🎙 55. From Self-Diagnosed Sociopath to Empathy Queen: Why It's Worthwhile to Train Soft Skills via Embodiment

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Episode Published on December 19, 2023

Transcript:

🎙 intro

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Welcome to The Spiritual 9-5 podcast, where the vibe is to be kind and stay in our work always. I’m your host, Marie Groover, founder of Essential Teams and The Corporate Psychic – two businesses that are here to awaken the soul of corporate and the world that we live in. It is to reconnect us with our shared human experience and feelings of fulfillment and joy while getting meaningful shit done. And this podcast is one way that we do just that.

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Today’s episode is about Empathy.

Empathy is mastering the knowing of what is yours and what is someone else’s and skillfully responding emotionally and intellectually based on the circumstance and the human in front of you. 

Empathy is trainable – it’s not a muscle or a brain type that some people have and others don’t.

It’s worthwhile to take the time to develop it in ourselves, our schools, businesses organizations and political groups

And, embodiment is the only way. We cannot intellectualize or storytell around empathy to get it right. Getting it is not enough. 

I’m going to talk about how fully understanding how people feel and where they are coming from is not empathy and how without total empathy, we manipulate, rather than move. Coming from a formerly self-diagnosed sociopath to an empathy queen, or someone who has worked on unlocking and nurturing her empathetic nature.

So let’s get to it.

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When I was in college, I studied philosophy and I was interested in the intersection of philosophy and human behavior. I wanted to know why we behave the way we do and then if was justified to behave that way, or if we ought to be behaving differently. I studied philosophy because I love wisdom, always have. And truly, I wanted to know the best way that I could live my own life. At that time of my life, I was really concerned and interested in living the “right way”. I was obsessed with ethics and morals and again, how we ought to be living and being.

Fast forward to today, btw, and I am still very much interested in these things. However, today, I place a lot more emphasis on joy and integrity on an individual level, vs what is right or wrong at scale. I don’t think I believe in objective right and wrong anymore.

I think there are so many truths and ways of being and situational variances that I am so much less rigid in my thinking and my philosophies than 12 or so years ago.

All of that being said, back in my undergrad career, I dove deep into neuroscience, evolutionary ethics, psychology and in my research, I was really interested in the way that our brains shape our behavior. Specifically, bad behavior. And I wanted to know, to what extent can we be held accountable. Disclaimer, this podcast is absolutely not about accountability or good vs. bad behavior. This is all context.

So, for example, I read a case study about a man who executed a public shooting. This man deeply believed that something was wrong with him and so with his body, he left a note asking for science to please check him out. Turns out, he had brain tumor. And turns out there are a lot of instances of brain tumors, lesions, injuries or traumatic accidents to the brain – instances where something physical and out of human control changes the state of the brain, and a massive shift in behavior, character, qualities will arise.

And it works both ways btw – there are also reported cases where a person will develop a brain tumor or suffer a traumatic brain injury and they become nicer, kinder, more empathetic people. It’s really fascinating.

If this is interesting, btw. You can check out the work of the late Oliver Sacks and then just start to go down the rabbit hole wherever it takes you.

Down my former college rabbit hole, I had a phase where I got kind of obsessed with sociopaths and psychopaths. I remember reading a book called the sociopath next door and was shocked to find how many sociopaths walk among us. And for a while, I was actually quite convinced that everyone was a sociopath LOL. I was really in it yall.

I was so in it, that I remember sitting one of my roommates down and telling him that I believed that our other roommate had sociopathic tendencies. And then I remember even reading the list of sociopathic descriptors TO MY ROOMMATE IN QUESTION, good lord Marie what was I thinking? And, I am so sorry, to this roommate. And, I am so thankful at his grace for just like, calling me cute and letting me roll with this.

I’m sharing this embarrassing moment because I want you to really feel my obsession so that you can really feel the irony and the embarrassment for what is to come in this story.

Fast forward a couple of years. I’ve graduated with my degree in Philosophy. I am working toward a masters degree in Computer Information Systems. I am living in Atlanta and working at a health technology company,. And this company was the first that I had the pleasure to work with, who did employee personality insights testing. For anyone listening who isn’t in corporate and hasn’t taken a test like this, it’s like astrology or human design for the office – AKA enneagram, meyers briggs, discover insights, etc. etc. etc. Some of these insights testings are amazing, some of them are duds. There’s science and research behind many of these. And personally, I’m a huge fan because I love anything that can tell me more about myself and more about the people around me.

Obviously, I am a coach. I work in personal development. I coach entrepreneurs, executives, teams and even organizations. And what I’m about to tell you could have even been the birth of my journey into personal and leadership development.

