Applied Empathy for Strengthening Relationships and Networking

25:56If you're not on top of your money, you're missing chances to save more, invest smarter, and hit your goals faster. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks. Use code charm at monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code charm. Now, Rick Hansen joins us to share how to develop a strong and confident brain. I mean a brain, first of all, that is resilient and knows that it's resilient from the inside out. So things happen and they're unpleasant. We feel them. I'm not talking about positive thinking here. I don't believe in positive thinking.

26:32I believe in realistic thinking. I want to see the whole mosaic of reality. But you basically can bounce back and move forward from things that are hard. So building up resilience over time. And there are things to do to do that. Second, mindfulness. If you're not aware of what you're experiencing inside, and you're not really aware of the outer world, of course you're not going to have confidence because you're not tuned into what's really, really going on. And then third thing I would just say is to repeatedly take in the good, I call it, repeatedly technical language, deliberately internalize beneficial experiences so that you gradually over time, based on the saying of what's called experience-dependent neuroplasticity, fancy language alert, neurons that fire together wire together.

27:21So by repeatedly extending your beneficial experiences, regular mild ones in everyday life that are useful to you, you gradually hardwire these critical inner strengths, mental resources into yourself so that increasingly you feel confident instead of insecure. You feel strong instead of anxious. You feel grateful instead of kind of despairing and depressed. and any single time you take in the good, you know, any single time you use my methods to really help your good experiences land and sink in, it's not going to be a transformative white light moment. I'm a very realistic work ethic, you know, blue collar work ethic kind of guy.

28:07You got to do the work, but it's enjoyable work half a dozen times a day to let your beneficial experiences really land, especially the ones that relate to what you're working on inside yourself. If you're working on, for example, building a confident brain, then when you have those moments with other people, especially high-value moments, high-impact moments, let's say you're trying to date, and you have those moments with women where you feel liked because they do like you or they do find you appealing. It doesn't mean they necessarily want to marry you and run away to the Bahamas with you, but yeah, that's good.

28:42You're on at least the third rung of the ladder, and it feels good. Don't waste those moments. Let them sink in. Protect them. Stay with them. rather than do what most people routinely do, which is to quickly move on to the next thing or say yes, but inside their own head or not even notice them in the first place when there's actually a factual-based opportunity to have a critically important experience for yourself. Rick shares how the brain actually learns, installing the experience we had to turn it from brain state to brain trait. How do you change for the better? How does that actually happen?

29:18Well, in terms of the brain, it's a two-stage process that goes from state to trait. In other words, you have to have an experience in the first place. We don't have brains or technology these days that's like iPods or like, you know, Neo and the Matrix where you plug a cable in and suddenly you know Kung Fu, right? No, we have to have an experience in the first place that's beneficial. But then, really important, we need to install that activated experience in the brain or it's only momentarily beneficial or pleasant. It has no zero, no lasting value if we don't encode it in some way as a lasting change in neural structure or function.

29:58So what I'm talking about here is the fundamental technology deep in yourself of changing yourself for the better over time. And most of the experiences that we are going to wire into ourselves, we're gonna suck them in and make them part of ourselves, They're usually mildly pleasant, but they're richer than that. Like you say, they're a moment of courage. They're a moment of connection. They're a moment of accomplishment. They're a moment of getting through a tough workout and knowing that you can survive the pain of that last rep. It's a moment of registering that this kind of person, even though she's really attractive, is never going to be the kind of person that's going to really meet your needs deep down long term.

30:42Any kind of learning. it's really helping learning land. And the way I kind of think about it is like, what's the rate of return in your savings account or investment on any day, right? And the difference between, you know, 5 % and 4 % or 10 % and 9 % is not very much on a given day, but gradually accumulating over time and compounding that little extra is going to make a big difference over time. I would say to people or ask people is, what's your average learning rate per day from your ordinary beneficial experiences? How many of them actually sink in to make you a little bit happier, a little bit wiser, a little bit tougher, and a little bit more loving at the end of the day than you were at the start of the day?

31:29And that is, to me, a profoundly powerful question for anyone, but especially for people who are wanting to grow and develop, and especially for people who, as many people do these days, You feel kind of pushed around by massive external forces, the economy, politics, whatever, and also kind of pushed around by the reactions still inside their own head. When you start doing what I'm describing, you kind of go through your day like you've got a vacuum cleaner, hoovering up those ordinary little jewels, those ordinary little opportunities for learning and growth. It changes how you see your life entirely.

