7 Systematic Methods to Develop Emotional Intelligence and Empathy
This is a very old blog post that comes from my first blog in 2013. Nostalgia made me put it back here.
Empathy, the ability to recognize someone else’s emotions, is one of the paths to understanding and bonding with others. Some have little, others a lot, but like many other things, you can train it and potentially balance difficult circumstances or amplify opportunities you had naturally seized.
Why Train Empathy?
This is a sound question. You are indeed right to question the application of voluntarily planned (almost strategized) actions on such a natural process (emotion). The aim in training empathy is not overcoming Nature, nor is it to prevent its effect. The aim is to develop a sense of inner emotional “understanding” to let Nature express itself in a richest, deepest way, with higher harmony (in other terms, for example engineering terms, clean up the noise from the signals).
Training empathy does not only mean phasing faster with others, or having sharpest reading skills, it also means being able to detect the amplitude of these interactions on yourself and understand your natural variations (in the day, in the year, with events, etc.). Learning empathy also means moderating emotions when needed, and finding balance between sharing them with utmost sincerity and mastering them for benevolent purposes.
Here are seven systematic methods to help you improve your empathy:
1. Identify Where You Feed on Emotions, and the Potential Patterns of Your Sources
Even if not all emotions are triggered by external means, we all have our sources of emotions, as much as we have sources of information. Whether you are a book reader, TV viewer, socialite, contemplative person, or parent of many, your mind feeds on emotions every day, at different levels.
First exercise: Identify where you get emotions from in your life, however diverse the sources may be. On the one hand, you will figure out how emotionally rich your life is; on the other, it will help you identify the most recurring emotions you experience, and the subsequent “emotional patterns” of your sources.
For example, if you are a horror-movie fan, and you watch one once a week, you might count fear or humor as a recurring emotion, and the pattern of the source would be “fear, humor, fear, humor…” for 90 minutes a week.
Questions to explore:
- What TV broadcasts are you watching on a regular basis?
- Is there a specific type of books you are fond of?
- Are there recurring character traits in people you prefer being with?
- What are the personalities of people you hang out with?
The resulting source/patterns list will probably (and fortunately) be long, and even though it seems complex to establish, if you do it step by step, patterns will emerge naturally to you. Then you’ll have the first step of “knowing your emotional surroundings” achieved.
2. Take Notes on the Variations
On top of knowing your emotional environment, you might be interested in clarifying your emotional timeline (which is probably related), through a day, or through a week, or through long periods of time. Our minds are good at tracking and remembering actions and situations, but not that good at tracking emotions.
If you ask yourself right now, at what time of which day you have felt the happiest this week, you’ll probably will not get the answer without relating it to a specific fact (that will provide you the information of time and date).
For most of us, we (fortunately) experience emotional variations throughout a single event, however short it might be - emotional change is way faster than situational change. For example, during the 5 minutes you’re waiting in line at the cashier, you might go through lots of memories and emotional states.
Practical approach: Do not start with the project of writing your whole day emotional track, but start with the past hour or the next hour while performing your usual activities. Ultimately, you’ll increase your awareness as much as you did for point 1. Even though recurring patterns could be less clear, habits could be identified throughout this exercise.
3. Slow Down and Meditate Away (“Empty Your Cup”)
If you were told to learn a language through vocabulary lists, you probably would not try to learn all the list in one shot. If you were told to eat something three times bigger than what you usually eat at maximum for one meal, you would not try to gulp it all down in one shot. Yet, the regulation that we instinctively apply to information or food is forgotten when it comes to emotions.
In a world where the frequency and strength of emotional stimuli is growing by the day, we might be “overconsuming emotions” by forgetting to let our minds rest between consumption.
Think of the range of effects an emotion can trigger on our body: heart rate, hormonal regulation, muscular contractions, altered senses… How could your body sustain heavy emotional loads and high variations without being totally tired at the end of the day? It cannot, and on top of that, our body intelligence will just numb the body response to emotional triggers after such tired situations, in order to regulate our energy regime.
The efficiency strategy: Once you identify the strengths of your patterns, learn to integrate emptiness moments, through slow meditation for example, not because “you ought to” or because you should always be living positive emotions, but because it could be a more efficient strategy to enjoy your life. By anticipating the natural numbing of pain and pleasures, you’ll feel emotions more intensively, and potentially increase the empathy effect you might get while with others.
4. Learn to Moderate Words (and Rationalization)
Explanation of jokes takes away a part of their fun, and words on top of an emotion can take away a part of its impact, by “systematizing it.” Even though this point might seem quite contradictory with the first two points, and even with the whole article, the aim here is for you to accept (if not yet accepted) that part of the experience cannot be reached through words, however beautiful or insightful their arrangement might be.
