The Practice of Empathy: How We Stand Alongside Another Person

A few years ago, I mediated a dispute between two senior leaders. I will call them Sarah and Marcus. They had not spoken in six months. Each carried a long list of what the other had done wrong, and each list felt conclusive to the one holding it. They had agreed to mediation because both could see the toxic effect their standoff was having on the team around them, and because the president of the company had told them: work it out, or both of you leave.

My practice in mediation is to begin with a joint orientation, then to meet privately with each party before bringing them back together. The work of the private sessions is to give each person unbridled empathy, the experience of being received without judgment. By the time we came back together, each had been heard once, fully, by me.

In the joint session that followed I reached for the cards. The Empathy Set®, the deck of feeling and needs cards I developed for exactly this kind of work, gives a vocabulary to draw from when feelings and needs are hard to find on your own. We did an acknowledgement round. Each took a turn to share how the situation had impacted them, and with my support and the cards in their hands, each named the seven feelings and seven needs that mattered most.

What happened in those rounds was what I have come to expect in this work. When Sarah finished naming her feelings and needs, Marcus leaned forward and said, "I think I am starting to understand you." Not as a strategy. Not because he had been instructed to. Because something in the room had shifted, and what had been impossible at the beginning had become possible.

That is empathy doing its work. Not as a technique I had imposed, but as a capacity they had recovered for themselves.

What Empathy Actually Is

Most people, when they reach for empathy, reach first for the image of stepping into another's shoes. The image is a good one, and worth keeping, because it points at something real about what empathy asks of us. But the image gets misused more often than not. The common move is to imagine what you would feel in their place, with your reactions, your hurts, your interpretations. The empathic move is different. You imagine what they are feeling there, with their history, their stakes, their way of reading the world. You are not asking what would happen to you in their shoes. You are asking what is happening to them in theirs.

Empathy, in the way I have come to understand it across twenty-five years of mediation, training, and meeting people in their most difficult moments, is the capacity to sense what another person is feeling and needing from within their frame of reference, and to communicate that understanding back in a form they can recognize as accurate. In A Dictionary of Feelings and Needs, the reference work I developed for naming inner experience, I defined empathy this way: "the need for oneself and others to understand and share another's feelings and needs from their perspective, communicating this understanding with sensitivity, and responding compassionately." The phrase that matters most at the front of that definition is "the need." Empathy is not only a service we offer outward. It is something we ourselves require.

This is close to what Carl Rogers described as the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, "as if one were the person." The phrase that matters most in Rogers's definition is the "as if." Empathy does not mean losing yourself in another's experience. It means temporarily entering it while never quite forgetting that you are you. When the "as if" collapses, empathy tips into something else.

Theresa Wiseman, working from nursing literature, names four defining attributes I have found useful: to see the world as another sees it, to suspend judgment, to understand their feelings, and to communicate that understanding back. The last is the one most people skip. Empathy that stays inside your head is not yet empathy. It becomes empathy when the other person knows they have been received.

Marshall Rosenberg, whose work on Nonviolent Communication has shaped this field for decades, added a further layer. Beneath every feeling lies a need, and empathy is not complete until it has received both. Feelings tell you something matters. Needs tell you what it is about. Reflect only the feeling, and you have offered partial empathy. Reflect feeling and need together, and you reach the person at the depth where empathy actually lands.

Empathy and Its Confusions

For empathy to do its work, it has to be distinguished from a cluster of look-alikes that crowd it out. Each wears empathy's clothes for a moment. None does empathy's work.

The most consequential confusion is between empathy and sympathy. The two sound like cousins. They are not. Sympathy, in its modern usage, often means feeling sorry for someone, which places you above their suffering rather than alongside it. Even in its older, gentler sense of shared feeling, sympathy still draws on your experience rather than theirs. A friend tells you she did not get the job she had been hoping for. The sympathetic response is, "Oh, that is awful. I was crushed when I got rejected last year too." Notice what happens. Your experience enters. The focus shifts. The empathic response is, "I imagine you are devastated. You put so much into this. That is a real loss." The focus stays with her. Sympathy draws on your story. Empathy enters hers. Sympathy can open the door. Empathy is what walks through it.

Empathy is not agreement. Many people withhold empathy because they worry that reflecting another's feelings amounts to endorsing the behavior or the view. It does not. You can see someone clearly without seeing things their way. You can understand their experience from inside their frame and still hold different conclusions. Empathy is the attempt at accurate understanding.

Empathy is not fixing. Someone shares something difficult, and before they have finished speaking, you are offering solutions, strategies, action steps. The intention may be care. The impact is interruption. Fixing often says, "I cannot tolerate your discomfort, so let me make it stop." It skips past the need to be heard and lands on the need to be helped, which may not be what the person came for. Sometimes people do not want solutions. They want to be met.

