Topic: Empathic Listening for Inner Development and Outer Impact

10:00 am Speaker: Anita Nowak  (10 min)

Summary

Anita Nowick, a faculty member at McGill Executive Institute and author of "Purposeful Empathy," discussed the importance of empathic listening and empathy circles for both personal and organizational development. She highlighted the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) as a complement to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing the need for inner capabilities to address global challenges. Nowick shared a six-step process for empathic leadership, stressing self-awareness, self-regulation, bridge-crossing, empathic action, and self-empathy. She underscored the significance of empathy circles in fostering genuine understanding and empathy, essential for effective leadership and personal growth.

Action Items

• [ ] Explore the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) website and framework.

• [ ] Implement a process for developing empathic listening skills, including the use of empathy circles, in the workplace.

• [ ] Encourage leaders to overcome their fear of showing empathy and instead embrace it as a critical skill for effective leadership.

Outline

Introduction of Anita Nowak and Empathy Summit

• Speaker 1 introduces Anita Nowak, highlighting her credentials including her role at McGill Executive Institute, her TEDx talks, and her book "Purposeful Empathy."

• Anita is introduced as the speaker for the session on "Empathetic Listening for Inner Development and Outer Impact."

• Speaker 1 expresses excitement about having Anita back for the summit.

• Anita begins her talk by thanking the audience and acknowledging the long-term commitment of many attendees to the empathy movement.

Importance of Empathic Listening and Empathy Circles

• Anita explains the focus of her talk on the importance of empathic listening and empathy circles for inner development and outer impact.

• She shares her journey of bringing empathy circles into the workplace and the significance of these practices for leaders.

• Anita introduces the Inner Development Goals (IDG) framework, emphasizing the need to slow down amidst urgent global challenges.

• She contrasts the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the IDGs, highlighting the inner capabilities needed to address external challenges.

Challenges and Importance of Empathy in Leadership

• Anita discusses the gap in achieving the SDGs by 2030, despite the 15-year timeline set.

• She introduces the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) as a response to the need for inner capabilities in leaders.

• Anita shares statistics on CEOs' understanding and fear of showing empathy in the workplace.

• She quotes Satya Nadella on empathy being the hardest skill to learn, emphasizing its importance for leaders.

Empathy Fatigue and Self-Awareness in Leadership

• Anita explains the physical and emotional effects of empathy fatigue on leaders.

• She describes the six-step process for empathic leadership, starting with self-awareness of stress.

• Anita provides an example of a leader, Helen, dealing with stress and the need for self-regulation.

• She introduces the concept of bridge crossing, where leaders need to meet others where they are emotionally.

Bridge Crossing and Empathic Action in Leadership

• Anita continues with the example of Helen crossing the bridge to empathize with Peter, who needs time off for his mother.

• She emphasizes the importance of cognitive empathy, perspective-taking, and active listening in empathic leadership.

• Anita introduces the empathy circle process as a tool to develop these skills.

• She outlines the fifth step of taking empathic action, focusing on extending genuine empathy to the person in need.

Self-Empathy and the Role of Empathy Circles

• Anita discusses the sixth step of self-empathy, where leaders need to take care of themselves after stressful interactions.

• She emphasizes the importance of empathy circles in developing the skill of sitting with and understanding others.

• Anita introduces the two golden rules of perspective-taking: holding space and allowing silence, and repeating back what you heard.

• She highlights the cognitive effort required to listen to understand and the benefits of practice in improving this skill.

Conclusion and Framework for Empathy

• Anita concludes her talk by reiterating the importance of empathy for the world.

• She references Maslow's hierarchy of needs, emphasizing self-transcendence as more important than self-actualization.

• Anita frames empathy as a path to self-transcendence and a significant contribution to global challenges.

• She ends her talk by thanking the audience and expressing her belief in the power of empathy for personal and collective growth.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/Od-cg8nFehRMn_5wHEgn6fM81kg?view=transcript

So yes, thank you for that very generous and warm introduction. I've got some slides that I'm going to share as well, so let me just take us there. Yeah, so I thought we would dive into why empathic listening and empathy circles are so important to the inner development that's needed for the outer impact that the world needs, and that I would share some of my learning as I've gone on my journey to bring empathy circles into the workplace where leaders can deploy empathic listening more carefully. So I discovered a couple of years ago the inner development goals. If you haven't been onto their website, I really encourage everyone to to do a Google search. I was at their conference two years ago, and I was really caught by bio statement. The times are urgent. 

Let's slow down. It sounds like a paradox, but when you lean into the IDG framework, you realize that that's exactly what we need. So I want to frame my talk with a model at the beginning and a framework at the end to provide context. So we've probably all heard of the UN Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in 2015 we had a 15 year runway with them, and it's really to help, kind of lift people out of global poverty, help mitigate against climate change, gender equality, all the things that keep us up at night. And the idea was that we, the globe, the world, would sign on to these SDGs, and that by 2030 we would see some major progress. 

