Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Opinions expressed in this episode are personal. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this streaming platform.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Good day, everyone, and welcome to another edition of let's be diverse. I am your host, Andrew Stout. This episode is dedicated to all my loved ones who supported me through this. Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from a point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they are feeling. Today, our topic is about empathy and my guest today is Anita.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Now, Anita, Nia Nowak has a PhD and is an empathetic, expert, award winning educator, speaker, podcaster, author of Purpose Empathy, taping our hidden Superpower for personal, organizational and social change. As a certified coach, she also helps family foundations translate their goals into social impact organizations create cultures of empathy through her boutique adversary firm, purposeful emphasis by design, dedicated to teaching and mentoring the next generation of changemakers. She's part of faculty of McGill University of Montreal Executive Institute and teaches leadership ethics in management and social entrepreneurship and innovation at an undergraduate level, where she was named professor of the year for 2014 and 2019. Thank you so much for being on today.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Terrific to be on with you, Andrew, thank you for the invitation.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: You're very welcome. It's been a while since we've been going back and forth trying to get you on. I went through a little bit of going through your administrators and stuff. So nice to finally have this conversation with you tonight. Yeah, how are you been? What's new with you in your world?
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Well, I launched my book in April and went on a book tour in east coast and west coast and then rested a little bit over the summer. And now I'm gearing up to leave in a couple weeks for Europe. I've got five or six cities to do a book tour with. I'm very excited.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Well, congratulations on the book, by the way. I read some reviews and all reviews are positive, so I love that. And I have to say I'm a little bit of a jokester. I'm sure you were so sorry that you gotta go to Europe for a book.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Yeah, terrible. Oh, that's gonna misery.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: That's gonna be such a terrible trip. I don't know how you're gonna manage to do that with all that great food and scenery and everything. It's gonna be terrible. Yeah.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: The only downside is that I leave on the 3 October and I'm back two weeks later and that, I think will be the prime time for the foliage to change in Quebec. And I love the fall in Montreal. So that's the only downside.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yep. Yep. Fall is probably. I really enjoy summer, but I started to enjoy fall only because I love that it's cool during the morning and cool in the evening and hot during the day. So I love the heat. But sometimes when you're trying to sleep, it's not the easiest thing to do when it's 28 or 29 degrees outside and it's hot and you just can't get any cool air. So, yes, it's not fun. So, Anita, before we begin, I always have a fun, thought provoking question to ask my guests. It's always a surprise, so the guests never know. Are you ready for yours?
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm asking you this. This is actually a favorite of mine. I asked this to a guest two weeks ago, and I had so much fun with it, and I chose you to do this question with, so I hope we have a little bit of fun with it also. So my question to you is, is soup cereal? Why or why not?
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Is soup cereal? The answer is no, because cereal is cold and soup is warm.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: You had to do a little bit of thinking on that one. No, it is. I always have fun with those. You answered it really good for not knowing what the answer was. You did a really good job. Thank you for having fun with me. Why don't we start off with you telling us a little bit about you and your story?
[00:04:28] Speaker A: So there are really three pivots in my life. When I was doing my undergrad in my third year, I was studying marketing, and I wanted to be a hotshot ad exec. This is back in the late 90, like 96, 97 era, and I dreamt about working in an office tower and wearing stiletto heels and vampire red lipstick and the whole thing. And my roommate at the time, we were living in a neighborhood in Montreal that has since become quite gentrified and cool. But back in the day, our rent was like, $140 a night, $140 a month, very affordable. He's now gone on to be a orthopedic surgeon in New York City. But back in the day, he was dating a woman from a local university who was involved in a film festival, and it was a feminist film festival. And back then, I really didn't know what feminism meant. And sort of horrified, in retrospect, that I had no idea, but that was the truth. And he went to a few films during the festival, and I went to one. And that one film changed my life. It changed the direction of my life. It was called the Vienna Tribunal, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It was less than an hour long. There had been a five day human rights conference in Vienna, one day of which was devoted to women's human rights. And women from around the world flew into Vienna to testify, offer a testimonial about the plight of women in their country. And I'd heard of a lot of different things, like inequities and pay gaps, but I had never heard of, for example, female genital cutting. I had never heard that young girls as young as seven, eight, or nine were being trafficked as sex slaves. I had never heard of women being buried to their shoulders and stoned to death, and that some governments have in documentation the size, the appropriate size of the stone to not kill her too fast or too slow if she's been accused of adultery. So I watched this film in horror, learning about things that I had never heard of before. And then I was doubly angry because I was graduating from arguably one of the best universities in the world, and that I had not come across this in my three year undergrad program. And so I left that theater as a nascent social justice warrior. I could not go back to the idea of being a corporate exec after that film. And, yeah, so that was the first turning point in my life.
