Empathy is often defined as “understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation”.

This is the single most important quality a human being can have. Emotional Intelligence is far better than Intellectual Intelligence, though both are important in surviving in this cruel and unjust world, emotional intelligence simply offers more.

Now, when most people think of empathy, they think of a person crying after seeing another person cry. Or being angry because someone else is angry. This is the cliché version of empathy, not real empathy.

Real empathy is understanding, and it is not your typical “I am okay” but inside you can tell they are not okay No, it is a deep understanding that can be achieved only with effort. You cannot simply passively empathize with someone else, or do it without intent, it has to be done with full intention.

We all have met a someone, someone special to us, not necessarily because they are special themselves but because they understand us and who we are. The feeling of being heard, and understood is very intoxicating, it makes adore that person simply because they us past our social image.

In a world full of distractions, objectives and stuff of accomplish, we are becoming more and more lonely and cold than ever. We rarely feel heard, everything seems so goddamn generic and without a unique touch.

Empathy is the antidote to our condition, simply observing and listening to other people will make you feel better, and it’s a special kind of listening, a kind where you let go of yourself and get lost in that other person or group of people. You let go of your tendencies to judge, analyze, feel jealous or envy, or any other tasks in mind, and just try to encapsulate what that other person feels like.

Do not stop at ‘oh he’s angry’ or ‘oh someone’s sad today’ - No, these observations are never enough. Try to go deeper than that, ‘he is angry because karen took the kids’, and even deeper than that. Ask yourself specific and detailed questions about the other person to yourself, and try to answer them.

It would be lovely if the other person is honest, and is not deluded by themselves, but most of the time they are very misguided about who they are. This is not a fault of the person per se, no, it’s just how things are. I call this the ‘presentation’ effect. To explain this effect, I’ll mention an anecdotal situation I had in an English Institution in Saana.

Recently I was in A2Z, an English institution, and all of my classmates were tasked to do a public presentation in-front of the whole school. I realized after asking my classmates about how they thought they did, that none of them had any perspective on the matter. They all think they did terrible, no matter how good they were. This is because people cannot judge themselves fairly, they are too biased, they see themselves as either good or bad.

This is where empathy comes in, empathy provides you with an abstraction. A model, someone other than you who is an island that you have explore. Because this person is not you, you have an easy time judging them and how they behave. After you judge them, you can compare what they did to what you did, like a simple logical condition.

Using this method of judgement helps you judge yourself better. When you listen deeply to what another person is saying, or doing, you get so lost that the weight of the self gets lifted and you feel light towards yourself.

Outside of conversations, presentations, and judging the self. Empathy can be a good skill to have in a business. Empathy is the ability to recognize what is missing from a market and providing it to customers. Empathy can single-handedly kill a company or create/revive one.

I am not saying reading customer testimonials is the sure way of success, no. What I am saying is deeply thinking about what customers need and want, and not heavily relying on their words but their actions, will tell you a lot about what direction your company needs to go in.

Apathy, on the other hand, will not benefit you even if the customers knew EXACTLY what they wanted and told you. This is because with Apathy you do not care, you are not interested. Apathy is decline, Empathy is growth.

At the end of the day, you need people. Without people you feel lonely and sad, you go through life without a purpose, bitterness overwhelms you and existence becomes more painful than ever before. With people, you feel safe and secure, you go through life with a purpose, people ease the pain of existing. Empathize with other people, at-least try to understand them, for it is a soothing experience for both parties.