I want to live in a World
where it’s
C H R I S T M A S
m o s t
WHEN IT ISN’T
where
PEACE ON EARTH
isn’t a dream
where
GOODWILL
is standard
where
PRESENTS
aren’t so much given
as GIVEN
where
my Best
becomes your BETTER
where
words don’t describe
but our ACTIONS do
where
SILENT NIGHT
shouts
what a heart beats
and a mouth can’t begin to whisper
where
______________
we fill in all of the blanks
where
a forever
is lived in a moment
that needs no years
or eternity
where
(oh where)
it all begins in me
but quickly
spreads infectiously to
o t h e r s
(continuously)
EMPATHY, STAT!

QUESTION:
IF WE ALL NEED IT
IF WE ALL WANT IT
IF WE ALL POSSESS IT
WHY
WHY
WHY
is there a shortage of
E M P A T H Y
? ? ?
The World is in need of so very much
right now
and we may well find out
that pandemics
vaccines
boosters
and interventions
come and go
but
e m p a t h y
is still in need
of being
g i v e n
r e c e i v e d

For a More Empathic World,
People Have to Choose Empathy. . .
Can it be
that simple. . . ?
Most people know how to feel others’ pain, But they have to be motivated to do it. . .
ELIZABETH SVOBODA a freelance journalist for GREATER GOO, took a deeper look into this EMPATHY phenomena that hopefully, in just a blog post can help us all be a little bit better Caring Catalyst’s JUST BECAUSE!
In the late 1990s, Najah Bazzy, a nurse in Dearborn, Michigan, made a house call to an Iraqi refugee family to check on their premature baby. When she arrived, she was shocked by how barren their home looked. The family had almost nothing: no stove, no fridge. The adults slept on the carpet. The baby—who’d gone home on a ventilator—was in a laundry basket, wrapped up in a towel.

Viscerally feeling the family’s hardship, Bazzy swung into action. She collected her relatives’ extra appliances and household goods and dropped them off that same day. But the impact of her house call lingered much longer. As Bazzy reflected on the widespread poverty in her city, she promised herself she’d work to spare other families the pain she’d witnessed.
We tend to think about empathy as an automatic response, like a parachute that deploys when we see someone in distress. But a new study suggests that while most of us have the capacity to feel other people’s pain, we are more inclined to exercise that capacity when we have the desire to do so, as Bazzy did.
That means focusing on this desire—our motivation to understand other people’s emotions and perspectives—could be an important way to awaken our own empathy and promote a more empathic society.
The empathy reflex
Empathy sometimes feels as instinctive and immediate as pulling your hand back from a hot stove. “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall on the leg or arm of another person,” philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1790, “we naturally shrink back our own leg or our own arm.” This can seem like a very primal phenomenon. After all, when a child starts crying, others as young as one or two may join in.
But while empathy can activate in hair-trigger fashion, this activation is by no means guaranteed. Your response to a hungry person crouched on the sidewalk, or to a struggling refugee family, depends on a number of factors: What is your own past history? What does the person in need look like? Who else is with you, and how are they reacting to what they see?
In attempting to help people grow their empathy, past empathy training programs have tended to gloss over such situational factors. Instead, they’ve focused on strengthening people’s emotional acumen by teaching skills like “perspective taking”—training students to see things from someone else’s point of view—or how to pick up on others’ emotions. However, follow-up studies of these programs sometimes show that their impact fades over time.
“The idea that all empathy interventions need to bolster skills is an oversight,” says Harvard University psychologist Erika Weisz. “Most people already have those skills.”
But she’s noticed that people choose not to use them in certain situations. A Boston Red Sox fan might be capable of empathizing with a New York Yankees jersey-wearer, but in the midst of a three-run Red Sox streak, the Bostonian might not feel inclined to share in the New Yorker’s anguish.
In their new study, Weisz and her colleagues focused on instilling empathy by boosting people’s motivation to identify with others. The results were striking: When researchers fueled students’ desire to empathize, the students were more accurate at pinpointing what others were feeling two months later. Some of them also reported making more close friends.
Amping up motivation
Weisz and her team, including Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki, recruited college freshmen, who naturally have their antennae perked to the social nuances of their environment. “When students get to campus, they have this huge spike in openness to experience,” Weisz says. “We were in a good position to see how motivation works in the wild.”
