BYOE (bring your own empathy)
BYOB = Bring your own beverage, a common term used in restaurants or at parties that don’t serve or provide alcohol. You are supposed to go out to a liquor store / package store* before the engagement and pick up your preferred beverage; pool party bring beer, fancy dinner bring red wine, kids’ birthday party bring Topo Chico for the adults dealing with the chaos. BYOB keeps the cost of a party down, allows restaurants without a liquor service license to still create yummy dishes to pair with your red wine, and takes a large + costly burden off of the experience provider. Win-win…kinda!
Companies, organizations, and communities for the most part expect a similar working model when it comes to social and emotional intelligence, bring your own. Unfortunately, most individuals haven’t gone through an empathy and compassion fermenting process. The beverages at your local liquor store have gone through numerous check points to make sure they are fresh, taste great, and will not get you sick (unless you drink too many of them). There are professional brew masters, distillers, and winemakers for a reason, to make great beverages! Even monks make beverages and people like myself pay a LOT of money to honor their hard work and enjoy what they’ve made. Unlike beverages that go through rigorous quality control check points at the packaging, selling, and opening ends, there are few quality control check points for an individual’s social and emotional skill set within a team, company, or community. HR professionals, hiring managers, and people managers are the social and emotional learning gate keepers. It is often expected that candidates and employees bring their own well practiced and relevant empathy, compassion, and other emotional / social skills. This is odd when the investment, time and money, in such skills is so very low across the board. College graduates can graduate without a single class in “how to work with others”. While most company and corporate training is aimed at leadership and executives, those in the trenches are typically supported in learning new and immediately applicable technical skills. This business model assumes that empathy, compassion, and other social skills will trickle down because of goodwill and gravity. Unfortunately, that is just not how a skill like empathy works, you cannot just BYOE the whole thing and hope for the best. You can’t just train the executives and hope for gravity to take effect. We’ve seen what happens when empathy is expected yet never really support.
So rather that just expecting people to show up with mad social and emotional skills like empathy which requires continuous practice, support and DEMAND active community investment in the skills that make the community better. Want a better future, not just a better PnL next quarter, invest in people skills. Better social and emotional people skills (like empathy!) = happier more productive people = more enjoyable communities = more innovation and collaboration = more products and experiences that customers like = good overall energy = better PnLs for more than just the next quarter. It really matters where you invest. What a strategy!
Empathy practice doesn’t have to cost a thing, it just takes time, patience, and courage to learn new skills.
Here are some high level thoughts on where you can start (or continue) an empathy practice.
Books and videos are the easiest and most approachable first step. This is where low cost and free solutions start. Authors like Brené Brown, Dan Siegel, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Helen Riess, and Dan Goleman all go deep into the different aspects of emotional intelligence and practice. There are so MANY books out there on developing empathy and compassion that we’ve read and included in our curriculum (yes, we are working on ever evolving library). Check your local library and get some books for free if you can!
Find a practice with REAL people. Yes, Empathy Lab offers empathy practices, but this isn’t a sales pitch! Organizations like Search Inside Yourself and Sounds True have been training individuals and companies for years, check them out. There are also many small shops around that have specific focuses like diversity, equity, and inclusion, neuro-diversity, and even how your favorite movies influence who you are and how you show up. I am more than happy to chat with you if you are serious about finding a practice that fits you, email me (no Empathy Lab pitch unless you ask…empathy first!).
So, what am I getting at? While we will always be expected to BYOE, we need to realize that investing time, patience, and courage is necessary for our communities and companies to thrive. This isn’t a one time investment, it’s a continual practice. The only reason we think it’s difficult and maybe too much is because we haven’t done it consistently yet. Invest in the practice.
*Package stores here in Atlanta and I assume the south are not to be confused with a mail package store like a FedEx or UPS store. Some guy I know walked into Jerry’s Package store back in 2006, a bit confused, trying to ship a box back to California. He tentatively walked in, realized he was REALLY wrong, and then asked the gentleman behind the bullet proof glass where the local post office was. He was
