Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.  Not to be confused with sympathy the feelings of sorrow for someones misfortune.  Empathy has been argued to be determined at birth.  Some people possess a great ability to have large amounts of empathy and some people don’t possess it at all.  It is a vital part of building and maintaining relationships.  Is it really something that you either have or don’t have though.  There is proof it can be something learned though.  It is simply a choice just like that many choices we are faced with daily in life.  If you choose to be empathetic and put yourself in situations more often you will learn the behavior and in turn develop empathy.

So why all the talk about empathy you ask…well for me empathy is something I have been lacking for many years now.  When I was much younger I had some sense of and thought about how others felt.  As I got older I definitely made the choice to show it less and less.  I tricked myself into thinking my sympathy for someone meant I cared about what they were going through when in reality it was just me acknowledging they were going through something.  My focus was always on how whatever event happened would affect me.  Wrong thought process for me as it led to me making choices that hurt other people.

As my life has changed I focused more on being right and having someone see things my way.  I cared less about how the person felt and listened less.  Needless to say instead of learning from my mistakes I was doomed to repeat them without even realizing it.  My lack of empathy lead to a need to prove I was right.  Maybe not the case for everyone showing a lack of empathy but specifically for me it caused a very skewed lens to life.  So just like many other choices my choice was clear…continue to live life this way or make the change.

So my lack of knowledge about empathy lead to reading articles, talking with my therapist about it, talking with people close to me and really trying to figure out where/why the change happened for me.  This is my conclusion…it doesn’t matter when or why it happened my lack of empathy is something I want to change.  I stopped being empathetic and made choices that caused a lot of issues in life that I don’t want to repeat them.  I hurt people that didn’t deserve getting hurt, changed lives in totally different directions and I don’t want to do that anymore.  The choice for me is deciding to learn about empathy and start using it in my life actively.  Its a choice you have to make much like eating right, working out, be polite, or any other choice you face throughout your day.  It is something that I want to be better at and just like anything else you want to be better at you have to put in the work.  So today’s share is a little more heavy on the content but it is something I wanted to share.  I am going to work much harder to be empathetic and make choices with others in mind.  I hope you have a great day and life is well for everyone and anyone that reads this.

Below is a link that I read that while short has some awesome information I came across when reading about empathy.  Enjoy

http://www.instituteforwellness.com/2015/08/28/three-steps-to-greater-empathy/