I don’t remember what this particular assessment was called. But what I do remember is that I scored a 100%, like 10/10 for being able to understand where people are coming from, how they are feeling and why. So, I demonstrated a deep understanding of people and how people work and feel and interact and their circumstance and motivations and desires.

AND, I scored a 0/10 for empathy.

I remember being SHOCKED. I worked on a data analytics team – at the time I was an analyst – and so empathy wasn’t necessarily like the top priority of our team. We were all pretty numbers driven and science driven and I wouldn’t say that soft skills were something we cared about developing on this team. I remember my boss making a joke about it. She said something like “So you understand how people feel and why, but you just don’t care.”

And we all laughed. I laughed. But I remember thinking, “shit, this isn’t okay.”

I had all these questions for myself.

Wasn’t the reason that I was OBSESSED with human behavior and how we ought to be living because I cared about people? Did I actually not care about people at all? Did I only care about people in the ways that they could advance my career or life? Did I only care about control? What was going on here?

Was I a sociopath??!

Around this time, I ironically also read an article about a neuroscientist who actually took fMRI scans of the brain and could identify people who were sociopathic, or had sociopathic tendencies, according to their brains. And he scanned 100s of people. One day he scanned himself. He found that his brain actually had that same pattern. When he wrote the article he talked about nature vs. nurture and how he was fortunate enough to grow up in a home that taught him how to love and be empathetic. And he speculated that if he had not grown up in that loving environment, he might have turned out differently.

I was like – is this me? Of course I wanted more than anything to get my brain scanned. But that wasn’t the most accessible thing for me at that time in my life. So I kind of just moved on and accepted that maybe I lacked the ability to be empathetic, to have empathy.

But this assessment result really ate at me. And I actually started studying people in my life who were genuinely kind and empathetic. I’m super fortunate to have grown up with an angel role model of a best friend. Her name is Andrea.

Andrea is the kindest, nicest, most positive person I have ever known. I remember in high school I convinced her to run cross country with me and she hated it, but she ran our entire first practice with a smile on her face. She quit, lovingly, after that.

She is someone who ALWAYS assumes positive intent in others. She is someone who ALWAYS greets people with love and understanding and genuine care. She is someone who is always working to find the connection point.

I’ve known her now for 22 years and despite the circumstance, despite the human being in front of her – 100% of the time, she is unconditionally loving and fully free of judgment.

To paint this picture brighter – at the peak of this country’s division over politics and covid and all the things – Andrea was the most connective person I have ever witnessed. She took time to understand where people are coming from who have very, very different views than hers and she loves them all anyways.

She meets people where they are and she feels what they feel alongside them. Empathy is her superpower and literally since I have known her, this is what I have witnessed.

And, I have to pause here for a moment, because oftentimes when we talk about empathy, in the spiritual space we talk about being an empath. It’s the natural ability to feel what others are feeling. And in this space, we often talk about protecting our energy from other people. And spoiler alert – I am not a sociopath, but I am an empath, and when I was at that health technology company, I was fully protected and cut off from the world around me. I knew how people felt, but I actually did not care. The way that I grew up, it was actually safer for me to be and live that way. So putting up these really strong boundaries was a survival mechanism for me.

And this is important because mastering empathy is not about simply feeling what others feel, or knowing where they are coming from and why. It’s also not about disconnecting yourself from others and protecting your energy.

It’s about mastering the knowing of what is yours and what is someone else’s and skillfully responding emotionally and intellectually based on the circumstance and the human in front of you.

Meeting others in empathy does not make you a pushover. It does not mean that you appease everyone else’s desires or wants or needs.

It simply means that you see them. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone else is to see them, while you hand them back their own side of the street.

It’s trusting the person in front of you to lead themselves through whatever it is that they are holding.

Mastering empathy is mastering boundaries.

And in my early 20s, this was something that I didn’t yet understand.

So back when I scored a 0 out of 10 on the empathy scale, I remember reflecting on Andrea’s natural ways of being. And I remember beginning to emulate those ways of being. I used to ask myself regularly “what would Andrea do?” and over time, something really fascinating happened – my philosophy of life and way of being changed dramatically.

I went from general indifference toward strangers and slight irritation when someone around me was not getting it, to desiring to be a light in people’s days. I remember wanting to never be the reason that someone frowned, if I could help it. And I don’t mean that I never wanted to deliver difficult messages or engage in conflict conversations.

I mean that when I ordered a coffee, I wanted to genuinely be cheerful. That, when I checked out at the grocery store, I wasn’t letting a rough day in the office spill over into my interaction with the cashier. That, when I came across someone new, I was a clean slate, so that I could be of genuine interaction and connection with them.