The second major turning point happened ten years later, also connected to McGill. McGill's Faculty of Law was hosting its inaugural human rights conference. And the first year that they hosted this conference, the theme was the prevention of genocide, which is not exactly a light conference topic. And the opening session had 700 people in the Mount Royal center with four guests, each of whom was a survivor of a different genocide. And I always find that sentence rather heavy to say, because if you think about the gravitas and the implications of four different genocide survivors, someone from Bosnia, somebody from Cambodia, somebody from the Holocaust, and a woman from Rwanda. And that woman, her name is Esther Mujawayo, got up to speak, and behind her was a giant jumbotron with a picture. And she pointed up to the photo on this big jumbotron and said, you see this picture of my family gathered for an anniversary celebration, and everybody in the audience, you know, saw the picture. Obviously, there must have been about. This is my guesstimate, 40, 40 or 45 people in the picture. And she said to the audience, not soon. Not long after that photo had been taken, the genocide started. And she obviously survived. And thankfully, her daughter survived, but every other person in that photograph did not. And there was just this pregnant pause, this, like, collective breathing in, and people just taking in that information. And then she said what I thought was very provocative. She said, I often am told, especially from people in the west, if only we had known the genocide was happening, we'd have done something about it. And she said, I'm gonna call your bluff on that, because right now, everywhere on the planet, there are people suffering, and you continue to fail us. Those were her words. And honest to God, it's never happened to me before, and it has never happened since. But my ears were physically on fire. I thought. I felt as though she was talking directly to me. And that summer, or the following summer, I ended up spending part of the summer in Kigali, Rwanda. My sister and I had done some fundraising. We helped a woman's organization launch a microfinance project with sewing machines. And it was a very transformational summer for me. And that call to action, and you continue to fail us, was the second thing that changed my life. And the third one happened thanks to my thesis supervisor. I was four years into my degree program when I took a year sabbatical. And my advisor said, don't do it. This is where all the attrition happens. You'll never finish. And I was accepting a new professional job that required my focus and dedication, and I knew I couldn't do both well simultaneously. So I said, no, let me get a year under my belt in this new professional job, and I'll come back and I'll finish it. And so six months later, he called me into his office, and he said, what's new? And I came in with no agenda, and I was leaving to Rwanda three months later.
