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Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast. I’m your host, Miriam Otero and this is episode two. 

How’s everyone feeling? Is this the first time you’ve been asked that today? So many of us start our day by getting straight to business, when we could take a brief moment to stop and connect with someone, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes. Loneliness is on the rise all over the world, especially here in the United States, and often this small act might not seem like a big deal to most, but it could really make a difference for someone who needs it.

In every class, I always take five minutes to ask my kids how they’re doing. It may not seem like much, but when you add up an entire school year of five minutes a day, it can really change a kid’s school year. 

And that is the perfect segue into today’s topic: the simplest ways to start building more empathy. 

In the introductory episode, I gave an overview of what my intention is with this podcast. This season, I’ll be focusing on topics that anyone can relate to in some way, shape, or form. These are topics and questions that have come up with friends, family, and clients in my personal development coaching. 

So, today, I’m going to talk about three simple ways to start working out the empathy muscle.

Three Simple Ways to Start Building Empathy

Think About The Kids

Much of what I do these days is informed by my experiences as a teacher. When you’re a teacher, you practice seeing things from multiple perspectives on the daily and whenever I confront a difficult issue in my life, I often think about what my students would have to say about it, because of the way they look at the world. 

It’s incredibly true that teachers often learn far more from their students than their students learn from what they teach. Take it from me, I’ve taught people of all ages, from age 3 to 89, in the United States and in Spain, history, music, and language.

You see, children below the age of 11 already have a natural pull towards caring for others, almost as a default. There was actually a study done by the Ben-Gurion University Bio Empathy Lab that was published last year in the British Journal of Psychology, where they did some experiments and found that children under one year of age can already display empathy towards bullied victims. So young children already have more of a tendency to be more empathetic towards others.

Now, when we move onto middle school, kids start to go through a ton of changes. I don’t have a study to quote here, but we can all look back on our own middle school experiences to understand what that was like. Despite middle schoolers going through what I often call the “human sour patch kid” phase, they often teach me the most about empathy through their own unique ways.

For one, there are developmentally appropriate, complex conversations you can have with middle schoolers that you can’t have with younger kids, where they’re able to provide really thoughtful insights. When I started teaching history to them, we’d often talk about current events and what I found fascinating was their ability to talk about things in a way that is constructive, something that is getting increasingly harder for adults to do.

They also have this ability to empathize harder than anyone in a way that only a middle schooler can because they feel things so deeply. Adults tend to be more fixed in their views. Look, we all develop stories about ourselves and the world pretty early on in our lives. By the time we’re adults, we have so much evidence to support our story, that unless you have an earth shattering event happen or you MAKE the decision to change, your opinion tends to be firmly cemented in place. Kids and teens are learning a lot from observing the adults around them. 

The first step to developing empathy is being aware. Ask yourself, “Would my kid be proud of the way I’m showing up in the world?” If you have a middle schooler, start building a habit of asking them questions about real world topics. You might be surprised by what they have to say. 

If you don’t have kids, then ask yourself, “What would my middle school self think about this?” Sometimes, we tend to forget that somewhere in there, there is still a kid who dreams, hopes, and believes in the possibility of something better. 

Be Curious

Growing up, I was always curious about people. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a multicultural community, where everyone had a culture and experience that was different from my own. I don’t really know how it started, but I always had this innate desire to understand people on a core level. 

Over the years, this innate curiosity and this genuine desire to understand others strengthened my empathy because I was constantly putting myself in situations where I had to interact with new people. 

A prime example of this is when at the end of my 6th grade year, my family moved about 25 miles east of where I grew up. I was not only going to start middle school at a new school, but also in a town where I didn’t know anyone. Despite that, I could understand that we were all going to feel awkward in one way or another just by the pure fact where were all about to get on the struggle bus that is puberty. 

That’s also part of the reason I love teaching because you don’t know what your students’ experiences have been, so you have to approach everything they do, good or bad, with curiosity to be able to understand their motivations and build trust with them. 

So, how does this translate to someone who is trying to build empathy now?

Be curious about people. Start with where you are, with the people in your life. The next time a coworker is having a bad day, don’t just write off their grumpiness as a character trait. We automatically tend to jump to conclusions about the people we’re in contact with every day without ever taking the time to understand where they’re coming from. There’s probably more under the surface than you can see. 

You know, I remember starting a job several years ago where everyone was intimidated by this veteran teacher. They said she had a bit of an abrasive personality, so they always tried to avoid her unless they really had to interact with her.

I hadn’t even met her yet, so I decided to ignore what they said about her and approach her with curiosity. You see, in elementary school, I had the teachers that were labeled unapproachable because they were a bit more stoic than expressive in their faces. And guess what? They were the ones who went above and beyond the call of duty. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have learned English as quickly as I did in elementary school (Spanish was my first language). 

The first interactions were direct; short and to the point. I made it my personal mission to go out of my way to say hi to her and ask her about her day. I would make small talk by the coffee machine. Slowly, but surely, I got to know her really well. She was incredibly kind and caring. What most people failed to notice was that she always came to work early and was always the last one to leave. 

What other people saw as an abrasive personality, was actually a woman who was direct and to the point, in an environment where people weren’t always authentic in the way they presented themselves. It was refreshing to me, since I had just come back from living in Spain, where people are friendly and VERY direct. 

Had I just written her off, I would have probably had the same opinion everyone else had. When I left that job a couple of years later, she was one of the people I was most sad to not work with anymore. I’ve been so fortunate throughout my life because curiosity has led me to meet some truly amazing people. It could do the same for you and with that, get you in the habit of questioning your assumptions about people before getting to know them. 

Now, the last point might get some resistance for some, but it is the one way out of these three suggestions where it’s more internal. 

Read Fiction 

I’m not going to go all teacher on you and go over all of the benefits of readin