I started really caring about how I affected the world and how I made other people feel and what the quality of my connections were. I started genuinely caring about others. Empathy became second nature to me.

Now, at the time I took the test, I did not know that we were malleable beings, or at least that we are as malleable as we are. And so I assumed that I didn’t have the empathy muscle and would never have it. I really thought like, how ironic, I am probably a sociopath.

Very dramatic, I know.

But fast forward to my days at Microsoft – not long after I started, I took a similar test. My score was 10/10.

So in a matter of maybe 2 years, I went from 0 out of 10 in empathy to 10 out of 10 in empathy.

That’s a pretty dramatic change. And I think it’s proof that Aristotle was on to something in his book, the Nicomachean Ethics.

In it, he says this – if you want to be a painter, you paint. If you want to be a virtuous person, you do virtuous things. Over time, however you choose to be, it will become a habit – it will become ingrained in you, like second nature. I.E. if you do virtuous things over and over and over again, your character will be of virtue.

Modern manifestors and super coaches and neuroscientists now say the same thing btw.

And I say this – if you want to train empathy, or any quality oor way of being, any characteristic or virtue, you have to practice.

You just can’t just talk about it, intellectualize it, or understand it. You have to do it, you have to be it.

This is important because so much of what we do is get out of bodies and into our minds. We intellectualize our feelings, our experiences – we explain things away. We think we understand so we move on.

But remember, I studied human behavior to the extent that I got REALLY good at understanding where people were coming from, yet I could not empathize with them. Which means, that at that moment in my career, I was probably a master manipulator, not a true motivator or leader.

And how many people in the corporate world can you think of, right now, who act and lead and manage in that same exact way? Too many.

And they are probably good people with good intentions. I had the best intentions, but I was still missing the mark.

You might have the best intentions, but you too might be missing the mark.

And missing the mark can be tremendously harmful to yourself and the people around you.

How do you impact the world around you? What is the quality of your connection with people in your life, strangers that you come into contact with, humans that you work for, with, or manage?

And what do we do about it?

This is the juicy bit and the entire point of this podcast episode: Empathy can be trained. But it must be practiced. It cannot be intellectualized, understood or taught in a way that puts the power of empathy into context or “makes sense”.

It needs to be experienced and embodied and practiced for it to take.

Empathy, I believe, is also a basic requirement of the full human experience. If we are not empathetic with others, we are probably not aware and compassionate with ourselves. We are probably are not connected truly with ourselves. We probably are not feeling connected, truly, with anyone else.

And if you are like young me, and you think: I just don’t have that muscle. Or you might think “so and so at work just doesn’t have that muscle.”

Don’t settle there. Figure out why. Find ways to practice kindness and empathy and compassion over and over again.

To unpack a little bit of what was happening with me, for context – I grew up with massive regular and consistent trauma in my home. I learned that it was not safe to feel what other people were feeling and that it was not safe to extend empathy, or it would be taken advantage of or used against me. I learned to completely shut the feeling part of my experience out as a way to protect myself. But I was always perceptive. Actually, knowing how other people were feeling was also necessary for my safety and survival as a kid – but I could not allow myself to feel. And that pattern extended into my early adulthood. Actually, I would say that I was stunted in that area of growth. So I had to develop it.

And I’m absolutely not saying that anyone who is an asshole or a jerk in the office or lacking soft skills had a similar experience, but I am saying that we don’t know. We don’t know the deep and complex inner experience of anyone else. And we can’t write that off.

It’s worthwhile to train soft skills, to train empathy in ourselves and in our offices and in our schools and organizations.

AND, I offer a training experience that does just that. It’s called from IQ to EQ and it’s developed for small corporate teams and large organizations.

Remember, it’s not intellectualizing. It’s not even storytelling that cracks the seed of empathy or soft skill development in people, in us. It’s practice. It’s intentionally experiencing that which we want to develop.

So that’s it. That’s our show. From self-diagnosed sociopath to empathy queen, I invite you to check out my work at www.youressentialteam.com, or if you are into spiritual shit, to check me out at www.thecorppsychic.com, that’s also where you can find podcast transcripts and many super juicy resources, that are also helpful in training your integrity.

And, thank you.

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🎙 outro

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Spiritual 9-5 Podcast. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE share this episode or your favorite episode or the show link itself with everyone that you think would resonate. It makes such a difference and it means the world to me. 

And, connect with me on LinkedIn. I am not really on other social media platforms, but you can connect directly on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you what you enjoy or how this podcast has affected you. So, don’t be shy.

Thank you again. Until next time, good day.