A deep dive into empathy
I’m taking part in an online training session with EmpathyLab on Nov 4th and I’d love you to join us! It’s all about empathy and relationships and is aimed at teachers or others working with young people of primary and secondary school age. You’ll get great tips for how to embed empathy-focused reading into Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PHSE) and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE).
What do I know and why me?
I think we all vaguely agree that empathy is important. That it’s a “good thing”. Even the book Against Empathy by Paul Bloom is not against empathy, just against the fluffy blanket of waffle that often surrounds it and hides empathy’s true power. In fact, the clue is in that book’s subtitle: The Case for Rational Compassion.
Empathy - the rational, robust, insightful, empowering, practical, life-improving variation of it - is something I’ve long been interested in and written about. (I gathered some of my writings here.) A few years ago I did a counselling diploma and what we are taught in that is known as advanced empathy. And I’ve been a supporter of the organisation EmpathyLab ever since it started. During Covid, I gave an online talk to the staff at Walker Books, unpicking some myths and diving deep into the psychology of empathy.
Crucially, empathy is a skill that is a) useful and b) teachable. We get better at it when we practise - but we need to practise is correctly. Unfortunately, too many people are selectively empathetic: they empathise only with people who have the same views as them. That’s not useful - in fact, it’s self-destructive - and practising it only improves that selective empathy and takes you further away from real empathy. Real empathy allows you to walk in other people’s shoes, not just your own.
Empathy is useful because it allows us to work with, live with and get on better with the people around us. It allows us to see others from wider and wiser perspectives and to build more effective interactions with and reactions to the other people that we come across. It allows us to understand ourselves better, too. It gives us a rational framework within which to navigate our world and it allows us confidently to step outside our comfort zones and see what is out there and how we might affect it.
So, would you like to join me and the team at EmpathyLab while we look at empathy and relationships? Book for the webinar on Nov 4th 4-5.30pm.
Here’s what EmpathyLab says about this webinar:
This course takes empathy-rich books and shows you how to use them to develop children’s understanding of relationships and how to navigate the emotions that come with them. It’s suitable for anyone working with primary or secondary age children’s especially teachers and will support the delivery of key themes in the RSE curriculum and personal, social and wellbeing education
The course focuses on books about positive relationships (including with friends) families of all kinds, and respecting difference and diversity.
You will come away with:
– An understanding of the science of empathy and how books build it
– An understanding of how empathy book-talking can build relationships
– Ideas for linking in with the relationships theme in November’s Empathy Action Month.
Join us on November 4th! Booking here. I’d love to see you. Personally, I’m looking forward not just to sharing my thoughts from a psychology/brain perspective but also to learning about lots of new book recommendations for young people.