32:04Instead of feeling like a nail kind of pushed on by powerful forces, you start feeling like a hammer from the inside out, inside your own head, changing yourself for the better every day. Learning from your experiences is what makes you grow. Don't take those teachable moments for granted. This is why we encourage our clients and listeners to journal and to share their discoveries in our implementation sessions. Now it's so important to look for little moments of connection during the day. Try to stay in that moment for half a minute and let it sink in. Don't dismiss it. You'll notice your brain neurons start firing together.

32:42Now this is not something you made up or wish it were so, but based on something that really happened in your life, as Rick explains. Just think about a typical day. You get up, you move through your day, you start encountering other people. So in my larger framework, which is based on how your brain evolved through, it's essentially it's lizard, mouse, and monkey stages, you know, reptilian brainstem, mammalian subcortex, primate human cortex, lizard, mouse, and monkey. That has to do with how the brain goes about meeting our basic needs. We have three basic needs, safety, satisfaction, and connection.

33:17Almost everything you can think of falls into one of those three buckets. And in terms of connection, you know, which is what basically we're talking about here. How to, you know, build up resources inside so you can actually be more successful in connecting with other people and connecting with the kind of people and in the kind of ways that you really, really want to do that. Okay, so in terms of that, let's say you go through your day looking for little jewels of connection, little opportunities that are real, where, you know, something real has happened that can build up a sense of feeling cared about by other people, feeling attractive, feeling respected, feeling resilient, feeling like you are a catch, right?

34:04How do you build up that sense? Well, look for opportunities to have that experience, right? And little ones. So you walk through your day. You make eye contact with some, let's say, a woman walking down the street. It's a little moment. It's nice. There's a little connection there. You feel connected. You feel validated. You don't feel scorned. Don't waste it. Stay with it. Open to it. Receive it. Maybe you have some friends. You know, you're hanging with them and they like you. They think you're a good guy. Don't waste that. Stay with it. Feel it. Let it sink in. Open to it in your body. The longer those neurons are firing together, the more they're going to be wiring together.

34:39Deep down in the basement of the brain is pretty mechanistic, which I find really, really helpful. You don't have to do some kind of, you know, or have some white light experience. Just stay with it. a dozen seconds in a row, it's going to naturally start encoding and getting wired into your body. And I've had the experience many, many times with people, and I've run a, I created a training on this, and we ran a study on it through UC Berkeley, and we got very positive results. The people quite quickly start experiencing something different is happening when they just take half a dozen or a dozen times a day, usually less than half a minute at a time, to really register their beneficial experiences, and to stay with them, you know, a dozen seconds or so, so they can really, really sink in.

35:24What makes it cool is that these experiences are real in your everyday life. You know, you're with someone and they include you. They think you're cool. Or, you know, your best friend's wife, just really from her heart, she looks at you and you know she's telling the truth when she says, dude, you're fine, as is. Or let's say you worry about something. Maybe you're going bald, you know? And she looks at you and she says, buddy, nobody cares. Women don't care about that stuff. They just don't. Instead of having it brush off yourself, like, you know, Teflon, right? Don't waste that. And I got to say, just to wrap here, I see all kinds of people.

36:03It's so interesting. They want to get good at lots of stuff, okay? They want to get good at operating Excel or their, you know, Snapchat account or what have you, but they don't take on getting good at getting good. They don't take on how do you change your brain and therefore your life for the better over time. How do you learn how to learn? Because that's what we all want to do. We're all developing but we rarely spend a minute thinking about, wow, how does development actually occur? And that's the secret sauce, meta-learning, learning how to learn. That's the X factor where suddenly every day is full of little real opportunities.

36:42to turbocharge and steepen your learning curve as you go through life. Now we want to treat developing empathy like a work task, as Michael Ventura explains. For sure, and that's why treating it like a piece of work for yourself that you're committing to and you're saying, yeah, I'm going to spend the next, whatever it is, couple weeks, really having a sense of awareness for this is going to help you start to train your brain to put yourself into that mindset more often. I had a teacher, I'll talk about this in the book a little bit, but I had a teacher who was helping teach me presence and particularly the sage-like behavior.

37:18And he said, Michael, are you left-handed or right-handed? I love that. We're just tired. And so I said, I'm right-handed. And he said, okay, well, I want you to open every door you go through for the next week with your left hand. I said, that's the easiest thing ever. I'm going to nail that. Oh, yeah. Right? And walking out of his office, I opened the door with my right hand. And I was like, oh, shit, this is going to be harder than I thought. Well, as soon as I read that, I was like, I've got to give this a try. And I failed miserably. And it took me putting Post-it notes on the doors of my apartment to remind me to do it with my left hand.

37:51But how much effort it took to enable that, it was difficult. Yeah, it's an untraining before it's a training. Yeah, and I love the best part. He goes, okay, now go back to you. Once I got comfortable, I was like, oh, I nailed it, Gil. This is going to be great. What do I do now? He goes, now switch back. Oh, I remember that story. And it's part of my learning process to this day. If you want to change your behaviors, you must turn on your consciousness at choice point moments. Now, Michael explains how we can use empathy in teams. In fact, which archetypes are you currently lacking? And what I've seen from teams, and going to your point earlier, you don't need to be in the C-suite to be doing this.

38:33You could be the most junior person on a team. Just start by looking for where the gaps are. Are we not being inquisitive enough? Are we not listening enough? Are we not thinking about the environment we're creating for people enough? Whatever it is, just have the best question. Don't worry about having the best answer. And I think that often that introspection or that sense of inquiry that comes from just trying to get a little objectivity on how a team works or how a problem is getting solved often helps open the door a bit more for this kind of conversation to occur. In these next couple of clips, Michael Ventura explains how to use empathy in larger groups, or when you're in a group and someone makes an inappropriate joke, you need to stand up for what you believe, or how to show empathy when you are in the out group.

39:23You have the benefit of fresh eyes. There are two anecdotes I'll give you on this. One is we had an interesting conversation about probably about 10 months ago now with a woman who runs some of the training at the State department. And she said, we're in a weird spot because we still have to train ambassadors to go out into foreign countries and run our different outposts. And we're living in a climate where we're not always very welcome. And so how do we bring empathy into the training process for these folks so that when they get to a post, they know how to think and how to gather insight from the local community and engender a sense of connection.

40:07Because if they come in on the headlines that everyone's reading, it's a pretty steep uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of folks somewhere in a far-flung corner of the world. But if you are trained to say, yes, this is one side of the story, but I'm also here to understand what your side of the story is and help me understand how we can play a role in your community and so on and so forth, things will shift. So that was an interesting area where I was heartened to know that the State Department is thinking that way and caring about that. Another area where we're looking at this right now is we're doing some work with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

40:45And one of the particular areas they've asked us to look at is what they call everyday hate, right? So this isn't the tiki tortures and stuff like that. In many ways, that is a hard empathy bridge to build. It can be done, I'm sure, and God willing, it will happen, but that is difficult. But what they want to really focus in on combating, in addition to that, is what they term everyday hate. So the off-color comment that if you just sat down at a dinner table with six people and you don't know one of the people at the table, and the meal just gets put on the table and someone says something off-color, are you the kind of person who is like, well, I don't want to ruin this for everybody and I don't need to make a big thing about it?

41:28And maybe it was said in poor taste, but like, oh, it's okay. and you have this internal monologue that rationalizes that you won't do something about it. And we've all been there. We've all had those situations. What we're working to try to do now is to help build a training program and raise the awareness of that is the moment where you have to draw a line, where you have to actually say, you know what, with all due respect, that doesn't make me comfortable and here's why. Or whatever you need to do to address it because I do think that it is hard to blankedly say, for this large group, here's how we're going to understand them.

42:02It does take one-to-one hand-to-hand combat sometimes to make those changes. But small shifts make a big difference. And those little standing up for your integrity and what you feel is right, or what you feel is right for someone else, can sometimes shift things. One of the simplest ways that we've seen success emerge is almost treat it like you're Jane Goodall. and you're looking at the apes and you're really trying to understand the behaviors and accept that your distance from the group may actually be a benefit for a period of time. There's a thing we do at Sub Rosa called fresh eyes, which is that for the first six months you work with us, we have a meeting where we want to talk with you and understand what do we do that we're blind to?

