Empathy is an innate trait, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be practiced and strengthened. In this workshop, we’ll build a picture of what empathy is, what it looks like, and how to practice it in your day to day life. Empathetic communication can help you have more meaningful and productive conversations by allowing you to build strong relationships, and build psychological safety. It will also bring greater self-awareness as you’ll learn to be empathetic to yourself, acknowledging and accepting your emotions, and seeing how they are affecting your communication.

We’ll cover how to pick up on body language, and verbal emotive language, and how to dig underneath (when appropriate) to see how these emotions are affecting conversations and decisions. Practising active listening will help us show empathy but also improve our ability to pick up on details and nuances, and learning to reflect those accurately will help gain clarification where needed.

We’ll cover active listening, reflecting and paraphrasing to show empathy, and using empathy to ask clarifying questions. We’ll also cover grounding work, to keep ourselves safe as we explore empathy with others.

Key takeaways:

• What empathy is and what it’s not
• How to show empathy in conversations
• How to use empathy in communication to improve how meaningful and useful these conversations are