Emotions, Empathy and Engagement
I said in an earlier piece that we make our decisions based on emotions and then use logic, information, data and other means to justify them. While I’ve received some push back on that assertion, the push back has been more to the point of how logic and emotions can best be combined for better decision making. I won’t argue that point. In fact I agree with it fully.
But I will argue the point as to how many people are using both logic and emotions for better decision making. Are you? Really? Honestly? Often?
There is little disagreement in the social media world today that content is king both in terms of creating engagement and for search engine optimization. And while I’m no psychologist, I’ve read enough to understand at least partially that engagement, or connecting, can be facilitated in a large part by displaying empathy toward another person. This is not sympathy and this is not patronization. This is truly feeling what the other person is feeling. This is truly identifying with the other person’s needs, wants, desires and frustrations.
Is telling someone who is experiencing difficulty to “suck it up” and get over whatever is bothering them a display of empathy? Or is it disdain and impatience? Is issuing a judgment that a person shouldn’t or wouldn’t feel the way they do if they didn’t have certain innate character flaws a display of empathy? Or is it arrogance and ignorance?
Wouldn’t you connect better with a person by saying that you hear them telling you what’s bothering them and that you can understand why it is bothering them? Wouldn’t you connect better, even if you don’t understand the situation in detail, by at least stating back to the person that you are hearing them say that they are upset and that you understand why that condition exists? These are the basic tenets of conflict avoidance and resolution and excellent customer service.
You can set the stage for excellent customer service, starting with excellent marketing messages to entice customers to try your product or service, by emphasizing that you do have empathy for their situation and that you are there to help them. Can you help them save money, get resolution, solve a problem or gain a need, want or perk? If so, tell them so in terms that will engage them.
You work hard at your job or business and you are good at almost all aspects of it. If there are a few aspects that frustrate you, perhaps I can be of service in alleviating those pains. I do understand what you’re going through from the marketing perspective, just as I know I go through similar anguish on the bookkeeping side of my business. I truly want to emphasize that I understand where you are coming from and want to engage with you for a mutually beneficial outcome so that we both grow our businesses and thus feel better.
Make sense? Let me know. I’m eager to hear from you.
Spot on Jon. There are some very good reasons why you are correct, otherwise known as the science of people.
We all believe in the very same good values: honesty, fairness, openness, industriousness, respect, courtesy, cooperation, perseverance, strength, and the like. And we all believe that their opposites are bad.
But we all have different standards for those good values developed from our experiences during our formative years. If I experienced little love in my family, I might have a standard of 2 for love on a scale of 1 to 10 and you having experienced a lot of love might have a standard of 8. If we view an event reflecting a standard of 5, you think it is not good at all and I think it quite good. If we view an event reflecting a standard of -3, I think is it quite bad and you think it is absolutely terrible and will probably become very emotional about it. A standard of +10 will bring tears to our eyes.
So our emotions are our gut level reactions to what we experience as judged by our value standards. Our gut tells us good from bad. In the workplace, if management fails to listen to us or fails to respond reasonably to what we say, this reflects great disrespect for us and we react accordingly. The same is true if management issues lots of order to us or fails to provide whatever information we want. Since all three of these reflect great disrespect, our responses will be quite emotional.
Telling us to suck it up judges our responses as being bad. Since we know we are good because we believe in good values, telling us we are bad causes us to become defensive and to totally reject the person who said that. The opposite approach of empathy shows respect for us as a person and creates a positive response from us.
Hope this helps, Ben Simonton
Leadership is a science and so is engagement
Thanks for the kind words and the amplifications, Ben. Appreciate both.