There are no words to describe the full feeling when you hold the hand of your significant one, or when you listen to your favorite music, or eat a meal cooked with love for you, or when you have religious faith in something. The furthest you can reach with words is poetry and science (which is already quite a lot), yet even the least sensitive of us all could easily find out moments in which words are limited.
The point here is not to remove all wording, naming and rationalization of what you feel, but be aware of not applying this layer of mind systematically, in other words “preventing the reflex,” in order to preserve the genuineness of some moments. Emotional training requires unlearning as much as learning, and once you unlearn to put words or system on top of someone’s feelings, you’ll improve your empathy with this person, in addition to avoidance of labeling or judgmental behaviors.
5. Accept the Whole Range of Emotions in Others and in You, Realize How You Usually React to It, and Realize the Relativity of Their Intensity
Perhaps the most difficult point to apply. If you are a benevolent friend, or lover, you will naturally drive your actions towards more positive feelings for your friend or lover. If you have the same definition of “negative” and “positive” as I do, you are not keen on extending negative feelings in time on purpose.
Although we are (almost) all averse to negative feelings, there is no empathy without accepting their existence in ourselves or in others. Jealousy, pride, anger, boredom, solitude, hatred are part of emotional life as much as their contraries. Moreover, embracing their existence is the first step into taming them, only then can you learn to really appreciate humility, quietness, excitement or love.
Without triggering negative feelings voluntarily on yourself or on others, develop awareness of your denial strategies and other mental barriers you set up (almost as reflexes sometimes) against it. For example, you might involuntarily have developed a mental routine which made you think of a sandbeach every time you felt stuck somewhere, to avoid the panic of claustrophobia. And then when you stumble on a claustrophobic person, you might despise their feelings because they do not have the same defense as you.
Yet, you have to accept fully how they feel, and realize how you escaped it yourself, in order to help them. Empathy is the emotional sharing tool that lets you help people with minor problems (for your own experience scale), like breaking a nail, as well as people with major problems (for your own experience scale). Even if your helping effort will rationally adjust to the size of the issue on your scale, do not forget that emotions are felt on a relative scale of the bearer.
This is why breaking a nail can be intensely depressing for some, while losing a limb can feel like nothing for another. Empathy will help you develop the strength of character of the latter, AND teach you to help both. There is no benevolence in neglecting pains of any scale.
6. Open the Channels
Without craving for attention, do not fear exposure. Without focusing on specific reading, develop awareness. As action: put yourself in situations where sharing emotions is possible (two ways) and highly probable, in order to learn from real reading and sharing.
For example, I personally avoid wearing sunglasses until I am alone or if it becomes absolutely necessary. Sunglasses are holes of empathy: by canceling opportunities of eye contact, you undermine the emotional signal you might give with your eyes (and eyebrows).
I try as much as possible to call instead of texting/emailing, and to meet instead of calling. As an office metaphor, I would recommend you to move from cubicle to open spaces, with keeping yourself some out of the noise moments (check point 3).
Try sharing or listening a bit more to people with whom you think no emotional bond exists (and you’ll find out it does). It does not involve taking more time, or changing fundamentally your relationships, but just increased awareness and increased self-allowance for sharing.
Empathy training practices natural reading of emotions in their sheer form - do not jump into a place with expectations on emotions, otherwise you will only read what you want and distort the richness of your experience.
7. Find Activities to Express Yourself
Emotional expression is not always visual - everything from your vocal pattern to the thrills of fear on your back and the enjoyment of music is about emotions. To explore all these paths and enrich the range of emotions you can go into, you can try to express how you feel through specific (often artistic, but not exclusively) activities.
Beyond words and all rationalized articles like this one, activities in which you can express yourself are among the most effective ways to develop your empathy. This is more salient in activities where several people perform the same form, partition, or recipe, and in which the resulting feeling is different from one performer to another, even though the “input” is the same.
Whether through music, writing, drawing, cooking, sports, or any form of creative expression, these activities allow you to:
- Experience the full spectrum of emotions in a safe context
- Understand how the same stimulus can create different emotional responses
- Develop sensitivity to subtle emotional variations
- Practice authentic emotional expression without social pressure
The Engineering Approach to Emotional Intelligence
As mentioned in the introduction, training empathy is like “cleaning up the noise from the signals.” By systematically working through these seven methods, you develop a more refined emotional processing system that can:
- Distinguish between your emotions and others’ emotions
- Recognize patterns in emotional responses
- Regulate emotional intensity for optimal functioning
- Express emotions authentically while maintaining social effectiveness
- Help others navigate their emotional experiences
The goal is not to become emotionally perfect, but to develop a richer, more nuanced understanding of the emotional landscape both within yourself and in your interactions with others.
Remember: empathy is not just about reading emotions correctly - it’s about creating space for authentic emotional connection while maintaining your own emotional well-being.
And as usual: Have a smiling day!