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Personal growth: Is empathy intuitive or learned? April 20, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth.
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For a program of personal growth and development to be complete, experts tell us that it is important for us to work on fostering the moral attribute or virtue of empathy within ourselves

Within the concept of personal development or self-improvement we could define empathy as being the ability to recognize, understand, and appreciate the feelings or emotions being experienced by another person, or any living entity that has feelings and emotions.

This Personal Development Potential post presents some ideas, or factors to consider, concerning the quality of empathy, rather than trying to provide definitive scientific answers on this abstract human ability.

A key question is whether we possess the attribute of empathy intuitively, or do we need to undergo a variety of circumstances, experiences, and /or education in order to have this capability.

Questions relating to non-intuitive empathy:

These questions involve the paradigm of personal experience as opposed to non-personal experience.

A few possibilities or examples:

(1) Do we have to have gone through a period of poverty in our own lives to appreciate the pain of people who are poor?
(2) Do we have to have or have had some personal mental or physical limitation in order to sympathize with a person who is mentally or physically challenged?
(3) Do we need to have lost a loved one in order to have empathy with someone who has suffered a personal loss?
(4) Do we have to have failed with an important financial project in order to empathize with a friend who has gone bankrupt?

Alternatively, can experience with opposites create empathy?

Turning around the above questions 1-4 we can ask:

(1) Can being financially secure help us to appreciate or understand the difficulties and emotions induced by poverty?
(2) Can being perfectly healthy mentally and physically help us to empathize better with people who are not?
(3) Can never having experienced grief help us to appreciate someone else’s loss?
(4) Can being highly successful in our lives help us to have empathy for the person who has failed with their major life-projects?

Such questions unfortunately, are just that – they are not answers.

But hopefully, sympathetic feelings and human decency are inherent or intuitive, and this, combined with our work on self-improvement, will imbue us with the character attribute of genuine empathy.

Appreciation and understanding through opposites

There is an interesting viewpoint on the generative quality of opposites expressed in the Tao Te Ching, as translated by David Hinton:

All beneath heaven know beauty is beauty
only because there’s ugliness,
and knows good is good,
because there’s evil.

Being and Absence give birth to one another,
difficult and easy complete one another,
long and short measure one another,
music and noise harmonize one another,
before and after follow one another. (1)

1) The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, Mencius, Translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, California, 2013

(Hinton provides an excellent overview of these classics, which helps in understanding the thought process of each of these Chinese ancient sages.

Further reading:

There is an extensive scholarly article on empathy on the Wikipedia website at the following URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

A personal growth essential: Acting with integrity April 19, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth.
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As we develop our program of personal growth and development, the concept of integrity must be one of the key building blocks in its foundation.

In terms of the self-improvement paradigm, integrity can be defined succinctly as “…a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes.” (1)

Or more extensively, “In discussions on behavior and morality, an individual is said to possess the virtue of integrity if the individual’s actions are based upon an internally consistent framework of principles. These principles should uniformly adhere to sound logical axioms or postulates. One can describe a person as having ethical integrity to the extent that the individual’s actions, beliefs, methods, measures and principles all derive from a single core group of values.” (1)

Integrity also has the underlying broad meaning of solidity and structural cohesiveness acting as a concrete or abstract component of strength holding something together. For example, we may say that a building has structural integrity.

Another implied meaning is that of high moral values and principles. We may describe a woman or a man, or a company, for that matter ,as “having integrity.” The implication is they are “good” people, and consistently operate from principle.

However, it is worth remembering that the principles-framework that someone operates within might not necessarily be “good” in relative terms to the well-being of others affected by those principles.

A person or a company can be acting within its principles, and therefore have “integrity” but could also be paying its workers low wages – but, they are being consistent and operating by principles (cost-cutting and shareholder value), and therefore technically have integrity.

However, for our purposes, let’s assume:

(1) That all of us working on making ourselves better persons through the concept of integrity are doing so with high moral purpose, and;
(2) That we greatly value the concept of consistency in our thoughts and actions

And overall, we realize that unless integrity is the foundation of our self-improvement program it will, in time, be weakened through its inconsistencies.

That being the case, our efforts to acquire the personal attribute of integrity would include the following, to name just a few:

* We don’t say one thing and do another; we are not hypocrites
* We keep our word; we deliver on our promises
* We treat everyone equally; the store manager and the sales clerk alike
* We try to react to our good times and our bad times with emotional balance
* We act in a way in which people believe they can “count” on us
* Our private actions are consistent with the image we project in public

In all of this, however, it’s important for us to realize that integrity or consistency should not mean total inflexibility. We should be willing to adapt our principles in specific circumstances where common sense and morality tells us that it’s the correct and proper thing to do.

As Winston Churchill said, “…never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

(1) These quotations about integrity are from a Wikipedia article on integrity which can be found at the following URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity