Walk a mile in someone’s shoes – figuratively Basically, it’s the mental projection into the emotional state of mind of another person, allowing you to identify their feelings. Furthermore, emotional intelligence enables a person to empathize with someone, without the need to have felt likewise in the past. A person that has experienced a variety of emotional states and feelings throughout their life – from the heights of victory, happiness, and joy to the depths of defeat, sadness, and anxiety – will find it easier to understand another person’s problems and feelings. This kind of intelligence has not so much to do with mental skills (intellect) or the intellectual ability to study an emotion, but a lot more with actually experiencing these emotions. You may also feel differently about those who are facing a similar situation.Īnother aspect that empathy depends on is emotional intelligence. But once you experience for yourself what it feels like to be teased about your body height or the difficulty to find a job, your point of view might change drastically. The outcome of this can be seen in our day-to-day lives it’s relatively easy to laugh about someone who is not as tall as you or to rant about “ the lazy unemployed” when you have never been unemployed in your life, or grown up in riches. This means in turn that it becomes complicated at times to understand what a person is undergoing if you haven’t undergone it for yourself – or at least felt similar feelings. Surprisingly, the ability to empathize with others is relative to a person’s capacity to identify, feel, and understand their own feelings and thereby being able to project one’s feelings onto others. Which can be – in general – understood as the ability of a person to understand others or to “see where they are coming from.” In contrast to this, the personality trait of a person that is incapable of empathizing with others would be defined as a sociopath. the awareness of another’s problems, without experiencing them.the capacity to understand a person’s (emotional) reaction.the identification of thoughts and emotional states within others.the ability to comprehend another person’s actions and emotions.It is the ability to literally experience the world from another person’s perspective to walk in their shoes, to view life from their living conditions and to feel what it feels like to be that person. You never really know the reasons behind a person’s actions until you have made similar experiences Definition – What is empathy all about?īeing able to empathize means to be capable of identifying and understanding another person’s feelings, without experiencing them for yourself at that particular moment. Lippincott & Co., 1960Īnd thereby brought the saying to a wider public and increased its popularity distinctly. “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Nelle Harper Lee, an American authoress, was seemingly inspired by the saying of the Amerindians in her book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” where she wrote: The earliest traces of the enlightening proverb date back to the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans, who warned: “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”. Many of those modern quotations added the sentence “… that way, you are a mile away from them and have their shoes,” which adds humor to the quote, but it (unfortunately) has nothing in common with the original thoughts behind the fantastic proverb. The origin of the famous proverb “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes” was quite difficult to find, as there are many who simply rephrased and added their own “spin” to this commonly known quote. It will also show you what you can do to develop compassion and to cultivate empathy. The following article has a lot to share about compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and the ability to think yourself into another person’s shoes.
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