Empathize The term "Empathize", according to Merriam-Webster, dates back to circa 1921. To Empathize is to feel or experience empathy. To Empathize in all of its forms of empathizing, empathized, empathising, empathised, etc., is defined as the act of "to sense and understand someone else's feelings as if they were one's own." To empathize is to identify with, understand, relate to, feel for, sympathize with or have a rapport with. To empathize with is to feel at one with and on a more scientific technical sense, to be on the same wavelength or frequency as. It is like tuning an out-of-tune stringed instrument, such as a piano or guitar string to the same exact tone or frequency as a specific tuning fork. It's noun form is "empathizer". To be an empathizer is what we believe is a key to change this world we all share for the better. “If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” This one statement says a lot, coming from one of the most successful people of all time. Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled, "What Life Should Mean to You". In that book he says: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.” The greatest failures of the 20th and 21st centuries have come from loosing sight of considering the other person’s point of view. In the wake of the greatest global financial crisis since the great depression, it is our intention to remind businesses and entrepreneurs to return to prioritizing who their business is based upon (i.e. customers who are real people just like you and I). This is done by taking into consideration what our fellow human beings think, feel, want and need in order to focus upon providing the goods or services that they need and want. By this consideration, we mean to use our perceptive and intuitive imagination to put ourselves in the other person's shoes to try to understand how they think and feel from within their own experiences and point of view. Empathize in Our Relationships and Friendships: If we ever feel lonely or have a feeling of having few "real" friends, the answer is to get our eyes off of being so centered on ourselves and our own wants and needs to empathize with others. We can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than we can in two years by trying to get other people interested in us. I call this getting our focus off of the MEgo (ME centered ego) and on the WEgo (WE centered ego). Every religeon and spiritual belief on earth has a fundamental belief that boils down to placing all of truth in one simple, but extremely profound empathetic concept of "Treating Others As Ourselves". This is called the "Golden Rule" by many. Humanity is on the brink of the greatest change or shift in consciousness that has ever been experienced before and the key to that change is in the "active" verb of to EMPATHIZE with one another, to put ourselves in the other's shoes and try to view the world through the other's eyes and feel the world through the other's experiences. When we can truly grasp the depths of truth in this simple, yet infinately profound concept, of "to Empathize" with one another, we will bring the change to our world which so many of us wish to see. "The time is now for each and every one of us to have a realization that we have unlimited power, unlimited resources and unlimited capacity to love, be creative, serve and support an emerging paridigm of good on this planet at this time in human history. The time is NOW to wake up to the infinite potentiality that is within all of us." -- Michael Bernard Beckwith The time is now for each and every one of us to stop feeling bad or guilty of things that we may have done, experienced, felt or seen in the past. The time is now to wake up and realize the power of choice we each have to change our future through changing how we think, feel and act NOW. The time is now to realize that deep within each and every one of us we have the power, resources and capacity to CHOOSE to empathize with the other human beings we share this planet and universe with to put ourselves in their shoes, understand and connect with one another in ways that will transform our world and our universe. "My whole life is dedicated to the inspiration of seeing that light in someone's eyes when they wake up and they claim who they really are. And who we are, I believe is that We are beings who are made to contribute. We're not just made to get something - we're here to give something. And when people see and experience and know that, through not intellectually, but in their heart, and when they start acting that way, worlds are transformed." -- Tony Robbins Empathize to Contribute and Transform our world: "I call it the social profit sector and social profit has 2 spellings. Social profit like we make a profit, because the profit that we generate is a profit that generate profit for all children of all species of all time. It's really that kind of a social profit. And people who are doing this kind of work are what I call the Social Prophets of our time." --Lynn Twist Empathize to Be a true Leader: "Actually come from the true leader that's within, the true visionary that's within all of us, the true (you might say) messenger that within all of us, and live authentically to that, regardless of what the world arround us thinks or feels or experiences or even reacts to, because I'd rather have the whole world against me that my own soul. And a leader of the future is one who follows their own soul and obeys. In fact, a genuis is one who listenes to their inner voice, follows