Periods of deep change such as the one we’re currently living through can cause all sorts of disruptions, from fragmented understanding to strong emotions, compounded by the challenge of distant work.
Have you had emotionally charged moments recently? Moments when you feel strong tension among your colleagues because they cannot agree with each other? Moments when you feel deeply frustrated that no one else seems to care about what you care about? Moments you noticed someone crying in the bathroom, or on a zoom call. I can certainly list more of those challenging moments, from my own experience. All this can not only take away your focus and momentum, but it fuels disconnection in professional relationships if those moments are not handle appropriately.
In order to respond to others’ emotional needs with a high level of sensitivity and empathy, you need to master your own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors first and foremost. In other words, you need psychological fitness.
Psychological fitness increases your ability to create spaces where diverse perspectives can coexist safely, leading to sharper insights, better coordination, and greater impact. It also helps you to unite your people and make wonders. Master it, and your strategies, practices, and culture will come together. Your people will actively embrace them, instead of applying the rules mechanically.
But, how do you build collective psychological fitness in your workplace? Three core skills, empathy, attention, and compassion, are needed in order to create a safe and empowering space for meaningful conversations and connections during those moments.
Empathy
Empathy is the fuel of human connection. It is the capacity to recognize and feel what another person is experiencing. This requires you to take on the other person’s perspective, withhold judgement, recognize their feelings — and communicate all of the above*.
How many of you can recall a time when you wanted someone to just listen? And instead, the other person started to share their own stories, offer advice, or seek solutions? They might have meant well, but it wasn’t empathy.
Empathy is not about giving your opinions or offering solutions (unless you are invited to do so). Showing empathy means you have the other person’s best interest at heart in the moment, and aim to meet their needs, not yours. The goal is to make the other person feel that they are heard and supported in a way that THEY want. If you’re unsure what that is, what about trying to ask?
But asking is not all there is to it. Many of us struggle with empathy because we feel uncomfortable when we’re required to feel with the other person. Particularly when it’s about experiencing challenging feelings such as sadness, anger, jealousy. So, we need to be able to feel comfortable with our own uncomfortable feelings first, in order to be fully empathetic.
Attention
“Everything we do depends on its quality on the thinking we do first. And our thinking depends on the quality of our attention for each other.” Nancy Kline.
Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment* methodology had a profound effect on my work with teams. Thinking Environment is a communication framework that identifies the ten key components needed for a situation to allow deep thinking, in professional settings and otherwise. The most central of those ten components is attention: listening with palpable respect, genuine interest, and without interruption.
Palpable respect is the capability to recognize, admire and engage with the essence of another person in a conversation. ‘Essence’ here means the core qualities you can identify in that person.
Everyone has unique qualities, but they only manifest when someone is here to listen. Your attention encourages the other person’s thinking because you WANT to hear more. So, this quality of attention is an act of intense creation. And it brings great rewards: a sense of intimate connection with the other person, as well as original ideas and thinking.
Reaching this state of attention, however, is often a challenge. Our world is full of interruptions, from social media to messages from friends or kids asking for something. As we adapt to those interruptions, we are slowly losing the capacity to give full attention.
We also have a very busy mind which focus on our needs and wants, rather than attending to the needs and wants of others. When we focus on ourselves, we listen to respond, rather than understand. We wonder what we should say when our turn comes, and miss the subtle details of what was NOT said, non-verbal cues, facial expressions and the intention behind the words.
To make people feel heard and seen, the first step is to pay close attention. This is how an intimate and supportive relationship should be. A good start is to listen without ANY interruption. Which sounds simple, but is not easy to do. So, next time you have a conversation, why not try this simple practice? Test if you can sustain not speaking up before the other person finishes.
Compassion
Compassion is the capacity to show kindness and care for others and for yourself. Compassion could be described as empathy in ACTION. Empathy has you feel with others and understand their perspective. Compassion begins when you do something about it. Compassion gets involved. It is about helping the other person, or alleviating their suffering.
Importantly, compassion does not take away power from the person who receives help. Compassion is very different from ‘oh, you poor thing, let me help you’, or sugarcoating reality. In the workplace, compassion could look something like this. You notice that your colleague has started suffering from self-doubt and anxiety after making a mistake in a high-stake project. Rather than judging them harshly, you offer them understanding and kindness by writing them a card to acknowledge their pain and show support.
When it comes to giving compassion, Dr Kristin Neff*, a world-leading researcher in self-compassion, suggested that the biggest challenge is to apply compassion to yourself. It is easier to give it to others. We tend to be harsher on ourselves than others. Very often, we blame ourselves when mistakes are made, while we tend to show much more understanding and kindness towards others. Listen to the way you talk to yourself, versus your best friends or family members, and you will know what I mean.
To practice self-compassion, start with building a friendship with yourself, and pay close attention to this friend. What do you notice? How does that friend actually behave? How do you tend to judge them? You might read my article on the 5 areas where you may not pay enough attention to your own behaviours in your everyday life here:
