The Magic of Compassion
original recording: July 27, 2021 (below is a transcription of the video)
Hello and welcome to this Coaching Moment Conversation!
Glad to have you here again. My name is Angie Robinson and I am excited to have you here and have this little conversation with me. If you are here live, feel free to pop into the comments and engage and have a little conversation. If you're watching the replay, still feel free to pop some thoughts into the comments. I will be for sure checking on those as well. And if you are catching this way later on my website, you can also jump back over to Facebook and comment as well, because this is meant to be a conversation. I'd love to engage with you and hear your thoughts.
By way of introduction, I am Angie and I am a leadership and life coach and a talent development consultant. I spend most of my time coaching new, emerging and mid-level leaders as well as teams on maximizing confidence, performance and connection through self-awareness and through revealing and uncovering barriers that might get in the way of success and reaching the results they'd like to get.
If this is something that you think another person or someone in your organization or in your life would benefit from, please feel free to tag them or forward this to them as well. I'd love to have more eyes on this work.
I have been in leadership roles for a long time. I started in my first ‘work’ leadership role was when I was 18 and have been in leadership roles ever since. I have been spent the majority of my career in human resources. So not only as a leader, but also in a position where I spent a lot of time coaching and developing and helping leaders grow and become the best leaders that they can be. I have learned a ton throughout my years about what makes leaders successful, what are some of the barriers and the hoops that can get people stuck and what makes leaders successful. And that is why I love doing this work.
I have had my own practice for about three years now and just love, love connecting people and teams. I do a lot of work with teams on understanding each other's different personality styles and how they communicate and connect. And so that is what it's about. It is about self-awareness.
I say that self-awareness is really pixie dust for making the most of our lives, making the most of our jobs and of our businesses…of pretty much everything.
Self-awareness is a key that when unlocked, it is magical. That's what I love to talk about. I did two other Coaching Moment Conversations. The first one was on the Magic of Self-Awareness which really was laying the groundwork on what self-awareness is and why it is so wonderful. And then the second one was on the Magic of Curiosity, which is another skill that I think is a game changer for leaders and in life in general as well, but leaders specifically, as is what I was talking about. You can feel free to jump back and watch those as well if you missed them.
Alright - diving into compassion. So again, I believe that compassion is not only a life skill, but it is a leadership skill that is often not talked about as a skill. We hear about things from leaders as being good visionaries and delegators and, you know, understanding the financials and setting direction and being inspirational. All of those are super important, but there's a lot of skills under the self-awareness umbrella that aren't talked about as much that really, really, really can make a difference. Curiosity is one. Compassion is another.
You probably have heard the term: there are two sides to every story, right? Two sides of a coin. And that is very, very true. However, our brains tend to make very quick judgments. We see something, we hear something, and our brains are really quick to make a snap judgment based on our own experiences, our own beliefs that we have. Oftentimes we don't get to see the other side of that story immediately, because we are quick to make our own kind of stories or judgments as well, and so that is where compassion comes in.
What is compassion?
Looking at the definition of compassion, it's a noun and it is “a sympathetic consciousness of others distress (or I would say others life situation) together with the desire to help alleviate it.” It's very similar to empathy in that it is wanting to understand someone else's situation. But the difference between empathy and compassion is compassion has an added element of wanting to help.
For example, driving down the road, you know, you might see a driver go zipping past you and you're thinking, “oh, my gosh, what a crazy maniac.” And this is where a lot of road rage can come in, right? Because we make this snap judgment - not knowing what their real situation is.
Another example is when someone isn't responding to an email. I have an expectation that when I send an email, someone's going to acknowledge or respond to it in a fairly, you know, quick manner. But they don't. So, our brains might make a snap judgment to say “they really don't care, they don't pay attention, they're just they're not responsible” - all these things. Or maybe in a work setting, you have a new manager who has just started, and they walk by (assuming you're back into the workplace) and they walk by and they don't say anything. They don't acknowledge you. Our brains might think right away a couple of things. I might think, “oh, what a what a jerk, not even saying hi” or we might go to “what's wrong with me?”
We make snap judgments. With the added element of compassion - you're trying to understand the other person but you're also wanting to help. So, it's almost kind of a verb in that sense too, is that there must be some action to it as well. It could be a minimum action. It can be, you know, just checking your thoughts. It can be asking someone if they need help. It can be getting curious and sharing some thoughts. It could simply be offering a smile. That is a form of compassion. So, like I said, it is a leadership skill. It is a life skill as well. But with any of these self-awareness attributes, I always say it starts with yourself. I think that's really important. Starting with yourself and also with others.
Why do you think compassion matters?
Why is it even important? Again, if you are watching a replay or recording, please jump into the comments and let me know your thoughts on why you think it's important.
I can share with you what I believe compassion is important, starting with number one. It allows us to get curious when we can check our thoughts. It just kind of opens up the space for wanting to learn more.
It can soften our judgments. Like I've already mentioned, our brain is really quick to offer judgments based on our own thoughts, our own beliefs, our own experiences. Those are often uninformed and harsh. And just notice as you're going on your day, if you kind of see that happening right there, uninformed judgments that oftentimes tend to be harsh. And that's because our brain is doing its job trying to protect us. But it's something just to be aware of.
It's also important because it puts care and humanity at the forefront. When we have compassion, we can move from judgment to acceptance and just kind of remember that we're all equal, right? That we all are humans.
It allows us to momentarily put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to imagine what it might be like if I was dealing with whatever that situation is, even if I don't have firsthand experience. With compassion, I'm able to, again, soften my judgment and just imagine “what if that was me?”