the vision of their inner soul, obeys that and leads and catalizes new frontier transformations in the world. And so the person who can do that is the real leader; and we all have that inside us." -- Dr. John Demartini Empathize to Collaborate to Win: "Leadership in the new civilation is very much about collaboration. Its about learning how to apply that emotional intelligence, connecting with other people in a way that allows everyone to win." --Dr. Ivan Misner "For 21st century leaders of this new civilization it is very clear that they need to be living what they're speaking about. First and foremost, they need to be themselves the inspiration and role model for everyone else. And what that means is they need to be living a life that is fulfilled, that's alive, that's joyfull, that's full of integrity, that is full of purpose and clarity." -- Marci Shimoff "The time is now for you to make change in your life. As a practical matter for my life I have suggested that the liptnus test for a great civilization, a new civilization, is a focus on mutual respect. But it's much more than that. Everyone watching this has it within their power to make positive change NOW. If not now, then when and if not you, who? -- Tom Tierney "The time is now for us to awaken. The time is now for us to evolve and live our fullest potential, live our highest visions and dreams. The time is now for us to realize our highest purpose for our lives - to contribute our gifts and allow the leader within us to come out." -- Lynn Joy McFarland we are all leaders in the new civilization. The time is NOW to bring change back to this world we all share and live within. Everybody who has come to this site and who shares this beautiful world we all live within has the power to make positive change "NOW". If not now, then when? If not you, then who? We are all leaders in the new civilization that humanity is on the brink of. The time is NOW for us to awaken to who we really and truly are and our connection to one another! If I can empathize with you and you empathize with me, what a truly wonderful world this would surely be. Empathy To Empathize is to feel or experience empathy. Empathy is the capacity to recognize or understand another's state of mind or emotion. It is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes", or to in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself or to see from their point of view. Afterall, we all occupy a different space in this time space "reality" world we all live in and therefore all have a different point of view. It may be described metaphorically as an emotional kind of resonance or mirroring. The English word empathy is derived the Greek (empatheia), "physical affection, passion, partiality" and that from (en), "in, at" + (pathos), "feeling". The term was adapted by Theodore Lipps to create the German word Einfühlung ("feeling into") from which the English term is then more directly derived. We cannot develop creative solutions to complex human problems unless we can see, hear, open up to, and include the humanity of all the stakeholders and of ourselves. Creativity requires all of our selves: our thoughts, feelings, personalities, histories, desires, and spirits. It is not sufficient to listen rationally to inert facts and ideas; we also have to listen to people in a way that encourages them to realize their own potential and the potential in their situation. This kind of listening is not sympathy, participating in someone else's feeling from alongside them. It is empathy, participating from within them. This is the kind of listening that enables us not only to consider alternative existing ideas but to generate new ones. Empathic development By the age of 2, children normally begin to display the fundamental behaviors of empathy by having an emotional response that corresponds with another person. Even earlier, at one year of age, infants have some rudiments of empathy, in the sense that they understand that, just like their own actions, other people's actions have goals. Sometimes, toddlers will comfort others or show concern for them as early as 24 months of age. Also during the second year, toddlers will play games of falsehood or "pretend" in an effort to fool others, and this requires that the child know what others believe before he or she can manipulate those beliefs (Feldman, 1997). In 1997, Douglas Olsen defined empathetic maturity as the cognitive structure that determines whether a person can feel or not feel empathy, who one feels it for and how broad a group. Differences in empathetic maturity are differences in the way a person relates self-created meaning to meaning perceived in others. Empathetic maturity provides the criteria for determining whether another will be experienced as "like me" or "different." More inclusive criteria increase the number and diversity of others who will be perceived empathetically. The highest of the hierarchical stages of empathetic maturity is the most inclusive where all others are perceived as "like me." (Olsen, 2001) There are three stages of empathetic maturity (Olsen, 2001; and Olsen, 1997): Stage 1 – This most primitive pattern and not common in adults. Persons at this stage see others as fundamentally different from themselves. The rationales for another's actions, feelings, or thoughts are not experienced as having human relevance in the sense that one’s own rationales do. Those operating at this stage perceive mutuality with others concretely. Stage 2 – People at Stage 2 hold that their rationales