The team tested three different ways to increase students’ motivation to empathize with others. In one study, participants read a letter that was allegedly from a freshman having a hard time adjusting to high school. They were then advised to write back and tell the freshman that they could work on building up their empathy—and that doing so would help them connect with their classmates.
This setup encouraged letter-writers to embrace the concept that empathy can be strengthened, Weisz explains. “When we ask a participant to endorse a statement to another person, they tend to endorse those beliefs themselves.” That, in turn, could boost their motivation to brush up on their empathy, because they believe their efforts will pay off.
In another study, the researchers gave students reading material that promoted empathy as a social norm, including testimonials from other students about the importance of empathy in their lives. Participants then wrote letters to high school freshmen that stressed how empathy was normal, promoted, and expected in their community. A third group of students, the “combined” group, took part in an activity that blended elements of the first two exercises, and a control group simply wrote letters addressing students’ academic challenges.
The results supported Weisz’s hunch that ratcheting up people’s motivation would strengthen their empathy. Participants in each study showed higher accuracy when asked to describe what people who spoke in a video were feeling, compared to the control group. These effects were “sticky,” as Weisz puts it, lasting for at least eight weeks after the studies ended.
Members of the combined group also reported making more close friends at college, possibly due to their empathic savvy—something Weisz says may set them up for success later in life. “Having that level of social integration is really important. It predicts all sorts of outcomes for well-being,” she says.
How desire drives empathy
Getting motivated to feel someone’s pain doesn’t necessarily involve thinking to yourself, “My friends understand what this person is feeling, so I’ll try to do so,” or “I can strengthen my own empathy, so I definitely should.” Like other kinds of influence, motivation often operates on an unconscious level, shaping our priorities in profound ways over time.
Bazzy’s life trajectory illustrates how this can work. Her hometown of Dearborn, near Detroit, was rich with refugees from different countries who were always ready to help one another. “Neighbors sat on the front porch and they shared food. Children would go from house to house,” Bazzy told CNN’s Kathleen Toner. “And just the amount of care that people had for each other—this is where I learned to love my neighbor.”
Like the people in Weisz’s study, Bazzy absorbed social norms that put a high value on empathy, motivating her to do the same. Other research suggests that social influences, especially early ones, can seamlessly promote this kind of value structure. In a seminal study of Holocaust rescuers, those who saved people from the Nazis often had compassionate role models within their families, which helped awaken their desire to serve others.
When the time was right, that deep-rooted motivation inspired Bazzy to serve her community on a larger scale. Helping the struggling refugee family and their premature baby reminded Bazzy of just how many people were in similar straits, and in 2004, she formally established a nonprofit called Zaman International to serve families in poverty all over metro Detroit. To date, Zaman has delivered essentials like furniture, food, and job training to over 250,000 people.
How to inspire empathy
Having demonstrated that motivation can influence empathy, Weisz, Zaki, and their colleagues are thinking about how this finding could improve empathy training programs. One of the keys, Weisz says, will be for program designers to take participants’ unique needs and desires into account. An effective workplace empathy course will probably look quite different from one designed for college students; what works will depend on what drives people’s motivations in each case.
If young employees at a startup are anxious to please their bosses, those bosses could focus on sending the clear message—through actions as well as words—that they value empathy in the workers they oversee. If a group of doctors pride themselves on being the best at what they do, facilitators could point out that patients with empathic doctors have better health, which reflects well on the doctors. And because middle schoolers are so attuned to their friends’ choices, Weisz has experimented with showing seventh-graders videos of their peers talking about the benefits of empathy.
“This approach holds promise to complement skill-building and create a menu of empathy-enhancing options that are tailored to people’s needs,” says Zaki.
Weisz’s study results also lend insight into how we can motivate our own empathy in various contexts, from volunteering to rescuing someone in dire straits. When you surround yourself with others who consider empathy a cardinal virtue, that social norm will likely start to rub off on you, as it did on the students in Weisz’s trials. And when you believe you can hone your empathic savvy through effort—a “growth mindset” approach to empathy—you’ll be more inclined to do it.
“People are excited and invested to increase their empathy if they think they can,” Weisz says. “A lot of people think of empathy as a static trait. Targeting motivations imparts lasting changes.”