Sadly, it's 2024 we have six years to go, and we've only achieved 12% of the goals. So a group in Stockholm actually got together and said, What do we need from leaders in order to achieve those goals. And through quite a process, bringing some thought leaders around systems change together, they launched the inner development goals. And so I just came back from their third annual conference, and you can see that empathy and compassion are very important goals or very important skills.

 These are a set of 23 skills that leaders should be developing in order to be the kind of leaders that we need to, you know, address some of the the problems that face the world. So the SDGs are the external challenges, and the idgs are inner capabilities, right? So when I think about leaders in the workplace. It's quite fascinating to me that 84% of CEOs understand how important empathy is, including to their bottom line, but seven out of 10 fear showing empathy in the workplace because they're worried they're going to be less respected if they do it.

 But you know, somebody like Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft, said it's not a soft skill. Empathy is the hardest skill we'll ever, ever learn. And I think that the empathy practice, empathic listening and empathy circles, is a practice to develop that skill. Now, when we are feeling emotionally connected to someone, our brain lights up the pleasure and reward centers of our brain. It feels good to our body. We all know that feeling, but when we're feeling empathy fatigue, guess what happens? Our brain cannot be in a state of empathy. We cannot extend empathy when we're feeling overwhelmed or stressed ourselves.

 So usually when I when I talk about empathic leadership and how to deploy empathy in the workplace, I'll use a little example. So this guy's yelling at, let's say, this woman in the white blouse with the bun, and she leaves the meeting, and she's feeling terrible about herself, and then she gets a knock on the door at her office saying, hey, Helen, do you have a minute? And she's stressed out herself, having been through some kind of really terrible meeting, and now she's expected to show up with empathy. How can she do that? Right? So I usually talk about a six step process, and then I'm going to go deep into one and end with why empathy circles are so powerful to develop. 

Of that particular step. So I say usually, Helen goes back to her office. She gets the knock on the door, and she's expected to show up with empathy, but she's stressed out herself. So the step, first step, is to know that she's stressed right, to just pay attention to what her body is saying. Maybe her cheeks are flush, maybe she's feeling butterflies in her stomach, maybe her heart rate is racing, so to have some self awareness that she's feeling stressed out in the first place, in order for step two to happen, which would be self regulation, how do you take that high level of stress down a few notches? How do you flip into the parasympathetic nerve system? 

And that's through maybe perhaps some breathing exercises. You could do some box breathing. Nobody needs to know it, but just to sort of take down your level of stress, the third step I call bridge crossing, which is really a simple step of making the decision to leave your frame of reference and to meet somebody where they're at. So let's say the person knocks on the door and says, Helen, do you have a minute? And that person is Peter, and he's like, I need to take some time off because we're moving my mom into a elder care home, because she has early stage dementia, and I need to take a couple of days off. It's the worst possible timing. 

I know we have this major client deliverable, but Helen's deciding to cross the bridge and not freak out about what's going to happen with her team, but to show up for Peter in that moment, she needs to do some cognitive empathy, some perspective taking, some active listening, and this is where the empathy circle process helps us. So I'm going to come back to this slide in a minute. 

The fifth step is to take the empathic action once Helen's heard from Peter. This is not the moment to say, hey, let's take out our agenda and let's reconfigure the workflow. This is the moment to really extend empathy to Peter and say, how are you going to take care of yourself? Sounds like you're going through a lot when you're ready come back and see me, and let's talk about the workflow. 

That empathic action will go a long way to increasing engagement. And then the sixth step, which a lot of leaders forget, is the self empathy. You know, Helen had a tough meeting, and she's had this tough conversation, and then usually she'll go back to her emails, when, in fact, she might want to take a beat and take care of herself in important ways. So as I said, I want to focus on the fourth step, because that's, I think, where rubber hits the road. 

Empathy circles are so important to develop the skill of sitting with someone and allowing them to share and to provide. So I usually call them the two golden rules of perspective taking in a scenario like this, one is to really hold space and allow silence to be more comfortable, you know, not to be allergic to silence. 

The second thing is the skill of repeating back some of what you just heard. Because when somebody is speaking and hears back the words that they've just spoken, they really feel heard. So I think you know, if we're going to be a leader that's extending empathy in our workplace, the capacity that we build through empathy circling is really, really, really important. So why does empathy? Why does empathy circles matter so much? Well, precisely we, our brains have been formulated, have been designed to listen to respond. 

Right when we hear somebody talking to us, we're quick to respond, and especially if our emotions are triggered. But we really need to learn how to listen to understand, and that's why I think empathy circles as a practice is so important. I remember in the beginning training, I remember thinking, what a cognitive weight. 

It was so hard to spend an hour and a half listening to understand, listening to understand and reflect back. It takes a lot of work to do, and then with practice, you get better at it. And I said that I would bookend the talk with a framework, so I want to end with two final slides. 

You know, I think empathy really important for the world. We know Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and that, he said self actualization is the most important thing that we'll achieve as a, as a, as an individual. But in fact, he also said that self transcendence is is more important than self actualization, and I think empathy and empathizing with others is a road to self transcendence. 

Thank you.