42:51Because after six months, you don't have fresh eyes anymore. You've drank the Kool-Aid, you're part of us, you're not going to see these things anymore. And so the same is true in those settings. You have the benefit of fresh eyes by being an outsider. Don't begrudge it, but actually embrace it as an opportunity to ask probing questions and say, hey, I know I'm not part of this program, or I haven't been here as long as you guys, or maybe we don't see eye to eye on this. Can you explain to me why we do fill in the blank?

43:21And asking it in a benign form of a question really lets people have to own up to why they do something a certain way. Or they may acknowledge, well, actually, we don't know why we do it that way, which is often sometimes the case too. Yeah, I feel like a lot of times these things are passed down traditionally without the reasoning behind them. oh, well, because we did it last week and we were doing it for two years. But everyone's lost the context as to why. Yeah, there's a great case study. I feel like it was based on, I feel like it was a Kodak case study that I read years ago that there was some issue that they were getting behind in their payments to vendors and they didn't know why and they didn't know why.

44:01And Kodak was an enormous company at this point, if it was Kodak. And someone eventually brought in an external firm to say, what's going on? Why is our process so screwed up? Well, we only cut checks on Tuesdays. Why do we only cut checks on Tuesdays? We're multinational. And as they do the digging, they realize that in the company's formative years, they had a part-time bookkeeper who only came on Tuesdays. And so checks got cut on Tuesdays. And that became canon for the organization as opposed to evolving the process. And we probably have a million checks we cut on Tuesdays, things that sit inside all of our organizations that we don't know why we do them.

44:35And now it's time to start questioning them. Now, every leader must bring empathy to companies. In fact, it has to be on your tool belt, as Michael explains. When I come into an organization and they say, tell us about your business, and one of the first things we say is, well, we work in this design thinking approach called Applied Empathy, the eyebrows raise almost immediately. And people are like, what are these hippies talking about? But what's interesting is some of the most switched on organizations that have accepted this and actually really not even accepted, but embraced it, have been some of the less expected suspects.

45:07So one of them is West Point. And so we've been working with the military academy for over a year now. And the superintendent of that school, who's a three-star general, he's a career military guy, as crisp and as sharp of a thinker and a strategic person as I've ever met. And when I first met him and we started talking about what we do, and I've got long hair and a beard and I'm talking about empathy on the campus. I'm a sight to behold as I walk around there sometimes, for sure. My ID is checked multiple times. But the soup said to me, empathy is the number one skill any leader who leaves here with needs to have in their tool set.

45:47Absolutely. And that accolade or that acknowledgement from someone like him was something that I have been able to use in conversations with other organizations. I can sit across the table from a Fortune 10 company CEO and say, look, if you don't think empathy is going to be important to your business, answer this question to me. How well do you understand your consumers? And, you know, they'll usually say they have some sense of their consumer and they'll talk about what it is and say, okay, what about your other consumers? And I say, well, what other consumers? And I said, well, you just described your end consumer, right?

46:21But there's probably 15 different end consumers, if we're being honest, right? Because they all kind of break down into subseconds. But then you also have your employees who consume content and information from you every day and consume the culture that you perpetuate inside this organization. you've got shareholders, you've got the media you've got potential new employees that you want to recruit away from someone else to come work here. All of those are your consumers and are you really thinking and do you really make the effort to understand them and all of their disparate needs and then back that into strategy that you're building for the business.

46:52And then usually you can hear the crickets in the room because it goes quiet for a moment and then people are like okay yeah this is actually something that is not as woo-woo as I thought there's going to be some real heavy insight work that's going to come along with this. And I will say, like I said earlier, it takes a little while. It's usually slower before you pick up pace with this, because it does take more work to go gather that information and bring it into the process. But the companies that have been doing it with us for over a few months start to see everything shift, not just the bottom line, which does happen, but also the employee retention changes.

47:28And employee satisfaction is on the rise. And even, you know, you can look at a drop in complaints to HR because people are handling their conversations with people better, right? So there's all these knock-on effects. Paul joins us to explain how empathy works when a person has bad luck. It doesn't work when the person wins the lottery and then gets promoted instead of you. Adam Smith talks about empathy. He calls it sympathy. He calls it empathy in the course of intimate relationships. And he is such a smart guy. He's just a kind of repressed Scotsman. And I'm kind of a repressed Canadian. So I have this sort of chemistry with Adam Smith.

