground: either we re cut off from another s experience and we remain aloof or uncaring... or we fully match them in their feelings and take on the other person s suffering, anger or pain. These are both no-win options if we wish to both a) understand the world of another person and their lived experience, and b) have the personal power and energy necessary to assist them and give them love or caring that can elevate and lift them up. This is why we recommend that you focus more on identifying a person s need rather than just their emotional state. It helps provide some neutral distance so that you can fully relate to their emotional reality without adopting that reality as your own and taking it on. Also identifying a need provides you information that can be actionable. It seems that often the downside of empathy gets triggered when you don t know how else to help or be there for them. Focusing on action or insight helps you maintain neutral and healthy empathy. Because you re never meant to heal or fix another person, or their situation. Instead, you can give your gifts: your love, your caring, your insights and your support. Only they can truly heal their own emotional state. 11 Copyright 2013 Choice Point with Jaime Mintun - www.choicepointmovement.com
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