And he said to me, after he heard me talk about this trip, he's like, Anita, you know what? I don't think you're going to graduate. And I was astonished, and he said, no. He goes, I've just heard you talk about your trip to Rwanda. You're lit up like a Christmas tree. Those were his words. And I believe that you need to change your thesis topic, because the only way you're going to finish your degree is if you are passionate about your topic the way you are passionate about this trip. And so he gave me advice, and the meeting was like, maybe twelve or 13 minutes long. He sent me on my way. The advice he gave me was, I. I bet you have a secret stash at home, a box or a drawer or something that you use to keep random artifacts in. I want you to find that and see what's there, because that's how I think you're going to find your passion. And I walked out of his office raging mad, fuming mad, like, how dare he question what I was passionate about? And finally, I guess it took about two weeks or so, I got over my ego, and I actually scoured my entire apartment from top to bottom to find this secret stash. And lo and behold, in my two drawer metal filing cabinet, after my taxes, all the way towards the end, I found a file called miscellaneous, and I spread the contents open. And at first, I didn't see anything. I couldn't see a common thread. But I came across this little article about a boy in Ontario that had gone to school without shoes for a week because he had learned about childhood poverty in the global south and that children sometimes don't have shoes to walk to school. So he wanted to know what that felt like, and he wanted to educate his classmates. And then when I looked at the artifacts, I had something about acid rain and something about homelessness and something about the mental health crisis. I realized I was naturally attracted to changemakers, people who wanted to create positive change in the world. And so I ended up changing my thesis topic and interviewing social entrepreneurs to understand why do they do the work that they do and the work. The answer that was revealed, without exception, across dozens of interviews, was that they all felt empathy for others and a need to act on that empathy. And so that's. Those are the three big turning points in my life that have led me down this path. And I've been passionate about empathy ever since.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Wow. What an amazing story. I just love every single bit of it. It was almost, for me, like I was watching a movie here and I was waiting, like, what's gonna happen here? So I love that story, and I just love that it led you to empathy. And I feel like empathy is so important today, especially anywhere but specifically in the workplace. I think it's so important. I talked to a lot of people, Anita, and a lot of them have either been in a situation where they didn't have empathy, or they were going into a situation and they feel like they're not getting any empathy. And I just feel that so discouraging, especially in the workplace today. We spend so much time with our workmates and our leader, more than we do with our family. For people to dread going in to work because of that, it upsets me to no end. Because me personally, I've been through it years ago, or I date myself here, but 2025 years ago, I dealt with it, and I promised myself that I would never do that again. And I was going to be empathetic. And I was going to ask a lot of questions about people. And I always joke with people. I always, especially women, I always joke because whenever a woman says to me, ask them how they're doing, and a woman says to me, I'm fine or I'm gonna be fine, my spidey senses blow up. Uh oh. I know right away something is not right. Because that word fine to a woman, it's not fine or I'm gonna be fine, or yeah, it's fine. It's not, can I do this? Yeah, fine, go ahead. Like, it's not a good word. So just that empathy. And it's not even just that word, but just empathy in general. I want to be empathetic to people. I want to know what's going on. I want to find out what's happening. Are they okay?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's a lot to say there. I mean, I've been posting a daily empathy post on my social media for nearly seven years without missing a day. That's like close to 2800 posts at this point. And something happened about three years ago that really changed the landscape of these posts. And that's corporate America woke up to the importance of empathic leadership and empathic corporate culture. And of course that's due to COVID and of course that's due to the BLM race reckoning that happened. And that's because we, like you said, we spend the lion's share of our time in the office with people working, doing work 40, 50, 60 hours a week. That's not a joke for 50, 60 years of our lives. And what's interesting is now that the workplace has figured out that, how important it is, and that it's not a matter of paying lip service to empathy. And they're actually doing the research on how does empathy impact the workplace. There's a ton of evidence to demonstrate that it has real implications on the bottom line. First of all, people who feel they can be authentic and that they belong in the workplace are more likely to be engaged. It's easier to attract and retain talent. People who left their jobs during the great resignation period were leaving because they didn't have purpose in their work. And we're seeking something with greater purpose. Those who stayed who are unhappy are engaging in what's known as presenteeism. So their bodies are present, but they're not present. Or something known as quiet quitting, where they just do the least amount that's necessary to fill their duties of the job. And empathy are antidotes to all of that because if you work in an empathic workplace where people feel valued and that there's a sense of belonging, guess what happens? Communication gets better, trust gets better, loyalty gets better, innovation goes up. Stakeholder engagement with across the entire chain of a business will actually impact the bottom line. Now, what's interesting is that 4% of CEO's understand the business case for empathy, but seven out of ten fear that if they showed it at work, they'd be less respected. And I think that has got to die out with the dinosaurs, because nothing could be. It's further than truth. And the last thing I'll say, because I'm sure you want to respond here, is that two thirds of employees, so out of the c suite, like just the workforce, two thirds also understand the importance of empathy. But only one out of five believe it's rewarded in the workplace. And that is a delta that has to close. So I think I was motivated to write this book a long time ago based on the interviews that I did for my PhD. And I realized that it's not just about changing the world. It is that too. But it's also about changing our relationships and changing our workplaces. So empathy is needed at every level of scale in our lives.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: I totally agree with you. Truly believe that if you get trust and respect from your team or your employees, if a leader can do that, then you're going to have an engaged workforce. I truly believe that. And you mentioned also being vulnerable.
