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Thank you for joining me for the first ever episode of the Living with Empathy Podcast!

Transcript: Episode 1 - Introduction Episode

Hello and welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast.

I’m your host, Miriam, and I wanted to take this episode to introduce myself and this podcast. I’m going to talk about how this podcast came to be, give you a little glimpse into who I am, and share a taste of what’s to come. 

So, let’s start from the beginning. Like I said, my name Miriam Otero. The idea for the name of this podcast actually came about from me looking back on my own journey as an empath and a highly sensitive person and thinking about how the perception of that has changed over the last 30 years.

People always perceived it as weak, but now, more and more people are realizing and recognizing how powerful empathy, sensitivity, and compassion can be during such tumultuous times as these that we are currently living in. And over the years, I’ve had a lot of practice in building these into strengths and skills that have served me well throughout my life. And while I now see these as a gift, they have also come with some hard earned lessons. 

I’m a middle school teacher and personal development coach, so much of the work that I do these days is focused on the social-emotional development of young people who will one day become the adults that inherit the problems we’ve left behind. Over the last five years, there’s been a big push on social-emotional development in the classroom, but if there’s one thing I’ve realized, its that they aren’t the only ones who need it. 

That’s why I decided to create this podcast. A place where people can come to learn about how to raise their emotional intelligence, to be more empathetic, and hear some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way from teaching this to middle schoolers. But ultimately, empathy is also about perspective. It’s being able to understand and feel what other people are going through. But how can we understand how others feel and what they’re going through when we don’t even take the time to understand our own feelings? It’s about zooming out from our tunnel vision to see situations from different angles. In doing so, it really allows us to creatively brainstorm solutions to our own problems and the problems of the world. 

Working with middle schoolers has reminded me that just because we grow up, it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to be innovative when approaching our lives. 

A couple of years ago, I was teaching 7th grade history. It was the beginning of the school year, and like most teachers, I spent the first week doing activities to get to know my students. I wanted to know how they approached problem solving in difficult situations. Would they work together? Would they come up with different types of solutions? How would they justify their choices? 

So on one particular day, I began class by introducing the Trolley problem. The Trolley problem is a common thought experiment, an ethical dilemma that takes a look at our morals. There are different variations of it, but basically it looks like this:

There’s a runaway trolley speeding down some railroad tracks. Up ahead, there are five people tied to the track. You’re standing next to a lever that can switch the trolley to another set of tracks. The only problem is that on those other set of tracks, there’s a person there. 

What would you do?

Do you do nothing and let the trolley kill those five people?

Or do you pull the lever, save the five people, and kill the one person on the other set of tracks?

I told my students that they had to choose one or the other and then justify their answers. I gave them some time to think about the problem and when we came back to discuss it, I was pretty surprised at how it went. Despite clearly stating the rules (several times, might I add) they were INSISTENT on coming up with any solution that meant no one would die. I tried SO HARD to get them to kill somebody, basically, but they couldn’t fathom letting someone die. 

After class, I talked about it with my co-teacher about the activity and how it went and we realized something we hadn’t noticed before. The students had decided that their mission was to save every single life in this hypothetical situation. Adults wouldn’t even question the rules. They would choose one of the options, even if it was a difficult choice, and they would justify it. They abide by the rules of the game and there’s no questioning THAT part of it. 

To me that’s a perfect example of what gets lost as we become adults. We conform to society’s expectations of where we should be at any given age of adulthood and we strive to reach the milestones set by the many generations before us. Sometimes, we’re ok with that. Other times, we wake up one day to find ourselves deeply unsatisfied with the life we’ve chosen, never realizing that there was another option: to live our lives based on a set of rules that we created. 

In another class, I wrote in big letters on the board: What can adults learn from kids?

I’ve learned so much from all of the students I’ve taught that I wanted to know if given the choice, what would they teach us?

It got me thinking about my middle school self and I wondered if she would be proud of the adult I’ve become. What about you? What do you think your middle school self would think about adult you? I mean, there are countless movies that address this, right? 13 going on 30. BIG. 17 Again. And they all seem to point to the same thing. 

My goal for the podcast is to ask you questions and create a space where you can come to focus on the “kind” in humankind. 

I’m going to leave you with that for now and I hope you’ll join me next week for another episode. 

If you want to know more about the human behind the voice, then head on over to www.miriamotero.com/about to get to know your host: me. If this is a podcast that you think someone you know might like, pass it on. It’s always nice to get a thoughtful recommendation from someone you love. Until then, thank you for listening and I’ll catch you next week for another episode. Take care!