Track the Feeling. Find the Need. Find the Words.
The Empathy Set® is a card-based tool for the slow practice of tracking what's present in you. It helps you name your feelings, find the need, and share both with care.
✓ Find the feeling. We tend to reach for the easiest word, and the easiest word is often a story about what someone else did. The cards help you notice what else is present.
✓ Find the need. Every feeling points toward something you need. Naming the need is what changes what becomes possible in the conversation.
✓ Find the words. Say what's true for you, with care for how it lands. Clear language is what allows another person to meet you, even when the conversation is hard.
Explore the Work
Emotional Literacy
Explore the difference between storied feelings and present feelings, and why one starts you on the trail and the other gets you home.
Understanding Triggers
Discover the difference between a trigger and being triggered, and why being triggered is always an echo from the past.
Empathy in Practice
Empathy is the discipline of reading what is actually there in another person, imagining their world, and staying alongside them with your own ground intact.
Listening and Connection
Hearing them is not enough. Listening is done when they know they have been heard.
Difficult Conversations
How to speak the truth and stay in the room, when silence or force both feel like the only options.
Why This Work Matters
Most conflict isn't about bad intent. It's about not having the words for what we feel and need.
When the right words aren't available, we reach for the easiest ones. I felt disrespected. He doesn't care. They're impossible. Each one names something real. But each one also carries a story about what someone else did, and the story keeps your attention locked outward. By the time you speak, the case has hardened, and the conversation goes somewhere neither of you intended.
Most of us were never taught the alternative. We grew up with a working emotional vocabulary of five or six words, enough to get us through ordinary days but not nearly enough for the moments when precision matters most.
The Empathy Set® offers a slower practice. The cards give you the vocabulary to track what else you're feeling, name the need it points to, and share both in a way another person can meet.
Used over time, the language they teach becomes part of how you notice your own experience. From that ground, more conscious ways of relating become possible.
The Empathy Set (Original Cards)
56 feelings cards and 56 needs cards, the original deck for finding the words when they're hardest to reach.
✔ Simple to use, on your own or with others
✔ Clear, precise language for feelings and needs
✔ Made for everyday conversations that matter
Best for: getting started quickly
$24.97
The Empathy Set® (Definitions Edition)
56 feelings cards and 56 needs cards with definitions, and the edition most people choose.
✔ Deeper emotional clarity
✔ A wider vocabulary, with a definition and four synonyms per card
✔ Helps you find the exact word, not just the nearest
Best for: going deeper and refining expression
$28.97
A Dictionary of Feelings and Needs
A reference guide to 108 feelings and 108 needs, for deepening your understanding.
✔ Definitions and synonyms in one place
✔ Helps you build clear "I" statements
✔ The natural companion to the cards
Best for: learning and reflection
Hardcopy for $12.97 (most popular)
The Empathy Guide
A Practical Path to Presence, Understanding, and Connection
A thoughtful 53-page guide exploring:
why empathy matters in relationships and communication,
how emotional reactions shape difficult conversations,
the role of feelings and needs in emotional awareness,
and practical ways to build empathy, connection, and relational clarity.
Drawn from more than thirty years of mediation, training, and emotional literacy work, this revised edition brings together practical insight, reflection, and real-world communication tools you can return to over time.
Inside the Guide
What Empathy Is
Empathy vs Sympathy
Why Empathy Matters in Relationships
Feelings, Needs, and Emotional Awareness
How to Empathize During Difficult Conversations
Self-Empathy and Emotional Regulation
Empathy Under Pressure
What Empathy Does — and Does Not — Mean
Go Deeper with the Free Empathy Set® App
The Empathy Set® App helps you apply the cards to real situations.
It guides you step-by-step to identify your feelings, understand your needs, and prepare for meaningful conversations.
✔ Work through real situations
Name what you’re feeling and what you need.
✔ Understand both sides
Consider what the other person may be feeling and needing.
✔ Communicate clearly
Turn insight into “I” statements and constructive dialogue.
Free to use. No cost. No limits.
John Ford
Created by John Ford
I've spent over 30 years helping people navigate conflict, first as a human rights attorney in Namibia, now as a workplace mediator and trainer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Across all of it, one pattern kept surfacing: the people in front of me weren't lacking goodwill. They were lacking the language to say what actually mattered to them.
The Empathy Set® was created to give them that language.
Talking Sticks
Simple tools for more respectful, structured conversation. Whoever holds the stick speaks, and everyone else listens.
Clarifies who is speaking
Builds listening into the conversation itself
Creates space for every voice
Zulu Beaded Talking Stick for $39.97 | Giraffe NVC Talking Stick for $19.97
Empathy Explorer
A guided tool to help you work through difficult conversations using feelings and needs.