I have a friend of mine, and I spoke about this on another episode of my podcast. A friend of mine had her leader walked in to the office one day, and normally he would say hi to everybody. How's everyone going this day? Everyone said hi to him. And he just was walking straight to his office and he turned around and he said, guys, I just want to let you know that I've had a really rough. All I'm asking is that you guys just give me. I'm going to go to my office. I'm going to do some work. If you guys could just give me 20 to 30 minutes in my office to let me do some work, I will be open to any conversations that you feel that you need to have or that you want to have with. I just need this time. And if you guys can respect me for that, I greatly appreciate it. Well, he closed his door and everyone kind of looked at each other, she said, and then they said, how vulnerable was he?
And they just said, wow, I. I trust and respect him before, but after that conversation, I'm ready to go through a brick wall for this guy now, like, he entrusted his vulnerability and his rough day with us and showed that he's human. This is unbelievable. So she told me the engagement was great, and it grew from that day. I'm going to use the Grinch. Everybody's heart grew ten sizes bigger than it was because they just were so impressed with this guy opening up. He didn't say what it was, but just the fact that he said that he was having a rough day was so great.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Love that story. Sounds like a good leader.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: Yeah. It was an excellent way of showing that you care about your team enough to tell them this is what you're going through and that you feel the need to tell them. And maybe seven out of ten managers probably would have just walked in, closed their door, and not come out for probably the whole morning. And then we're probably continued to be miserable the rest of the day and not know what it is. But for him to do that, I just thought, what a great story, what a great way to lead, and what a great way to show that you were human and vulnerable.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Such a great way. So what are some of the big findings that you found about empathy in the workplace?
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Well, there's a lot more to say about empathy as a whole. I mean, I mentioned some of the stats earlier about the workplace specifically, but I think it would be worth covering what empathy actually means. You read a definition up at the top end of the conversation?
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: And my research would suggest that there are a few baseline things for people to know about empathy, so that we're talking about the same phenomenon. The first is that there's a bunch of words that are often treated as synonyms, but I put them on a continuum. So on the left side is pity, followed by sympathy, followed by compassion, followed by empathy. And on the pity side of the continuum, there's power asymmetry embedded in the relationship. When you pity someone, you look down on them. And unfortunately, the higher up the ranks you go in any hierarchy, the less likely you have a tendency to empathize. So there's like a negative correlation between climbing the hierarchy and showing demonstrating empathy. So it's really important to mitigate against that on the other side of the continuum, the empathy side, which is why I think, I call empathy our hidden superpower. Second, it's this. It's the most important and powerful human trait or emotion. Second only to love, in my mind. And that is because empathy is the innate trait that unites us in our common humanity, and so we all have the capacity for joy and love and disappointment and shame and fear, and all those physical and emotional phenomena that we have as humans. And empathy is what actually connects us, because we understand what shame or disappointment or fear is like. The important thing about the definition is that it doesn't negate or take away from lived experience. You can't fully ever really know what someone's going through but you. But there is a common ground. And so I think empathy in the workplace needs to start from this recognition that we share common humanity. And it's not about hierarchy. That's the first thing. The second thing I would say is that empathy is actually two different kind of phenomena, and that they're also treated like the same thing. One of them is feeling what someone else is feeling, and that's thanks to our mirror neuron system. So when you watch somebody stub their toe, you wince. When you listen to kids play in a playground, you smile.
