A Quote by Daniel Goleman
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
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Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn't a chance.
Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded foucus of attention. When our attention lapses into single focus, empathy has been turned off. When we shift our attention to dual focus empathy has been turned on. Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to there thought or feelings with an approriate emotion. Empathy makes the other person feel valued, enabling them to feel that their thoughts and feelings have been heard.
The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you tune into the other person, you feel with them. If empathy arises, and if that person is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then that begins a compassionate act. So I'd say that compassion begins with attention.
We can think about how we reduce the pain in paying. So, for example, credit cards are wonderful mechanisms to reduce the pain of paying. If you go to a restaurant and you are paying cash, you would feel much worse than if you were paying with credit card. Why? You know the price, there's no surprise, but if you're paying cash, you feel a bit more guilt.
We are simply committing ourselves to paying attention to our life. We use meditation to help us in that attention process. We are not trying to become good meditators. We are trying to wake up.
You make a mistake, you better hope I wasn't paying attention and didn't see it, but if I catch you doing it and you think I'm not paying attention, then that's when you get in trouble.
You think everybody's paying attention to what you're doing. No, they're paying attention to what's interesting to them.
In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.
We often miss hearing God's voice simply because we aren't paying attention.
Empathy gives you the ability to enjoy another person's pain.
We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they easily get distracted by anything interesting.
When I sit and talk with a person, I'm not always paying attention. I'm looking at the person and saying, 'What is it about his or her life that appeals to me?
When I sit and talk with a person, I'm not always paying attention. I'm looking at the person and saying, 'What is it about his or her life that appeals to me?'
Everybody is saying, 'ESPN is not cool, no one is paying attention to ESPN, they're all paying attention to the Barstools of the world.' Why? Because we're authentic.
There's no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that's when it has the best chance of being heard.
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