The Art of Empathy (47 page)

5.
Hire overqualified people and trust them.
An old, dusty canard in HR lore is that overqualified employees are a problem because they might get bored and leave. Empathically and logistically speaking, that's nonsense,
especially in our new workforce where pretty much everyone job-hops every three years, on average. If you're lucky enough to have highly skilled and experienced workers applying for jobs, you've struck gold. Experienced workers require fewer training days, fewer corrective management interactions, and less time to learn their jobs. They can think on their feet, and they understand the workplace as an entity. In other words, they know what they're doing. If you hire overqualified people, then you're well on your way to creating the true meritocracy that most businesses dream of. All you have to do is acknowledge your concerns about possible boredom levels. If highly qualified and experienced people are not concerned about that, believe them, hire them, and stand back and watch your workplace actually
work.

6. Honor shadow meritocracies and support them.
Shadow meritocracies, which form in response to real problems in the workplace, are often the secret, underground machine that keeps everything working. To address these meritocracies, you should fix the problems that they formed to solve—don't shun, shame, or cajole the people who formed them. In fact, throw them
two
parties: one to thank them before you fix the problem (and while they're still making everything work for you), and one to thank them after you fix the problem and they can disband gracefully.

7. Honor gossip networks, but help them become ethical.
Gossip is a vital and absolutely necessary form of communication, and it strengthens social bonds. However, as we all know, it can strengthen bonds in a toxic way and encourage people to express jealousy and envy harmfully. If there's a powerful underground gossip network at your workplace, it's signaling deep trouble in your social structure, which may be too rigid and overly authoritarian or too loose and unstructured to be truly efficient. If you can formally introduce Ethical Empathic Gossip into the gossip networks, it can help people become consciously aware of all the information that exists in gossip, and it can do so in a way that protects the dignity of everyone involved. If you can't formally introduce this practice, see if you can use it in small work groups or within your own department. Gossip is a necessary tool, and you can learn to use it ethically as an intentional part of your workflow.

WHEN YOUR WORKPLACE IS NOT EMOTIONALLY WELL-REGULATED

If you work in an emotionally unregulated workplace, do what you can to make yourself comfortable. If you can, work with thresholding and Ethical
Empathic Gossip to make your environment and your relationships as supportive as possible, and use your empathic mindfulness skills to keep yourself focused, grounded, and resourced. An emotionally unregulated workplace can really drain the life out of you, so you'll need to create as many thresholds around it as you can. Your social life away from work can provide some of that thresholding, and of course, your home can be a healing getaway and a sanctuary that will give you something to look forward to every day.

If you can't make enough changes to detoxify your workplace, and you can't currently move to a new job, I ask you to treat yourself as a working empath in a situation like this—and to take care of yourself as fully and with as much dedication as I suggested for professional empaths a few pages back. Emotion work is real work, and if your workplace can't support your real work, then you'll need to support yourself in as many ways as you can.

You can support yourself with all of the empathic practices in this book, with art and movement, with time in nature or with animals, and by spending time with people who truly understand you. In the next chapter, we'll look at ways to connect with empathic people and empathic social justice movements so that you can help create a more truly empathic civilization for everyone.

C
HAPTER
11

Empathy for the World

The Empathic Art of Social Justice

IN THIS BOOK, we've been working from the inside out. I intentionally focused first on your emotions; then on your empathic skills; then on your home and on your relationships with your friends, family, and children; and then on your workplace. Now, we'll focus on the most outward manifestation of your empathy, which appears in your social justice work.

Social justice work is all about empathy; it's a full-bodied empathic activity that calls upon all of your empathic skills. Attaining the sixth and most developed aspect of empathy—Perceptive Engagement—means that you can take focused and appropriate actions based on your Concern for Others and your capacity for sensitive Perspective Taking. Social justice work, which is intentionally and deliberately empathic, can help you expand your empathic skills in a community of people who want to do the same thing. Social justice work is a full-scale, professional empathy-building activity that will connect you to other empaths. This work can challenge you in the areas of self-care and Emotion Regulation (as we'll explore later in this chapter), but if you want to deepen your empathic skills and enter an empathic community, social justice work is your friend.

When I speak of social justice, I don't mean to conjure up images of large organizations collecting money and advocating for national and international political change. Those organizations are certainly a part of what I'm referring to, but social justice work is empathic, which means it occurs wherever interactions occur. Visiting an elder in your neighborhood and driving him or her on errands, creating a fun afterschool space for local kids, providing a safe shelter for neighborhood stray cats, creating a tool-sharing cooperative
on your block, learning Spanish or sign language so you can communicate with your new neighbors—all of these are empathic social justice initiatives. Social justice work doesn't have to be large and lofty activism; it can be anything you do to make the world warmer, more connected, more just and equitable, and more workable for others. You can do that in activist organizations, sure, but you can also do it in intimate and informal settings, such as your home and your neighborhood.

As you think about bringing your healthy, grounded, and resourced empathy to the larger world, I'd like you to put on your anthropologist's hat again to observe the causes that speak to you. You're a unique empathic organism with a unique sense of meaning and purpose. As such, which forms of need and inequity feel meaningful to you? What draws your attention? I'd like you to be as specific as possible, because if you're very empathic, you may be pulled in many directions at once, and your anxiety may kick in to help you plan for the complete healing of every problem facing every species on every continent. Bless your heart, but remember the question for anxiety—“What
really
needs to get done?” Focus your attention closer to you, become very specific, and identify things that you can actually do, so that you can take tangible, real-world actions that will help your anxiety recede naturally.