And that's because we tend to have emotional resonance, right? So that's the feeling part, and that's what compassion is. It's feeling what someone else is feeling. There's a second part to empathy that's worth mentioning, and that is the cognitive empathy, which requires our higher order thinking, our neocortex. It's really about perspective taking. When somebody's telling you a story about what's going on in their lives, you are listening and imagining what that's like for them, right? And so that's cognitive empathy. And we can become better at it with practice. We can actually become better at empathy with practice. Just like going to the gym and doing bicep curls and growing your biceps. Thanks to what's known as neuroplasticity, we can actually rewire our brains. Our brain is full of all of these synaptic connections. And the more often we think a thought, the thicker they become. The more often we behave in a particular way, the thicker they become. So we react reflexively, without thinking, because of our neural connections and how thick they are, or how thin they are. And if we want to become more empathic, we just need to practice empathic thoughts. We just need to practice empathic behavior. And that really surprised me. And I remember when I came across the literature around the neuroscience of empathy, being so inspired that we could actually become more empathic, that I. I started doing all sorts of experiments, and I have this one memory. I share it often, Andrew, and I'll share it here with you if you want me to.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: It was twelve or 14 years ago before we had mobile phones attached to our hands to distract us. I was in a long lineup at a FedEx store at a major mall, the Placeville Marie in Montreal. And it took about 30 minutes for me to get to the counter because it was the holiday season and everybody had packages. And by the time I got up to the counter, the lady who greeted me was rude. I mean, really properly rude, for no reason. And I was taken aback. And I. My initial reaction was to call her out on it, but then I realized that I had a moment to practice empathy and let's see what happens. So it was just a flash of insight. Like, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I was like, oh, let me just try this. And so I looked at her and I said, are you okay? And there was a moment where she was trying to figure out if I was being, like, sarcastic or passive aggressive, but I wasn't. I was asking her sincerely, are you okay? And she burst into tears. And she said, I've been working double shift for two weeks straight. My son's at home with a fever. I think I'm getting sick.
It's three in the afternoon. I haven't had a lunch break. I'm just exhausted. And now, 15 seconds earlier, I really did not like this woman. And then I found myself holding hands across the FedEx counter, her crying and me being moved. And it was a really salient moment in my life where I realized that we all have the capacity for empathy, if we so choose. And in her case, after she felt heard, I went to get her a mint tea in the food court. I remember I came back. She set my package with efficiency and grace. I don't remember her name, but I'll never forget that moment. And I have been her. We have all been her. Like, in your cup is empty, your batteries are empty. And that's the thing about our brain, is that we cannot be in a state of anxiety or stress and empathy simultaneously. Our brain cannot do both. And guess what's happened to us in our lives, in our culture, over the last few years. We are living with chronic stress and chronic anxiety, and it's having an impact on our capacity to empathize. So that's why the book is called purposeful empathy, because we have got to make the decision to turn up the volume of empathy in our lives.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Wow, what a story. My thoughts are, is that, first of all, amazing for you to just switch, and at 1 second, you didn't really like this woman, for you to just switch and go, I'm gonna ask her if she's okay. And you asked her, you probably didn't expect the answer, that you probably were gonna get removed by vulnerability to trust you and tell you her story. I would say that's a very moving story, and I wish a lot of other people would done. Have done that before as well. Ask someone if they were okay. They dropped a few things, and I've asked them, are you okay? Do you need help carrying your stuff to your car? This one was kind of a little bit different because she wasn't sure. So she's like, no, I'm okay. Fine. As I was saying earlier. So I didn't really push it because she didn't seem like she wanted to have my help, but I could just tell that something was not right at that point. So, yeah, it's different to see people's reactions and their vulnerability. And like I said, I wish that people especially, like, in a space, like a retail space, and especially around that time of year, I mean, any time of year in retail, but around that time of year, everybody's level is sky high and. Yeah. Just asking people if they're okay, or. Can I get you