TRUE OR FALSE
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
The only way to truly answer this
un-mathematical equation
is to
SHOW YOUR WORK
. . .NOW
is no time to talk of
e m p a t h y
IT IS TIME
to be
EMPATHY
(STAT)
F R I T T E R I N G
We all do it
. . .in fact,
it may be the one thing that every single one of us are
E X P E R T S:
F R I T T E R I N G
SOMETIMES BEING ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE
MEANS BEING NOTHING
TO NO ONE. . .
We are all so busy
DOING THE BUSY
that we let the
PRECIOUS
slip us by
without much noticing it
. . .THE EXTRA of the o r d i n a r y
and then much to late
with much less than an
exhausted sigh
it’s ALL gone. . .
WE WISH FOR MUCH
but seldom for
the REALIZATION OF NOW
the RIGHT HERE
the MOMENT
the NOW
NOT TODAY
NOT EVER
as long as you ask often:
WELL. . .
What answer you
Never make a
QUESTION
what you can have as a
LIFE STYLE STATEMENT
FRITTER ON
(no more)
BUG ME
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
There is no
NATIONAL BUG ME DAY
and maybe there’ll never be
such a day
but today
right now
right here
I wanted to invite
or no pun
i n t e n d e d
PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR
to do one simple thing:
CHECK IN WITH THAT PERSON
WHO MATTERS TO YOU
BUG’EM
. . .One you haven’t talked to in a while
BUG’EM
YOU KNOW WHO I’M TALKING ABOUT
B U Z Z
B U Z Z
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
GO BUG SOMEONE TODAY
Make someOne feel like it’s their
NATIONAL HOLIDAY
(. . .yeah, it’s that simple)
T E N D E R N E S S
In this video, Trui Snyman reminds us that carving out a little solitude in a fast-paced world can make a world of difference to our health and wellbeing. She encourages us to be more gentle, not only with others, but with ourselves too.
What feelings/thoughts/questions surface for you in viewing Trui’s story?
How does Trui’s story move you?
Are you too busy going nowhere and feeling like you’re getting there?
What brings out your TENDERNESS?
Is being a Caring Catalyst a weakness?
Are some of the things that popped through my mind when I was watching this. . .
F U N N Y
When I read the video transcript, I had a different feeling. . .
Y O U
Video Transcript
“I read somewhere that worry is like sitting in a rocking chair. It keeps you busy but it gets you nowhere.
If you asked me six years ago if I was happy or if I wanted to see tomorrow or if I wanted to see next year I would have said, no. That’s a really terrible place to be. I didn’t even smile. Because life was too busy, that’s why.
We race so quickly through life that we’re blind to it, we’re deaf to it, we’re numb to it. We’ve become desensitized because we are in too much of a hurry. Did I notice the phases of the moon? Did I notice whether it was winter, summer, autumn, or spring? There was no time for that.
Should we not rather look at life through the eyes of a child? There is something new to discover, every day. What feeds your soul? If small things don’t feed your soul, what will?
People are hard, hard, hard. People are hard on each other, people are hard on themselves. Tenderness… We could all do with more tenderness. If you feel you need ten minutes to yourself just to sit and relax, why not. We have the right to invest in ourselves. Half an hour, just half an hour each day. Maybe you use that half hour to walk outside. Whether you shut yourself in your bedroom and read a book or you lie and soak in an herbal bath, that time is just for you. Forget the emails, forget the telephone.
My quality of life and my health have improved, just by taking things a little more slowly. Do yourself a favor and be a little more gentle with yourself. So yes, life is actually beautiful. But I’m still learning. Starting to learn…to be more gentle with myself.”
RUNNING INTO TROUBLE
ANY VOLUNTEERS. . . ?
Some never ask
FOR WHAT
before they put their hands up
or just flat-out-full-sprint
RUN INTO A BURNING HOUSE
RUN TOWARDS THE TROUBLE
. . .Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
SOME DO NOT
S O:
Is Avoiding Other People’s Suffering Good for Your Mental Health?
An international study finds that people who turn away from compassion have felt more depressed and anxious during the COVID-19 pandemic
Elizabeth Svoboda is a writer in San Jose, CA, and a regular contributor to Greater Good. She is the author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness. Her newest book, for kids, is The Life Heroic. Elizabeth took a closer look at the WOULD YOU RUN TOWARDS TROUBLE or possibly suffer the consequences of playing it safe?