If your attention is drawn to the environment or to animal welfare, you can support large organizations, but you can also work in your own neighborhood to address local issues. You can help with creek cleanup, work to make bike lanes safer, work with animals at the local shelter, or take neighborhood dogs on walks if they're lonely and bored. If you're concerned about human rights violations at home and abroad, you can support international organizations, but you can also volunteer at local homeless shelters and food banks or with the local battered women's shelter. If you're drawn to literacy or the arts, you can support your local library and become a reading tutor or support your local arts council and teach classes (or support others artists who do). My point is not to provide you with an exhaustive list of places where you can lend a hand; rather, it's to focus you on simple, real-world interactions that will help you develop and expand your empathic skills in your community and in support of causes that already have deep meaning for you.

PROTECTING YOURSELF FROM EMPATHIC BURNOUT

If you follow your own sense of meaning and do your social justice work in a way that works for you, your experience may be pretty graceful and
fulfilling—that is, you won't burn out. However, in many larger social justice initiatives, two often-competing needs are active: (1) The social justice work needs to be undertaken in the smartest way possible; and (2) Money needs to be gathered. As we've all seen, this need for money can mean that our inboxes, social networks, and mailboxes are filled with pleas for help. Empathically speaking, these pleas are created very intentionally to activate specific emotions and empathic states in you.

Numerous studies have found that when people are emotionally activated about causes, they tend to be willing to part with their money. If you approach people with information on these same causes
without
trying to activate their emotions, they don't tend to be as generous. If you think about this empathically, it makes sense—emotions require actions, and giving money feels like you're taking action. As you observe your involvement in social justice work, look for the emotions being activated. There's some crossover, but in general, disease-curing activists try to evoke your sadness, fear, anxiety, and pity empathy; environmental activists try to evoke your sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, and indignation empathy; animal rights and human rights activists try to evoke your sadness, anger, indignation empathy, and pity empathy; and so forth. Many social justice and activist groups pour a lot of time and money into marketing pleas that are engineered to activate specific clusters of emotions about that group's special focus.

This doesn't have to be a problem. Intentional emotional activation isn't evil; it's how activism works, it's how advertising works, it's how teaching works, and it's how parenting works. If you need people to do something they might not want to do or if you need them to learn something new, you have to figure out ways to compel or maneuver them—and the fastest way is through their emotions and their empathy. There are certainly more and less ethical ways to do this, but in and of itself, trying to evoke emotions in others is not a problem; it's normal everyday behavior, and we all do it.

Here's something to consider: when activist groups target and activate your emotions, it means that almost all of your empathic skills are engaged (all of them except perhaps Emotion Regulation, I'd say). That's really great in one way, because you may love to feel the emotions that are being evoked. You may love to feel deep empathy and pity as you look upon the images of sad dogs or babies in third world countries, and giving money might feel incredibly healing to you. That's great! You might also love to be angered and energized by activist groups that help you identify injustice and malfeasance.
You may love to feel righteous indignation and share that emotional state with your activist friends as you work to bring awareness and justice to the world. That's great, too! Your activism and social justice work can be as emotionally compelling as any form of drama, art, or literature, and it can absolutely increase your emotional and empathic capacities.

However, because the dramatic and empathic practice of emotion activation is an intrinsic part of the business model of successful activist organizations, there's something to watch out for empathically: As we all know, this emotional activation can become absurd and manipulative (“Who will think of the
children?”),
and it can and does lead to compassion fatigue and empathic burnout. So I ask you, empath to empath, to become hip to this intentional emotional manipulation rather than become a victim of it. Activist groups and social justice organizations feed off of your emotions; it's how they survive. You can use your empathic skills to identify the targeted emotions and decide whether you want to be influenced into feeling them. If you do, great! If you don't, but you really like the work the organization does, make sure to perform emotional thresholding for yourself and stay away from their marketing materials—you should be fine.

Tony Waters, one of my sociology professors, wrote a beautiful book with a fairly inaccessible title,
Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan.
⁵⁸
In it he writes about how humanitarian relief organizations have to focus their advertising efforts in ways that have very little to do with the realities of their work. Many of these large relief organizations have to mobilize quickly and create massive tent cities with food, temporary housing, medical care, transportation, sanitation, clean water, electricity, and security for perhaps thousands of people fleeing wars or natural disasters. The work is massive—it's city-building in a hurry, and it involves intricate planning and cooperation among dozens of governmental and nongovernmental agencies—ships, trains, airplanes, huge trucks full of supplies. Yet to procure donations, according to Waters, these organizations often have to show photos of two or three hungry children or mothers holding babies with tears rolling down their cheeks. They have to humanize the situation and help people feel sadness, love, anger about injustice, pity empathy, and a kind of panicky immediacy about sending money. Often, famous singers and actors are recruited to stand among the refugees and ground the emotional situation for people back home. But sometimes these situations are so emotionally inaccessible that the donations don't arrive, and the massive relief efforts can't function effectively.

The behavioral economist Dan Ariely writes about this very situation in his book
The Upside of Irrationality,
⁵⁹
in which he contrasts the striking differences in people's responses to two tragic situations. In the first situation, which happened in 1987 in Texas, a toddler who came to be known as Baby Jessica fell into the bottom of a dry well and got stuck for two-and-a-half days. The media went on an absolute bender, with the new cable TV station CNN providing continuous and breathless twenty-four-hour coverage of the rescue efforts. Baby Jessica was rescued after two days of media frenzy, and though she needed medical attention, she survived and returned to a fairly normal life, media glare notwithstanding. People who had followed the story sent more than $700,000 in donations to Jessica's family. Ariely contrasts this situation to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Africa, where more than 800,000 people were murdered in ethnic-cleansing violence that didn't garner even a fraction of the media coverage that Baby Jessica's two-day ordeal did.