Power Play

Empathy power

at a glance

• Empathy power derives from climbing into your audience's skin in order to understand their world.
• Empathy power rests on demonstrating caring by understanding other people, creating real connections and showing the courage to suggest solutions or offer options.
• Projection bias, imagining other people think like us, can create powerful distortions to our empathic response.
• Empathic power players are conscious of the private discourse (what people really think but leave unsaid) that is an undercurrent to any public discourse. They recognise that stepping into the private discourse, while challenging, turbocharges our empathy and influence.
• After the loss of AirAsia QZ8501 with 162 lives in December 2014, CEO Tony Fernandes immediately took off on the same flight path to be with the bereaved families. He continuously used social media to connect compassionately with them. His authentic, deeply empathic response at a traumatic time was widely praised.

Focus	Impact
External	Service
Attitude	Action
Courage	Change

Chapter 7 Empathy power … walk in my shoes

A posse of foreign journalists travelled with the Dalai Lama as he visited village after poverty-stricken village. In every village the people would come out and present the Dalai Lama with gifts — a handful of rice, an old book, whatever they had.

One of the journalists became angrier and angrier as he saw people who had practically nothing gifting what little they had, and the Dalai ...