As COVID-19 ricocheted around the globe, millions of us sought shelter in retreat. Not only were we quarantining at home, we were putting up internal walls against the suffering we saw in the world. For more than a year, it’s been easy to justify an inward focus rather than an outward one.

But a new study suggests that retreating from compassion in the name of safety may not protect us as we hope. Shutting off our compassionate response during the pandemic may threaten our mental health, the research team found, and fray the social connections that sustain our well-being.
This research shows the corrosive effect of suppressing our instinct to connect with others, says Leah Weiss, a founding faculty member of Stanford University’s compassion cultivation training program.
“When we get into a fear-based, anxiety-driven perspective, we’re going to withdraw and isolate. When we withdraw and isolate, we have even more anxiety, so it leads to a negative loop,” Weiss says. “The whole thing ramps us up, and then our resilience, our resources go down.”
How retreating from compassion can backfire
To explore how attitudes toward compassion were affecting people’s well-being during the pandemic, University of Coimbra psychologist Marcela Matos and her team recruited more than 4,000 people from 21 countries, including Brazil, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. All of the participants completed an online survey in spring 2020 that asked them to describe their beliefs about compassion, as well as their psychological state and the strength of their social connections.
The team was particularly interested in the fear of compassion, which comes in a number of different forms, Matos says. Some people are afraid that responding compassionately will trigger emotions that overwhelm them, threatening to suck them under. Others believe that showing compassion is tantamount to showing weakness, or that those around them do not deserve compassion.
When people hold these kinds of beliefs, they may consciously or unconsciously block their own compassionate response, failing to notice other people’s suffering or to help them when they’re in crisis. “In a way, they have an inhibitor that prevents this compassion motivation from being turned on or acted on,” Matos says.
When the team analyzed the survey responses, they found that participants who expressed a fear of showing compassion for themselves or others were likely to feel more depressed, anxious, and stressed out during the pandemic. Compassion fears also seemed to magnify the danger people felt from COVID-19: While the threat of the virus brought on some psychological distress, this distress was worse in those who feared showing or receiving compassion.
“What is really key here is that this risk effect—this magnifying effect of fears of compassion—was universal,” says Matos. “They were more vulnerable to the negative effect that feeling threatened by the virus had on their mental health.” People with a fear of compassion also reported feeling less connected to others.
Matos’s findings are consistent with earlier research showing the damaging effects of isolation and withdrawal on mental health, experts say. “Social isolation is associated with not just loneliness, anxiety, and depression, but also an increased risk of hypertension, inflammation, cognitive decline, and vulnerability to addictions,” says Australian psychologist Hugh Mackay, author of The Kindness Revolution. “The need to restore social cohesion is our greatest societal challenge.”
Reversing the downward spiral of isolation
On the flip side, people who choose compassion during stressful situations seem to have a more durable sense of well-being. Training programs that boost people’s compassionate response appear to reduce their fear of compassion during the pandemic, based on preliminary results from another of Matos’s studies. Other studies suggest that compassion training promotes activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which instills calm and helps us recover from stress.
“Compassion is this motivation toward being attentive and sensitive to suffering,” Matos says. “The activation of this motivation is linked to very important physiological regulators of our own well-being.”
People struggling with pandemic mental health issues can also seek out compassion-focused therapy (CFT), which helps clients cultivate compassion so they can heal from trauma and develop a clear sense of purpose. In CFT sessions, therapists remind clients of their capacity for compassion, leading them in exercises like remembering times when they cared for others or helped them through difficult periods.
In addition, skilled therapists can help people escape the isolation trap by helping them get comfortable with different ways of showing compassion and connectedness. “In the context of COVID,” Weiss says, “the more afraid we get of physical proximity, maybe the way to think about it is, ‘Well, what ways can you engage virtually?’ Or, can you set up an environment where there’s cushions that you’ve positioned for yourself, for your children, at a distance that you know is fine? Because the more you isolate, the less resilient you will ultimately be.”
On the civic and organizational levels, pandemic-control messages that stress protecting the whole community—for example, “Help save our most vulnerable. Together, we can stop the coronavirus” as opposed to “The coronavirus is coming for you”—are highly effective at motivating people to comply with health measures to stop COVID-19, a new study shows. Besides slowing the virus’s spread, Matos says, such compassionate, community-focused messaging encourages people to look out for others in ways that benefit everyone involved.
