The Components Of Empathy
In the century of technology, everyone rushes to chase their dreams to become successful people in their lives. People are extremely busy with following their personal goals, and they care about have various things. College students struggle with handling twenty-credit courses, while still enjoying life. Working parents struggle with following their career goals while improving their relationship with their children. Old people struggle with maintaining their mental and physical health. Everyone is busy caring about big things, including their careers, their goals, and their work-life balance. The question is, how much have we had tried to understand other people's feelings struggling with their problems? Have we ever tried to care about others’ emotions when they are falling apart because of their broken marriages? If we have ever attempted to understand one's emotions, then we have tried to be empathic.
In other words, the experience of understanding another person's feelings, thoughts, and condition from their point of view, is called empathy (psychology today). While disagreements occur whenever people oppose over something, one key component to resolving conflicts is understanding one's emotions, values, and ideas. As a result, empathy can significantly resolve one's oppositions with their partner, colleagues, or friends. The two fundamental components of how we connect to people and experience empathy are body language and emotional expressions. Body language is one of the principal parts of empathy. Even though body language is a vital part of our daily communication, we may not be entirely aware of it. Three main aspects of body language are eye contact, posture, and facial expression. Eye contact can show how a person pays attention and feel about another person. Posture and facial expression can communicate one's emotions in various situations. Last week, I met two of my friends, Sean and Ava, and I was witnessing them talking to each other and sharing the same experience. Sean started chatting regarding his struggles as an only child, and how it is difficult in some situations. "Sometimes I really feel like I need someone else other than my parents to be able to count on them", Sean explained while he was directly looking into Ava's eyes. Sean's upper eyelids dropped, and his eyebrows were slightly angled upward, which formed an inverted V-shape above his nose. I could feel a huge sadness and disappointment in Sean's face.
On the other hand, Ava was only listening very carefully to him, and she would shake her head up and down after each Sean's sentence. While Ava was staring at Sean's eyes, she would change her gesture and her face expression according to Sean's story. Watching them experiencing empathy was the same as looking at a mirror because they would reflect each other's feelings. ""I can totally feel you, Sean. In fact, while you were telling your story, I had a feeling that was like listening to my own life's story from another point of view. I am an only child as well. "", Ava responded back to Sean after he finished his story. I could feel the power of empathy and understand how an individual can connect with a partner through it. Furthermore, Body language is the first connection that happens before even someone starts a conversation. It was the Christmas of 2017, and I was walking home after my work. I saw a man sitting on the floor next to a shopping cart. He was wearing a shirt that was a small, but on him, it was like his big brother's shirt hanging loose. It was cold outside, and he had wrapped his arms tightly around his knees to make himself warmer. By only looking at him, I could feel he is hungry and cold. The fact that we have all had the experience of watching homeless people in the streets, and understanding their feelings by looking at them, is an excellent example of how body language can communicate feelings. Emotion plays a significant role in empathy. Hearing and understanding the hidden person of the heart, are the essential components of empathy. Human beings' feeling is like an onion that has several layers. For understanding one's feelings and going through all those layers, we need to step into their shoes and live from their perspective of life.
For example, when my stepsister, Amy, was three years old, and my cousin, Evan, was one year old, I witnessed a fascinated response from Amy to Evan. While Evan was crying, Amy went to him, and she tried to comfort him with her favorite panda toy. Empathy can inspire a revolution, and lead to innovation. One of the most empathic people I have ever seen is Patricia Moore. In the mid-1970s, Patricia was 26-years old, and she was the only female product designer working at Raymond Loewy design office in New York. "Couldn’t we design the refrigerator door so that someone with arthritis would find it easy to open?", Patricia said in one of their planning meetings (Innovation Hall of Fame article that published on Rochester Institute of Technology website). One of her more senior colleagues responded, "Pattie, we don’t design for those people!". Patricia got extremely angry from her colleague's response, and she decided to do something that changed the whole design industry forever. She hired a makeup artist to make herself look like an eighty-five years-old woman. She had put on glasses that made her vision blurry, plugged up her ears to reduce her hearing ability, and put on uneven shoes that made walking hard for herself, which resulted in using a stick for walking. From 1979 to 1982, she pushed herself to go through various challenges of an old woman for around three years.
During these years, she traveled to 116 cities in both the U. S. and Canada, and she did all the daily activities of an old woman. She tried to put herself in older people's shoes to understand their challenges and their feelings. She was one of the actual leaders in the movement of the Universal Design (RIT). Universal Design is an approach that makes product designers to design products that are easy to use for the broadest range of consumers, notably the ones with disabilities, possible (Universal design pioneer: Why design still excludes many).
