Empathy

Empathy isn’t nodding your head while someone talks. It’s feeling what they feel.

Most of us think we’re decent at it. We’re not. We wait for our turn to speak, we reach for the fix, and we check the phone halfway through the bit that mattered.

If you’re tired of shallow conversations and want people to actually open up to you, this is the skill. And there are two levels to it.

• Empathy. Understanding what someone feels, and letting them know you do.

• Empathic resonance. Feeling it with them, at the same time, on the same wavelength.

The first is the price of entry. The second is where the rare connections live. I’ll take them in order.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to hear. People know when you’re not really there.

They can’t always say what gave it away. The eyes that drifted. The “yeah, yeah” that came a beat too early. The question you asked that she’d already answered.

But they clock it, and it costs you. Without empathy, trust is a hard sell. Why would anyone open up to a man who isn’t listening?

So the first move is boring. Put the phone down. Look at her. Let the silence sit for a second longer than is comfortable, because that second is usually when the real thing comes out.

Men do this constantly. Someone shares a problem, we hear a job, and we start on the job.

She didn’t want a plan. She wanted you to get it. “That sounds horrible, he’s a prick” does more than ten minutes of career advice.

Acknowledge the feeling before you touch the problem. Most of the time, once the feeling has landed, they work the problem out themselves and you never needed to say a word.

The same goes for mates. When your friend tells you his dad’s ill, he doesn’t need a link to a specialist. He needs you to sit with it for a minute.

I wrote about the mechanics of this in Active listening. Short version: we’re bad at it, and the fix is mostly shutting up.

Every row you’ve ever had got worse the moment you stopped trying to see it from her side.

Perspective-taking isn’t agreeing. It’s being able to say, honestly, “I can see why you’d feel that way”, and mean it, even while you still think you’re right.

Do that and most disagreements stop being fights. They become two people who both make sense, trying to work out what to do next.

It also makes you much harder to wind up. Once you can see where someone’s coming from, their worst moment is a bit less personal.

Empathic resonance takes that sh*t to a whole new level.

Empathy is understanding what someone feels. Resonance is feeling it with them. It’s the difference between hearing a song and being moved by it.

This is less mystical than it sounds. In 2010 Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson at Princeton put a woman in a brain scanner, recorded her telling a story, then scanned people listening to it. The listeners’ brain activity followed the speaker’s, with a lag. When it didn’t follow, the listener hadn’t understood. And the listeners whose brains ran slightly ahead of hers, anticipating, understood her best.

Two brains, in step. That’s the picture. Empathy is knowing where her wave is. Resonance is yours moving with it.

You’ve felt it from the other side. The friend who, for an hour, just got it. You didn’t have to explain. You didn’t have to perform your feelings so they’d register. That’s rare, and it’s why those friends are the ones you ring at 2am.

You can’t force resonance, but you can stop blocking it.

Most of the blocking is noise. Your own agenda, what you’re going to say next, how this reflects on you. Clear that and there’s room for what she’s actually giving off: the tone, the pause before the answer, the hands, the thing she said and the thing she didn’t.

Words are a small part of it. People leak how they feel through everything else, and the man who notices the leak is the one who gets described as “he just gets me”.

I covered the body side in Listen to your body and How to be mindful. The same attention you learn to pay to yourself works on other people. Mindfulness, meditation, whatever you call it, is practice at noticing, and noticing is most of this.

In the moment

Dating: feel the vibe, don’t just observe it. If the night is light and silly, be light and silly. If she goes quiet and serious, go there with her instead of trying to drag it back up.

Relationships: when your partner’s upset, don’t stand next to the feeling and label it. Let it in. It’s the difference between “I understand you’re sad” and actually being a bit sad with her. The second one is intimacy. The first one is customer service.

Mates and family: be the one who gets them. Not the one with the best advice, the one who doesn’t need the explanation. Nearly everyone goes their whole life with one or two people like that, and some have none.

And it goes both ways. Resonating with someone’s pain is heavy. Resonating with their joy is the best feeling going, and it’s why a good night with the right people beats anything you can buy.

None of this is soft. Empathy isn’t a weakness, and resonance definitely isn’t. It takes more nerve to feel something with someone than to stand back and comment on it.

Most men never try. They nod, they fix, they move the conversation back to themselves, and they wonder why nobody tells them anything real.

Stop half-listening and start giving a f*ck about what people are telling you. That’s the whole thing.