Once people realize that compassion can benefit them in tough times as much as it benefits others, that insight can motivate them to pull out of an isolation spiral. “We’re hardwired for social connection, for community, and for kindness and compassion, because those are the pathways to social harmony and cooperation,” Mackay says. “If you can find the resources to address the needs of other people, your own anxieties tend to melt away.”
When I began as a Hospice Chaplain on HALLOWEEN, October 31, 1994, I couldn’t finish the first day of orientation what I have seen every day of work since then:
COMPASSION MATTERS
I went into Hospice
wide-eyed
and I’ve never been tempted to
b l i n k
which means
I’ve not only seen
amazing people running into the burning building
while the World seems to be running the other way
but by running towards the trouble
it has made all the difference
in my life
and the lives of those
who have forever been
i n t e r w o v e n
into the very fabric of my life
. . .My Definition of
A CARING CATALYST
isn’t who I am
IT IS
the countless
House Keepers
Home Health Aides
Security Guards
Nurses
Doctors
Social Workers
Chaplains
Music and Art Therapists
Bereavement Coordinators
Team Leaders
Administrators
who have literally
in full vivid color
shown
companioned me
in running into the
burning house
t o g e t h e r
SNICKERED
Y U M S
A simple SNICKERS Candy Bar
in the supermarket
is worth about $0.50 on sale. . .
The same bottle in a bar costs $1 in a vending machineIn an airport gift shop or hotel it can be worth up to $3 or maybe even more. . .
The SNICKERS bar is the same, the only thing that changes is the
P L A C E
Each place gives a different value to the same product.
When you feel like you are worth nothing
and everyone around you belittles you,
CHANGE PLACES
DO NOT
stay there. . .
Have the courage to change places
and go to a place
where you are given
the value you deserve. . .
Surround yourself
with people who really appreciate
YOUR WORTH. . .
Don’t settle for less!
and ABRACADABRA
You will find
YOUR MORE
will add to Some One Else’s
L E S S. . .Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. . .
SNICKER
SNICKER
EMPATHY IT UP
WITH A LITTLE HELP
What would you think if I sang out of tune
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song
And I’ll try not to sing out of key
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm gonna try with a little help from my friends
What do I do when my love is away?
(Does it worry you to be alone?)
How do I feel by the end of the day?
(Are you sad because you’re on your own?)
No I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm gonna try with a little help from my friends
(Do you need anybody?)
I need somebody to love
(Could it be anybody?)
I want somebody to love
(Would you believe in a love at first sight?)
Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time
(What do you see when you turn out the light?)
I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm I get high with a little help from my friends
Oh I’m gonna try with a little help from my friends
(Do you need anybody?)
I just need someone to love
(Could it be anybody?)
I want somebody to love
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm gonna try with a little help from my friends
Oh I get high with a little help from my friends
Yes I get by with a little help from my friends
With a little help from my friends
This song by the Beatles, written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon is a classic and on several of my personal playlists, not just because I love the tune, not just because I love the lyrics or even the message, so much as the truth that I’m better for having OTHERS in my life. . .
uhhhhhhhh, WE ALL DO
To get through life, we all need to ask for
help — here’s how NOT to do it
Social psychologist Heidi Grant shares 4 common ways that we inadvertently make things weird for other people when we request their assistance. Read this before your next ask.
Asking for help isn’t just about what you say and do; it’s also about what you don’t say and do. In her research, she found there are specific things you can say that can really backfire on you. Heidi shares here are 4 of the most common ways that well-intentioned people screw up and make things weird for their helper when they’re asking for help.
Wrong way #1: Emphasizing how much the other person will enjoy helping
“You’re going to love it! It will be so much fun!” One of my collaborators has a friend who has a habit of phrasing requests this way. “Any chance you could help me repaint the living room? We can totally drink beers and catch up! Girl time!” she might say.
Or, “Hey, could you pick me up at the auto mechanic? I haven’t seen you in ages! Road trip!” It’s a testament to the strength of their friendship that it survives this kind of request.
Don’t ever try to explicitly convince someone that they’ll find helping you rewarding. While it’s true helping makes people happy, reminding them generally drains their joy out of helping. First, it reeks of control, undermining their autonomy. Second, it’s presumptive as hell. Don’t tell them how they’re going to feel — that’s for them to decide.