for behavior are valid for everyone. And so, reasons for behaviors and feelings are legitimate to the degree they coincide with the person at Stage 2. Unlike Stage 1, the Stage 2 person sees others like him or her so long as they make sense of their world the same way. Therefore, positive regard for a sufferer perceived to be participating in negative behaviors is difficult for the Stage 2 person unless the behavior is explicable from his or her point of view. An example of such negative behavior would be AIDS as the result of sex practices not condoned by the Stage 2 observer. If the Stage 2 person believes the sufferer is responsible for the behavior, he or she will have no empathy. If the Stage 2 person can detect an acceptable reason why the sufferer is not actually responsible, for example, illness resulted from blood transfusion, beyond the sufferer's control, then empathy emerges. [Note: This "example" confuses empathy per se, being the ability to recreate in one's mind the emotional or cognitive state of mind of another being and so understand that other being, with the possible resulting sympathy/compassion a person feels towards a sufferer as a result of the empathy. Whether sympathy/compassion occurs clearly also depends on the empath's value judgments and understanding of what caused the suffering, but the empathy that allows the person to understand that suffering occurs is still present.] Caregivers at Stage 2 who want to feel empathetic toward their patients often try to find factors that mitigate responsibility. Most of society operates at Stage 2. Stage 3 – At this stage, mutuality occurs prior to any judgment about the person's behavior. The other is perceived as human in the same way the self is experienced, based solely on being a creator of meaning rather than on the content of the meanings created. The perception of another person as responsible for a problem no longer has the power to hinder the development of empathy. If the sufferer is seen as responsible, there is no longer any need to mitigate that responsibility as a method for allowing empathy. A hallmark of Stage 3 is a person's ability to perceive another empathetically while simultaneously and without apparent contradiction perceiving that other as responsible for problematic behavior. Since empathy involves understanding the emotions of other people, the way it is characterized is derivative of the way emotions themselves are characterized. If for example, emotions are taken to be centrally characterized by bodily feelings, then grasping the bodily feelings of another will be central to empathy. On the other hand, if emotions are more centrally characterized by combinations of beliefs and desires, then grasping these beliefs and desires will be more essential to empathy. Furthermore, a distinction should be made between deliberately imagining being another person, or being in their situation, and simply recognizing their emotion. The ability to imagine oneself as another person is a sophisticated imaginative process. However the basic capacity to recognize emotions is probably innate and may be achieved unconsciously. Yet it can be trained, and achieved with various degrees of intensity or accuracy. The human capacity to recognize the bodily feelings of another is related to one's imitative capacities, and seems to be grounded in the innate capacity to associate the bodily movements and facial expressions one sees in another with the proprioceptive feelings of producing those corresponding movements or expressions oneself. Humans also seem to make the same immediate connection between the tone of voice and other vocal expressions and inner feeling. There is some debate concerning how exactly the conscious experience (or phenomenology) of empathy should be characterized. The basic idea is that by looking at the facial expressions or bodily movements of another, or by hearing their tone of voice, one may get an immediate sense of how they feel (as opposed to more intellectually noting the behavioral symptoms of their emotion). Though empathic recognition is likely to involve some form of arousal in the empathiser, they may not experience this feeling as belonging to their own body, but instead likely to perceptually locate the feeling 'in' the body of the other person. Alternatively the empathiser may instead get a sense of an emotional 'atmosphere' or that the emotion belongs equally to all the parties involved. More fully developed empathy requires more than simply recognizing another's emotional state. Since emotions are typically directed towards objects or states of affairs, the empathiser may first require some idea of what that object might be (where object can include imaginary objects, concepts, other people, or even the empathiser). Alternatively the recognition of the feeling may precede the recognition of the object of that emotion, or even aid the empathiser in discovering the object of the other's emotion. The empathiser may also need to determine how the emotional state affects the way in which the other perceives the object. For example, the empathizer needs to determine which aspects of the object to focus on. Hence it is often not enough that the empathiser recognize the object toward which the other is directed, plus the bodily feeling, and then simply add these components together. Rather the empathiser needs to find the way into the loop where perception of the object affects feeling and feeling affects the perception of the object. Empathizing with another is the key.