48:04And he says, sometimes you can absorb the pleasure of somebody else. If it's your kid, if it's somebody you love. But a lot of times, somebody comes up to you and says, you know, great news. I got the promotion you always wanted. You know, if it's zero sum, their pleasure will not creep up to you. While their sadness might. Adam Smith advises somebody with real good news. And you have real good news. you want to tell your friends to tone it down a bit because there's always social comparison. Empathy is always sort of tainted by envy. I mean, if you have good news for a friend and you want your friend to really be happy for you, maybe temper it somewhat.

48:42And it depends on your nature, on the nature of relationship with your friend. But Adam Smith's insight, and this is like in the 1750s, and he would have never put it this way, but is that we're primates. We're hierarchical social creatures. And so whenever we hear some news, we can't help but ask the question, where does this put me? Where do I fall on the ladder? If Bill Gates makes more money, that's fine. That's not going to affect me one way or another. But if my office mate gets a big raise or a big demotion, that affects me. And it's very human to think in terms of that way. The moral isn't that we can never feel happy for our friends.

49:19Of course, we feel happy for our friends all the time. It's that when their success connects with where we stand in the world, that makes it more difficult. And on the flip side, to the extent we could take them and put them into our in-group, our category, make their victory our victory, then we could enjoy it wholeheartedly. Social psychologists call us a Berg, B-I-R-G, basking in reflected glory. So this guy down the street from me, like 10 houses, got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. And I'm thinking, cool, it's like my accomplishment too, because he lives next to me. So we can do that.

49:59Certainly, I think great happens to my kid. That's a no brain. That's easy. Because my kid is me and I'm my kid. And so it reflects. It's with friends. It's just, again, it's not that you can't do it. It's that it's complicated. Before you can have empathy for others, you must first have an understanding of yourself. In this next clip, Michael Ventura tells the story of a physical injury to make his point. That foundation is so critical because if we immediately leap to trying to understand everyone else but don't know where we're leaping from, it makes it quite difficult. And I had a personal journey getting to this thought myself, which was when pre-empathy being a thing for Sub Rosa, when I had first started the business, the stress of that was significant.

50:44and I would walk in the door at 24 years old, 25 years old and see a group of 50 people who I was responsible for. I had to make sure that if I did not close that deal, if I did not manage the business the right way, if I did not, did not, did not, they can't pay their rent. They can't pick up groceries tonight. I'm responsible for these people. Or at least that's what I felt at the time. I've since gotten a little more distance from that. But at the time, it really was crippling. and one day I was changing the water cooler in the office and the next thing I remember I just went white and I woke up and I was on the floor and the thing was glug, glug, glug, water all over me and I had herniated a couple discs in my back and literally couldn't walk and when I went to the hospital their recommendation was we're going to put rods in your back, we're going to fuse your discs it's going to be this whole procedure you'll have arthritic pain the rest of your life but you'll be able to walk nothing anyone wants to hear No bueno.

51:40Yeah. And so I kind of left in sort of a huff. I would say it's probably a mild way of putting it. But I got - And you were a young man of the time. Yeah, 25. Yeah. And I got a walker and I left. And it was miserable. And a friend of mine said, you should try acupuncture. I don't think it's going to fix everything. But before you go get under the knife, see what happens. And so I went. And it was the first time I'd ever had an alternative medicine treatment of any kind. And if I went in and my pain was at 100, I left at 99. I didn't leave at like 50, right? Like it didn't change me overnight, but I saw a crack in the door and I went back again and then I went back again.

52:21And then after like the fourth or fifth time, the acupuncturist said to me, so what do you do to manage your stress? And my only answers were drink and do drugs. It's the American way. And like I just, I didn't have a good clean answer to that. And he said, well, your back issue isn't really a back issue. It's a stress issue, in my opinion. And that I think if you can learn how to manage your stress better and comport yourself in a different way, a lot of that pressure you're putting on your shoulders and metaphorically on your back will start to lessen. And so fast forward, you know, nine months of that and Tai Chi and finding some meditation that worked for me and this and that.