It’s OK for you to point out the benefits of helping if you can be subtle. But you must be careful not to pile it on and mix egotistic reasons with altruistic reasons, because this makes your manipulation noticeable.
In one study, just under 1,000 alumni who had never donated to their college were contacted by fund-raisers via email. They received one of three versions of the appeal: (1) egotistic: “Alumni report that giving makes them feel good”; (2) altruistic: “Giving is your chance to make a difference in the lives of students, faculty, and staff,” and (3) a combined appeal. Researchers found both the egotistic and altruistic appeals were equally effective, but the combined appeal? It saw donation rates cut in half.
Wrong way # 2: Portraying the help you need as a tiny, insignificant favor
One common tactic is to portray the help we need as a piddling, negligible, barely there favor. So, we might emphasize the lack of inconvenience, as in, “Could you drop these contracts off at the client’s? It’s practically on your way home.” Or, we might stress how little time it will take: “Would you add these updates to the database? It won’t take you more than five minutes.”
The thing is, by minimizing our request, we also minimize the other person’s help — and minimize any warm feelings helping might have generated in them. There’s also the risk that we’ve miscalculated the size of our favor, especially if the person does work we don’t fully understand. For instance, Heidi’s book editor occasionally gets an email from an old friend asking her to take a look at his writing. It’s usually phrased as a small request, such as, “I think it’s pretty clean; maybe just give it a quick proofread? It shouldn’t take you very long!” Then, when she opens the attachment, the item is invariably a 6,000-word academic article. Oh, except for the time it was an entire book.
If you’ve been guilty of making this kind of ask, I don’t think it’s because you’re selfish. You’re just clueless. You have no idea of the hours of work you’re asking. But what you’re inadvertently doing is conveying that you think the work the other person does is easy, quick, trivial and not very taxing. And that’s not a great way to enlist help.
Chances are, you work every day with people whose duties you don’t understand that all, whether it’s IT, HR, compliance, sales or marketing. If you don’t quite get what goes into another person’s job, do not presume it won’t take them very long the next time you ask them for help.
Wrong way # 3: Reminding people that they owe you
“Remember when I took over that really tough client of yours?”
“Remember the time I babysat your screaming child?”
“Remember how you always used to forget your house key, and I always had to come home and let you in?”
Because asking for help makes us feel icky, we might be tempted to remind the potential helper how we’ve assisted them in the past. This, too, is fraught with awkwardness. For example, when Heidi’s book editor received that book in her inbox, she wanted to say no. But, for all the reasons that saying “no” is painful, she felt she couldn’t do that — not completely.
So, she wrote back, explained politely that he was asking her to do about 40 hours of work, and asked if there was one chapter he was particularly worried about. When he replied, he reminded her that he’d edited her writing back when she was a columnist. In theory, this might make sense. He had done her a favor and they were old friends, so she should do him one in return, right? Hmmmmmmmmmm. . .
While reciprocity does make people more likely to say “yes” to an ask, it also makes us feel controlled, which takes all the fun out of helping. Reciprocity works best when the acts of help are roughly equal. In this case, editing a few 500-word columns and editing a 50,000-word historical treatise are not equivalent. In addition, they should also be proximate in time — unless someone has done you a truly massive favor such as saving your life, they won’t feel they owe you anything 10 years down the line.
When you’re calling in a favor, you should try to tap into one of the specific types of reciprocity that psychologists have identified: personal, relational or collective. For example, Heidi’s editor is glad to edit for her neighbor, a carpenter who writes how-to articles for magazines, because they’ve helped her with house projects on numerous occasions. That’s an example of personal reciprocity; the exchange is a fairly clear trade. She’s also happy to edit her husband’s essays on fly-fishing (relational reciprocity) and proofread the grad-school application of her cousin’s boyfriend even though she doesn’t know him well (collective reciprocity).
The bottom line on reciprocity is this: If you have to remind someone they owe you one, chances are they don’t feel that they do. Reminding them that they owe you a favor makes the other person feel as if you’re trying to control them — which, let’s be honest, you are. It’s not particularly generous, and it doesn’t create good feeling. It’s like going out for pizza with a friend, only to be told you should pay more since you ate two extra slices. It makes the other person feel as if you’re keeping a scorecard, and scorekeeping is fundamentally bad for relationships.