something? I know here in. Where I am in Saskatchewan, especially in the holidays, if you go to a Tim Hortons, sometimes you'll go to the drive through and someone. And they'll say, oh, someone's got your coffee. And then you, in turn, do it for the next car. So, you know, I've heard stories that some Tim Hortons here where there's been, like, 25, 30 cars in a row that have done that, somebody paid it forward, and I just think that's so cool when I do hear about that, because, yeah, it just takes just a little bit of sentiment to. To show somebody that you care for them. It just takes a little bit. And you could see that people respect that, and they just love that for sure. So, I'd like to get into some. I think we kind of talked about it, but we'll just say an example of poor empathy.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Great question. Okay, so let's use a workplace example where I'll talk about what poor empathy would look like and what good empathic leadership would look like. So I want you to imagine a manager at any workplace comes out of a Zoom meeting or an in person meeting or gets an email that is totally stressful. Okay. So you're triggered. You're second guessing yourself, or maybe you have to work late or on the weekend, or something's gone wrong where you're back at your office, and you are just flooded with negative energy and negative emotions. And at the same time, you get a knock on the door from an employee, somebody who reports to you, or maybe it's a colleague. It doesn't matter who needs your time and attention because they want to tell you something like, hey, do you have a minute? I want to chat with you for a second. So you say, okay, sure, have a seat. Kind of distracted. And then they start telling you something important, like they need to take a few days off because their wife is getting treated for breast cancer, or they're putting their mom in a home because she started early. Dementia or whatever life gives you life throws you a lot of things. And so all of a sudden, you as a person, whether it's as a boss or whether it's as a colleague, you know that you're meant to extend empathy to this individual, but at the same time, you're stuck in your own head about your own things. So this is. I talk about a six step process towards empathic leadership, and the first step is self awareness. It's actually knowing that you are stressed in the first place. So bad empathic leadership starts with not having awareness about how you're feeling. People are just wandering around, reacting all the time, not paying, paying any attention to how their bodies feel. That's because we spend a lot of time listening to our thoughts, but we don't spend a lot of time listening to the butterflies in our belly or the shallow pace at which we're breathing or the cheekbones being flushed or our cadence going fast. So the first step is actually having self awareness. For the second step, it's to have self regulation. So that's the capacity to say, hey, I'm in a heightened state of stress, which is not useful and impedes empathy. So I need to do something to actually change how I'm feeling. So if you want to go from stress to no stress, one of the ways to do that is through breathing exercises. So there's something called the box breathing, where you take in a breath for a count of five, you hold for a count of five, breathe out for a count of five, and you hold for count of five. And you do that repeatedly three or four times. Nobody has to notice you're doing it. And it will change the parasympathetic nerve system. Like, it'll change your body to become sort of activate the power. The parasympathetic nerve system will be activated to calm you down thanks to the breathing, so that you can do step three. So I guess, to answer your question again, what does poor empathy look, like is if you don't down regulate, then you're just stuck, stressed in your own head, which means you can't be empathic, right? Okay, so the third step is what I call bridge crossing. It's a very snap your finger in speed decision to leave your own context, whatever's going on in your world, and to cross the bridge and meet somebody where they're at. That's step three. Again, a poor empathic leader would not do that. Figure out, like, oh, I'm going to listen to this person and it's connected to my life and how I experience the world. But that's not being effective as an empathic leader. So the fourth step is perspective taking, and that is engaging our, what I earlier called cognitive empathy, where you're listening to understand, you're not listening to respond.
We are very poor listeners, and we don't learn how mentally. Like, it takes a lot of energy to actually listen to someone and hold space for them. And when they're telling you something important, when anybody's telling you something important that's emotional or hard to express, it's really important to hold space. And how do you do that? I have two hacks. One is you let silence be golden. In our culture, we're busy filling in blanks. We talk about how whatever you said, oh, I know what you're talking about because this happened to me.
