What is Empathy?

Empathy is understanding another's emotions. Where sympathy focuses on your understanding of the emotion that the other person is feeling, empathy focuses on your understanding of the human capacity to feel emotions. It has less to do with experience and more to do with understanding, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and caring enough to do so. 

Empathy includes the ability to communicate and even lead by being able to understand what others are feeling, thinking and their viewpoints.  Rather than treating the other person as someone like yourself as sympathy does, empathy is treating the other person as a unique individual with unique needs and experiences.  Empathy is safer than sympathy in that empathy does not involve the comparison of emotions. It can also offer solutions like sympathy can, but in a more roundabout way – largely because empathy does not require you to have been in the same situation.  

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