The Art of Empathy (46 page)

Gossip is crucial to social awareness, social inclusion, and social survival, but by its very nature, gossip is indirect, and this can be problematic. If gossip is the only informal communication skill you have, you might learn to talk
about
people, rather than talking
to
them. When you're trapped in a poorly managed social system, this indirect approach can save you from all kinds of trouble. In the workplace, gossip and shadow meritocracies may be your only options. But within your intimate relationships, gossip can lead to unfortunate problems precisely because it
isn't
direct. Gossip can certainly help you navigate safely through social structures and workplaces that are repressive (or permissive), but you can also
create
a repressive social structure if you rely on gossip alone, instead of developing actual relationship skills. You can waste
years
talking about a friend or coworker instead of talking to him or her openly;
therefore, it's often necessary to move gossip aside so that you can communicate directly with people you care about.

Gossip can also be problematic in relationships that you want to nurture, because gossip can lead you to invade the privacy of your gossip targets as you telegraph their behavior to everyone. This is one way that gossip can create a repressive and compromising environment. If you go back to the relationship you gossiped about without addressing the problems more openly, there will always be this
thing
hanging out there—this gossipy information that you hope never gets repeated. Although gossip is necessary, it can be a very messy business if you aren't conscientious and ethical about using it.

Gossip is as natural to us as breathing. Anthropologists see gossip in humans as a primal tool of socialization, almost like the preening and grooming primates use to form bonds. So gossip is primal, and it's necessary. But that's no reason to allow it to be unconscious, derisive, or dehumanizing. If you can understand the tension-relieving, information-gathering, and socialization opportunities that gossip provides, you can turn gossip into a tool that will support your ethics and your relationships. You can turn gossip into an
ethical
empathic practice.

Although this gossip practice is wonderful for your personal life, you can also use it at work if you realize you're in a gossip network or a shadow meritocracy. These networks and shadow structures are often unconscious; you might just fall into them through peer pressures and group dynamics. That's fine, because it's normal to chip in and make things work when there's dysfunction in a social structure—it's a part of the social contract we have with one another. But these social contracts can be brought forward, observed empathically, renegotiated, or burnt. Remember that your social and emotional behaviors aren't concrete; they're not written in stone. They're tendencies that you can change when you become aware of them.

ETHICAL EMPATHIC GOSSIP SESSIONS

Gossip is an irreplaceable communication and connection tool that helps you learn the informal rules of a social group. Gossip also helps you become aware of threats to your security and your relationships, and gossip can help you take the actions that your jealousy and envy require. Gossip contains an incredible amount of essential social information, and when you can create an ethical practice for your gossip, you can bring the life-changing gifts of your jealousy and envy out of the shadows. This practice will also help you
become more able to empathize with and provide support to the currently unaware gossipers in your life. Here are some guidelines for creating an Ethical Empathic Gossip session with a supportive friend or coworker:

1. Identify a person you gossip about consistently and with whom your relationship has stalled.

2. Open the gossip session by acknowledging your trouble in the situation.

3. Ask your friend for help in dealing with your gossip target and to listen with the goal of providing opinions, ideas, techniques, and skills that will help you re-enter the relationship or situation in a different way.

4. Go for it—just gossip—but be aware of any shadow issues that come forward. Remember that gossip targets nearly always hold some of your shadow!

5. When your friend gives you feedback, pay attention.

6. Close your gossip session with thanks, and then go back to the original relationship or situation with your new skills and insights. Or let it go if it's too damaged to survive. But don't go back in the same old way; that's what led to the need for gossip in the first place.

When your gossip is conscious and ethical, you'll increase your social skills and your empathy, and you'll become more able to create honest, healthy relationships. What's amazing to me in this practice is that when gossip is made conscious, you can clearly see what a stupendous information-gathering tool it is. When you're able to gossip ethically in this safe, firmly bounded empathic practice, you may be amazed to learn how much intricate social information you've gathered about your gossip targets. This practice will connect you to the deep and emotionally rich undercurrents that flow through your informal gossip networks.

This practice will also remind you that you can ask for and receive help in dealing with difficult emotions, difficult situations, and difficult people. When you've hit a wall, remember to reach out for the assistance of others instead of isolating yourself. None of us knows how to deal with all emotions, all situations, or all relationships, because we simply weren't taught how. For goodness' sake,
most of us weren't even taught how to name our own emotions! We're all working without a guidebook here, and we can always use some empathic assistance.

IF YOUR WORK IS EMPATHIC IN NATURE

Not surprisingly, many empathic people choose empathy-requiring jobs in health care, counseling, teaching, and other social support occupations. If your occupation requires high-level empathy and emotion work, then of course, all of the empathic mindfulness skills in this book apply to your occupational health and well-being. You might burn out if you don't have ways to ground, focus, resource, and define yourself in your work, in your workspace, and between clients. High empathy work can be wonderful, and I'm grateful that you're openly using your empathic skills, so let's make sure that your workplace supports you.

