Emotional Intelligence for IT Professionals

Empathy

Empathy is generally defined as the ability to sense other people's emotions and feelings. Contemporary researchers often differentiate between affective empathy--our ability to mirror the sensations and feelings we get in response to others' emotions and cognitive empathy--our ability to identify and understand other peoples' emotions by perspective taking, to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. When you do that, you gain an understanding of why a person feels or behaves the way they do and what triggered that feeling or behavior. Then and only then can you employ the other emotional intelligence tools in order to influence or manage the emotions and behaviors of others. "Ok, Emilia! But, I don't need empathy to work in the sandbox. ...