All of this creates trust, which is super, super important. If you are in a leadership role or you work for somebody or in an organization, you know that without trust, everything else kind of ‘fails’ or it's not where it could be. Compassion definitely builds trust. It enhances collaboration and builds connection. All very important.
And the other reason why it's important is that it benefits all. When you offer compassion, not only is the person who's receiving it benefiting from it, but so are you as the giver of it. It’s one of those things that benefits everybody.
What are some barriers? What might get in the way of compassion?
As I was thinking about this, there's really kind of one main thing that I have actually heard in coaching and in roundabout ways. I've not necessarily heard anybody say, “what's the point of compassion?”, but in a roundabout way, one of the barriers (the main barrier) that tends to come up is - if I practice empathy or compassion, then I'm excusing behavior. Or I'm having to put on a positive spin on everything, kind of negating what my real true emotions or feelings might be about something. Or I'm expected to change my mind.
I just want to say that none of those are true.
You can have compassion and not necessarily agree with a situation or have to change it. I'll give a kind of standard workplace example. Oftentimes I've heard with leaders thoughts around attendance. If an employee is, you know, late often or doesn't show up to meetings or something like that. How can I have compassion for somebody who is breaking the rules, or are breaking policy? You can still have compassion for the person and want to be able to, you know, even help them with that without negating your own frustration around it, without having to bend the rules and let them just get away with something.
You can do both. You can have compassion and not agree or and uphold policies. But what compassion will do it will allow you to approach the situation, the employee, the other person from a place of acceptance instead of fear or frustration or anger. And that just changes the trajectory of how the situation plays out. Hopefully that makes sense.
What are some ways to practice compassion?
You know, it's very easy to put labels on people. It's very easy to put people in boxes. But we can actually train our brain to recognize that there are many layers to everybody, to all of us, to every situation. We can train our brains to do this, to not jump to some of those judgments right away and take a step back. I'm just going to share the ones that I have, and again, if you have any additional ones that you either practice yourself or that you think of that you have seen work, please share those as well.
Start with yourself.
We are typically the hardest on ourselves. If we are not able to practice compassion on ourselves, it is going to be much more difficult to practice compassion with others. So always start with yourself and make sure that you are showing compassion for yourself. Again, our brains will make really quick judgments on ourselves, just like everybody else. “I shouldn't have done that. I'm so stupid. Why would I do that? I stink at this.” Whatever it is. Start with yourself.
Challenge your beliefs and biases.
Like I’ve said in the other Coaching Moment Conversations - challenge your beliefs and your biases. We all come with our own beliefs. They are formed over time based on our experiences, based on what we've been taught as children, based on what society tells us.
And we all have biases as well. There is no way trying to get around that. Nor you should never try to or deny that because we all do. And that is OK. But the key is to challenge those. Why do I have that belief? Why do I have that bias? What am I missing by thinking about this or thinking this way? What am I not noticing?
Get curious.
Another way to cultivate compassion is to get curious.
Like I said, I did a whole Coaching Moment Conversation about that last time so you can go back and watch that. But getting curious again allows us to get a little deeper, go beneath the surface, ask more questions and really understand what's going on.
Set the ego aside.
Another way to practice compassion is to set the ego aside, which sometimes can be challenging. What I mean by that is trying to avoid saying things like “what I would have done is…” or “when I had this happen, I…” or “I had it much worse when…”. Everyone has their own experience. We have to allow that and not try to compare our situation or how I would do things to somebody else's. This is not apples to apples. We need to check our ego and let the other person have the experience that they're having. It is theirs, not ours.
Imagine yourself in their place.
And then we already talked about this. But imagine yourself in their place - putting yourself in their shoes. Even if you don't have the direct experience. Just put yourself there. Let your brain go there. “Gosh, if I were speeding by in a car, I imagine maybe there's a medical emergency, maybe, you know, something else happened” or “Gosh, if I'm a new leader starting in an organization and it was my first day, I might be a little freaked out. I might not know where I'm going. I might be a little out of place.” I might walk by people to without saying hi or acknowledging. Just kind of imagining what it could be like for the other person.
And then, finally, work with the coach.
Being in our own brains, sometimes it's not it's easy to see these things or to manage that. And so working with somebody from an external perspective can help us to see our brains from the outside and help guide us through situations or help us to elevate this skill of compassion. I know you can do it on your own, but working with a coach can really, really create some results that you never even knew were there.
I'm going to throw out this quote that I really like – I like this concept of the ripple effect. And the quote from the Dalai Lama says, “Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far reaching effects.”
And I think this is true. I think about this all the time. Everything that you do - that I do, that people do has an effect. Oftentimes we have no idea what that might be, how we might impact someone. Judgments, especially harsh judgments, has a ripple effect. Having compassion has a ripple effect. How we handle our connection with others is going to ripple out to how that person then might interact with others and so on and so on and so on.
We have a choice on how we want that ripple effect to go. Choosing compassion over judgment is just probably the best choice. I think you would agree with that.
That is what I have today in this Coaching Moment Conversation about the Magic of Compassion. Again, I would love to talk to you more about this - what your thoughts are, what your challenges might be around this topic. Do you think it's an actual skill that is important in your work as either a leader or just in your life in general? What kind of difference would it make for you, for your team, for your company?
I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about how we can work together in a coaching environment or any team development work again. I love working with teams on all of this as well. You can go to my website and find some resources. There is also a free PDF on there right now: 10 Impactful Coaching Questions for Self and Others that you can certainly download.
You can get on my email list where you will not get a lot of messages from me, but you can keep up to date on what's going on. I also sent out a Magic Monday message every week where I take a Disney quote and expand on it a little bit on how that quote might apply to life.
I'd love to connect. And until then, have a great day. Thanks!