Emotional Intelligence for IT Professionals

Strategies to enhance empathy

Empathy is the ability to sense other people's emotions and feelings.

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between affective empathy--the ability to mirror the sensations and feelings we get in response to others' emotions and cognitive empathy--the ability to identify and understand other peoples' emotions by perspective taking--putting 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. We human beings are, literally, wired to connect because ...