53:01And I had no back pain and I had no surgery. And I was able to manage my physical body by managing my interior body a bit more. And that led you down the empathy pathway. Yeah, exactly. It showed me that if we don't have that internal foundation and understanding for what's actually going on inside us, there's no way we're going to be of service to someone else. And so that empathy for me, which sometimes psychologists I've talked to have said, you can't have empathy for yourself. You can only have empathy for other people. And like, yes, I guess I'm sure technically that's true, but you can have understanding for facets of yourself, right?

53:35And this was a facet of me that I didn't understand, that I was blind to until a physical injury made me pay attention to it. Now we recognize that empathy can be cultivated. And Michael shares how. I do a check-in for myself every morning as part of a larger like Tai Chi and other things that I like to do for my physical body. But I do probably about a 15-minute check-in in the morning with myself to just sort of get a sense of how am I feeling? Where's my energy level today? Is there something that's nagging at me that I haven't addressed because I don't want to? Which is sometimes the way things go, right?

54:09It's like, oh, there's that thing. I don't want to send that email about that thing. But today's the day you've got to send that goddamn email, man, and get it over with. And just make sure you get that monkey off your back. And so I think about those types of things, but I attach them to actions. right like even if the action is i'm not going to do something about it today that's an okay action but i've decided to i'm not ignoring it i've made a conscious decision yeah and so i think that's a that's an easy first one um because we all can do it and i had a during my learning of tai chi i went to my uh tai chi master master ru who's got a shout out in the book he's an amazing man i said to him, Master Wu, I love Tai Chi.

54:53It does so much for me, but I don't have the time. I can't do it every day. And he said, wake up earlier. And then he just walked away. And I was like, oh yeah, I guess you're right. So for those of you who are hearing this, I'm like, I don't have 15 minutes in the morning to check in with myself. If you can't give yourself 15 minutes for yourself and your own personal development and your own sanity sometimes, then maybe you should think about your priorities a bit more because 15 minutes isn't that much. If you feel you're robotic or have been told that you seem stiff, your empathy will make people not only more comfortable around you, but will seek you out.

55:27This is why it is important to develop, regardless of how much you think you exude, work on developing it as a tool. Now, this is one of the many tools in our X-Factor Accelerator toolkit that we spend time helping you develop. We've understood its power from the beginning of our work, and that's why we spend so much time discussing it on this show. All right, this week's shout out goes to David. And well, I'm going to let David tell you for himself. Hi, my name is Dave and I am a senior software engineer. Art of Charm has helped me advance my career because it gave me the confidence and permission to go out and interview.

56:01Within four years of taking the program, no joke, 3x my salary. My favorite AOC concept was that I can build my own belief system. I am not tied to the negative doubt and self-talk that was in my head. I can push forward with who I want it to be. To anybody thinking about joining, I'd say you won't regret it. Just do it. Trust the process and you'll have the life that you deserve. Thank you, David. And it's been an honor and a pleasure to work with you over the years. Now, if you've listened this far, my guess is because you want more out of life and to finally succeed at work, love, and life.

56:34And if that's the case, then join us, the Art of Charm team and hundreds of other people just like you who are experiencing breakthrough conversations, supercharging their confidence, and growing an incredible network inside our world-famous X-Factor Accelerator program. The X-Factor Accelerator is where high-achieving, like-minded people meet, strategize, and unlock their hidden X-Factor to make sure they get the most out of life's opportunities, and finally unlock those doors keeping you from success. Weekly implementation sessions with opportunities to practice your conversation skills, rapport building, supercharge your charisma through powerful communication and unlock the charm to attract the right people in your life.

57:16Imagine what you can accomplish with coaching and mentorship from the Art of Charm. What are you waiting for? Join us today at unlockyourxfactor.com. Now, before we head out, could you do us and the entire Art of Charm team a huge favor? Head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. it'll mean the world to us and it lets others find the show and before we head out a huge thank you to our producers michael harold and eric montgomery all right everybody go out there and have a wonderful week yeah i remember you you were the bad boy you threw your love away like it was just a toy And you solved the world You solved a tragedy Cause you had your taste All black on the yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh, yeah, I remember you Yeah, but I remember you But I dellered you away