Wrong way # 4: Talking about how much their help will benefit you
We all know we need to express gratitude and appreciation for other people’s help. Yet many of us often make a critical mistake when doing this: We focus on how we feel — how happy we are, how we have benefited from the help — rather than focusing on the benefactor.
Researchers Sara Algoe, Laura Kurtz and Nicole Hilaire at the University of North Carolina distinguished between two types of gratitude expressions: “other-praising,” acknowledging and validating the character or abilities of the giver (i.e., their positive identity), and “self-benefit,” describing how the receiver is better off for having been given help.
In one study, they observed couples expressing gratitude to one another for something their partner had recently done for them. Their expressions were coded as other-praising or self-benefit. Examples of expressions included:
Other-praising
“You’re so responsible …”
“You go out of your way …”
“I feel like you’re really good at that.”
Self-benefit
“It let me relax.”
“It gave me bragging rights at work.”
“It makes me happy.”
The benefactors rated how responsive they felt the gratitude giver had been, how happy they felt, and how loving they felt toward their partner. The researchers found that other-praising gratitude was strongly related to perceptions of responsiveness, positive emotions, and loving; self-benefit gratitude was not.
This is worth thinking about, because most of us get gratitude wrong. Human beings are, more often than not, egocentric by nature. We have a tendency to talk about ourselves, even when we should be thinking and talking about others. Naturally, when we get high-quality support, we want to talk about how it made us feel. And we assume it’s what the helper wants to hear, that they were helping to make us happy so they want to hear how happy we are. Well, this assumption isn’t quite right.
Yes, your helper wants you to be happy, but the motivation to be helpful is intimately tied to your helper’s identity and self-esteem. We help because we want to be good people — to live up to our goals and values and to be admired. Helpers want to see themselves positively, which can be difficult for them to do when you won’t stop talking about you. You’re making it all about you, and it should be about them.
(Excerpted with permission from the book Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You by Heidi Grant. Published by Harvard Business Review Press. Copyright © 2018 by Heidi Grant.)
I have a very hard time
G E T T I N G
R E C E I V I N G
ASKING FOR HELP
but
I am at my best
my most blessed
when I am severely benefitted
c o m p l i m e n t e d
by ANOTHER
who can do for me
what I can’t or won’t do
for myself
which lets me know
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm gonna try with a little help from my friends
Oh I get high with a little help from my friends
Yes I get by with a little help from my friends
With a little help from my friends. . .
Let me hand it to you,
F R I E N D
THE HUMAN LIBRARY
In Denmark, there are libraries where you can borrow a person instead of a book to listen to their life story for 30 minutes. The aim is to fight against prejudices. Each person has a title – “unemployed”, “refugee”, “bipolar”, etc. – but by listening to their story, you realize how much you shouldn’t “judge a book by its cover”. This innovative and brilliant project is active in more than 50 countries. It’s called “The Human Library”.
When I heard of THE HUMAN LIBRARY one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was, “I WANT TO GO THERE” quickly followed by “I WANT TO START ONE” and as I let those two thoughts dance wildly with each other, another tune began to play, a much slower, sweeter melody, familiar but still unheard:
WE LIVE DAILY IN
THE HUMAN LIBRARY
I can’t remember the last time I have lived a day without some kind of human interaction; as a hospice chaplain, a minister, a husband, a dad, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle, an in-law and as a frequent visitor to STARBUCKS, I have had countless encounters with so many people on any given day, and that’s just IN PERSON, not counting the texting, emailing, and messaging I do throughout the day; The question, isn’t WHEN HAVE I EVER BEEN TO THE HUMAN LIBRARY so much as WHEN HAVE I EVER BEEN ABSENT FROM THE HUMAN LIBRARY. . .
The biggest questions are:
AM I MAKING USE OF IT. . .
AM I LITERALLY BORROWING AS WELL AS GIVING. . .
AM I DOING MORE LISTENING/LEARNING. . .
AM I DOING MORE TALKING/TEACHING. . .
AM I DRIVING IDLY PAST THE HUMAN LIBRARY. . .
AM I PULLING INTO THE PARKING LOT OFTEN
(EARLY AND STAYING LATE). . .
THE HUMAN LIBRARY
. . .now that’s a Levy we can all get behind and vote
. . .S U P P O R T
WILL YOU
. . .This is one Library
where you don’t have to be
Q U I E T
JOIN ME
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