Be Empathic
Resources to help you be empathic.
Books
Indi Young
Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.
Roman Krznaric
Krznaric presents the six life-enhancing habits of highly empathic people, whose skills enable them to connect with others in extraordinary ways – making themselves, and the world, more truly fulfilled..
Jon Kolko
Kolko makes the point that empathy is needed to deeply understand customer needs and feelings, and this understanding must be reflected in the product. He shows how leading companies use a design process of storytelling and iteration that evokes positive emotions, changes behavior, and creates deep engagement.
Dev Patnaik
Patnaik shows how organizations prosper when they tap into empathy. When people inside a company develop a shared sense of what's going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. People are "Wired to Care," and many of the world's best organizations are, too.
Articles
This NY Times guide describes steps people can take to acknowledge their biases and move beyond their own worldviews to try to understand those held by other people, and develop empathy.
Roman Krznaric's six habits to make empathy an attitude and a part of our daily lives, and thus improve the lives of everyone around us.
This article describes three ways you can actively practice empathy in your daily life. This is part two of a two part series on empathy, also read part 1.
For companies to truly win fans and motivate employees, "empathy" has to be more than a word. It needs to be translated into specific action. Read about the author's concept of Human OS.
Media & Interactive
Daniel Goleman reveals the three types of empathy, and how they make up the recipe for forming strong, lasting relationships (2 1/2 mins).
This quiz is from Project Implicit, a nonprofit started by researchers at Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia.
This 5-minute quiz calculates your “American dream score,” which takes into account the factors that were working in your favor and those you had to overcome to get where you are today. I scored a 67/100 - how about you?