Please put on your anthropologist's hat again and use your Einfühlung capacity to observe and feel your way into the physical and aesthetic qualities of your workspace in the way you observed your home. Who works here, and what is important to this person? What is beautiful to you, and why? Which aspects of this workspace support you, and which aspects are problematic? Are you able to create thresholds and privacy for your work? Do you have a comfortable break area? Can you get outside for a walk? Do you have a private place where you can go when you need to resource or rejuvenate yourself during work?

Look at the chair, desk, or station where you do your intentional empathic work: What have you placed nearest to your body? Are you physically comfortable when you work? Is your workplace quiet enough for you? What are you looking out upon? Are there soothing and beautiful vistas or artworks? Are there areas of sensual and visual delight for you to observe as you work? If not, why not?

As a professional empath, the quality of your home life and your relationships will directly affect the quality of your work and your capacity to care for yourself. If your home and your relationships are supportive and healing, they can provide rest, rejuvenation, and real downtime in which you can
unwind, let go, and replenish your emotions and your empathic skills. But as I pointed out in
Chapter 6
, if your home and your relationships are not supportive, then you'll be doing empathic work and emotion work all day and all night as well. There's just no way to keep yourself well if you have nothing in your life that feeds you. If you perform heavy empathic labor at work and then go home to provide basic emotional life support for your emotionally unskilled mate or family members, then something's going to fall apart. I don't want that something to be you.

As a professional empath, please stand back and observe your workspace with the skills you bring to others: If you were consulting with the person who works in this space, what would you change, if anything? Does this physical environment support your body, your emotions, your boundaries, your aesthetic needs, and your unique self? If not, why not?

As a working empath in our emotionally troubled world, you provide a vital and valuable service that can't be replicated. We can't digitize you or replace you with a machine, and we can't outsource your work to other countries. We need you here—happy, healthy, emotionally well fed, and well loved. Your work is vital, and to do it over the long term, you need support from your workplace, from your home, from your loved ones, from your healthcare providers, from your diet, from your sleep, from your artistic expression, from your movement practices, from your empathic practices, and from your empathic friends. But most important, you need support from yourself: you need to identify yourself as a working empath whose unique emotional functioning requires intentional self-care and self-love. I thank you for bringing your empathy and your emotional awareness to our waiting world; please make sure that you're bringing empathy and emotional awareness to yourself as well. Thank you!

CREATING AN EMOTIONALLY WELL-REGULATED WORKPLACE

There are literally thousands of books and programs that target the workplace in terms of how to make people into better workers and thereby increase productivity. Empathically speaking, most of those books and programs fail (or get replaced in a number of months by the next miracle book or program) because they ignore emotion work and focus on the individual instead of the overriding power of workplace culture in driving behavior. With that in mind, I've focused on seven approaches that may help you create an emotionally well-regulated workplace that is respectful of the real needs of real human beings.

1. Honor emotions in the workplace.
Emotions are reliable, action-requiring neurological programs that arise reliably in response to specific stimuli. They are an intrinsic part of cognition and an intrinsic part of social intelligence. Emotions can lead you directly to crucial issues that affect your
workplace, the workflow, or employee and vendor relationships. Honor emotions and honor the people who feel them. You can do this by copying the list of emotions and their actions from
Chapter 4
and having people regularly check in (with themselves or others) about how they're feeling about work, upcoming deadlines, or changes in workflow. A tremendous amount of information is contained in emotions. Use it well.

2. Identify any unsupported emotion work and acknowledge it openly.
Put on your empath's hat and observe the emotion work requirements at your workplace. What emotions are required in interactions with customers, suppliers, and coworkers? Is empathy toward customers required but unacknowledged? What emotion rules are active and for whom? Are the emotion rules different at different levels of the hierarchy? For instance, can one person or group display anger, depression, or anxiety, while everyone else must display only happiness and complacency? To the extent that you can, acknowledge this openly. If you can't do it openly, use Ethical Empathic Gossip to help people clearly identify the emotion work they're being expected to perform.

3.
Support healthy thresholding and help people become physically comfortable.
Remember the stark differences between a bedding store and an office supply store and challenge that paradigm. People
live
at work, and they need to be physically and emotionally comfortable.

4.
Create many ways for problems to be communicated upward without danger.
Employees will be honest in a supportive work culture where bearers of bad news are welcomed. However, if problem-identifying employees are shunned, shamed, or jollied out of their positions, gossip networks will have to intensify, and a shadow meritocracy may become necessary. If you notice a great deal of gossip in your workplace, yet unusual silence occurs when management or HR show up, there is probably a culture of emotion valencing, repression, or even punishment at work. If your workplace is currently incapable of dealing with problems in a focused and emotionally honest way, your workforce may not trust any changes you might make to this process. Suggestion boxes may be necessary at first, but even those may not be trusted. In a culture of silencing or punishment, you may need to bring in a mediator to help work through the multilayered dysfunctions that reliably arise in a problem-averse workplace.