You have to be allergic to that response if you want to be an empathic leader. So let silence show up in that container of space. And then the second hack is to repeat words that you just heard. And that's something that psychologists and therapists are trained to do. And it sounds like maybe mechanical or robotic to do for us. But honestly, if you repeat back a few words that somebody just said, it feels like a balm to them. So that's the fourth step. Fifth step is taking empathic action. So somebody who's poor at empathy would let the person say what they have to say and say, oh, yeah, okay, that sounds tough. And now, since you're taking two days off to take care of your mom, like, how are we going to redistribute your work? Let's pull out our agendas and figure that out. That's not the time to do do that. Empathic action is leading with compassion. Saying, listen, that was really tough. Thank you for sharing that with me. I want you to really take care of yourself. I want you to go for a walk or grab a glass of water or call a friend. And then when you're ready. Come back and see me and let's figure out what the work thing is going to be. And when they do come back, as you've alluded to earlier, Andrew, they'll come back with so much more loyalty and engagement because they feel really supported. That's the fifth step and the final step, and it's really worth underlining, is self empathy. Again, in our culture, we do not take care of ourselves well. So if you can picture this manager who had a stressful situation and then got interrupted by this other heavy duty conversation, once that's done, what do most people do? Go back to their emails or back to their work without taking care of themselves. And so I think it's really important that we also take time to tend to our emotional needs, and that can happen a bunch of different ways. One of my favorite things to talk about is in Japan, they call it Shidenyuku, which means forest bathing. So just spending time walking in nature, in the natural world. So that that was like a six step process that I do in my training. But when you're talking about being an un empathic person or a leader that doesn't show empathy, you screw up on those, maybe all of them or some of them, but I think it's possible with effort and repetition to become a more empathic leader following that process.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: I just love those five steps. The step that with me is the step of listening, but not saying, because I think a lot of our culture, a lot of people say, and a lot of people said this to me, oh, I get what you're going through. I understand what you're going through, but in reality, you really don't. It's almost like when someone passes away in someone's family and you go back to work and they say, oh, I totally understand what you're going through. My family member of mine passed away, but you don't know fully what that person is going through because everybody deals with it differently. So the thing to say is, sympathize with you and then listen, not have a answer. Like, just almost, like, pause and let them speak, because you have no idea what that person is going through in any situation. Could be somebody passed away, they're having issues at home with your significant other or their kids, or it could be anything. They're not feeling well, they're going through health issues. Whatever it is, you don't know what they're thinking. So take the time to think about it from there.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: If you could choose one way to describe yourself, what word would that be?
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Gosh there are a lot of words that people have thrown at me over the years. I've heard connector a lot that I'm a connector. I like connecting people. Sometimes I introduce people, and years later, I have no idea that I am the person that connected them. I think I like being a catalyzer. I like to catalyze change.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: My book agent called me a. What is it? He called me, like a tour de force in English. It's. I don't know what the expression is in English.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: A force of nature. Like a force.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: Force of nature. That's more than one word, though. I don't know. I think I'm an educator. I like teaching, and I think I've learned a bunch of things, sometimes the hard way, and I want to share what I've learned. And so, yeah, an educator. That's what I'll call myself.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: I definitely think that is a perfect word for you. Do you have any final thoughts for today?
[00:38:33] Speaker A: The final thought, Andrew, is that after spending 15 years studying the power of empathy and experimenting with ways that I could be more empathic on a regular basis, I'm by no means a perfect example. I can still be rude. I can still be short tempered. I hit my limits, too. So I'm still a work in progress. So let's just, like, accept that. But I can say that with the effort that I've put in to be a more empathic person on purpose, I have become a much healthier and happier person. And I think if people understood that empathy with others is actually like a really big wing, the story that I shared earlier with the woman at the FedEx counter, if somebody was looking at my brain activity, they would see that my pleasure and reward centers were lit up, connected with her the same way that they would light up if I was eating a great piece of chocolate cake or even high on psychedelics. So I think it's really necessary to point out that as social beings, we want to feel connected with people. And when we empathize with people, it benefits us. And the world needs more empathy. Our workplaces need more empathy, and we need more empathy in our lives. So I would end on that.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: I love it. I want to say that I truly enjoyed this conversation. I've been wanting to have it for the longest time, and I've been wanting to have it with you. And I feel like this conversation went way better than I expected. So thank you very much much for coming on and for joining me today. It was an honor and a pleasure to meet you and to meet a fellow Montrealer probably would have crossed paths with back in the day, but for some reason we didn't meet. So we were just meant to meet today. So thank you very much for taking the time with me tonight.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: You're very welcome. So on behalf of myself and my guest, Anita, I would like to thank you all for listening. And until next time, be safe. And remember that if we all work together, we can accomplish it.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: You have been listening to let's be diverse with Andrew Stout. To stay up to date with future content, hit subscribe.