Empathy is not fawning. This confusion is less often named, and it matters most of all. Fawning is the fourth survival response, alongside fight, flight, and freeze. It shows up as appeasing, accommodating, making yourself smaller to keep the peace. Fawning can look like empathy from the outside, with the nodding and validating and smoothing over. But the person who fawns has lost their own ground. They are no longer offering empathy. They are offering the disappearance of any view that might create friction. Genuine empathy requires two footings, theirs and yours. The moment you abandon your own, what remains is not empathy. It is the performance of empathy by someone who has left the room.

Empathy is not the same as compassion, though the two are closely related. Compassion is the impulse to relieve suffering. Empathy is broader, the understanding of another's experience, whatever that experience is. You can empathize with joy, with relief, with frustration, not only with suffering. When empathy meets suffering and reaches toward relief, that is compassion, one of empathy's most important expressions. All compassion rests on empathy. Not all empathy becomes compassion. Empathy tells you what someone is experiencing. It does not always obligate you to fix it.

What unites these distinctions is the stance empathy requires. You are alongside the other person, sensing what they are sensing, imagining their world from within. But you are also still yourself, with your own footing intact. The shoes image gestures at the closeness. What it can miss is the second half, the not-quite-becoming. Lose your own ground entirely, and you merge, or you fawn, or you flood. The work collapses.

Genuine Perception and Deep Imagination

I have come to describe empathy as a form of tracking. The metaphor is not decorative. It points at the actual cognitive operation. For many years I have been drawn to the tracking tradition of the Ju/'hoansi San of Southern Africa, with whom I have had the privilege of spending considerable time. Their lineage of wilderness reading may well be the ancestor of science itself. Louis Liebenberg, in The Art of Tracking, showed that skilled San trackers combine two distinct capacities. The first is systematic tracking, the disciplined reading of what is actually on the ground, a hoofprint, a bent twig, a shift in the soil. The second is speculative tracking, which begins when the trail fades and the visible signs run out. Now the tracker must imagine the animal's movements from its habits, its likely direction, the wounds it carries.

Translated into the work of empathy, the same two capacities are what makes empathy possible. I call them genuine perception and deep imagination.

Genuine perception is the capacity to read what is actually there in the person before you. Not what your history would expect. Not what your projections supply. The actual signals, the pause before a word, the softening around the eyes, the breath that catches when a particular subject is raised. This is the tracker's eye, trained to see what is genuinely on the ground rather than what the mind expects to find. It is harder than it sounds. Your brain expects the present to match the past, and finds patterns whether or not they are there. Negativity bias amplifies threat. Attribution error explains your own behavior by circumstance and the other person's by character. Genuine perception is the work of catching these distortions and setting them aside.

Deep imagination is the creative act of mentally journeying into the inner world the perception has revealed. It is something close to a shamanic move, an imaginative crossing into another's experience while keeping one foot in your own. Given what I am seeing in this person, what might it be like to be inside their experience right now? Not what you would feel in their place. What they are feeling in theirs. Roman Krznaric called empathy the art of stepping imaginatively into another's shoes, and the imaginative part of that formulation is exactly what deep imagination names. But it has its dangers. It can collapse into projection, where you supply an inner world out of your own material and mistake it for theirs. It can collapse into prosecution, where attribution error and the leap from impact to motive turn imagination into verdict. The discipline of deep imagination is to hold the hypothesis tentatively, ready to be corrected, offered as an invitation rather than a claim.

Together, the two capacities yield a working formula I have come to rely on in teaching:

Genuine perception + deep imagination = empathy.

One capacity keeps you accurate. The other keeps you connected. Perception without imagination is observation, accurate but never quite felt. Imagination without perception is projection, felt but inaccurate. Empathy is the integration of the two, tested against the only authority that finally matters, the other person's confirmation that what you have offered fits.

And both, finally, depend on the tracker's stance. The shoes image gets the closeness right. The tracker's stance adds the second half: you enter their experience, but you do not surrender your own. The same wisdom shows up across traditions. Hasidic teachers describe it as a kind of hovering, the way an eagle hovers over its young, neither landing on them and crushing them, nor fleeing from them and leaving them to starve. Present from above. Close enough to feed. Far enough not to collapse onto what is being nurtured. Lose your own ground entirely, and the empathy collapses into merger, fawning, or overwhelm. Stay too far outside, and the person feels observed rather than met. Stay too close too long, and something else goes wrong. The person you have been holding in your sustained attention can become held there, trapped in the very narrative of distress that called for empathy in the first place. The art is in the holding of both, theirs and yours, with the right distance at the right time.

The Three Dimensions of Empathy

What we have been building has a name in contemporary psychology. Paul Ekman and Daniel Goleman describe three dimensions of empathy that map closely onto what this essay has been developing. Cognitive empathy is what genuine perception produces, the understanding of what another is feeling and the grasping of their perspective. Emotional empathy is the body's resonance, the felt sense that arises when another's state echoes in your own, what happens when you wince at someone stubbing their toe or tear up when a friend shares grief. Compassionate empathy is what the Dictionary's definition points to with "responding compassionately," empathy that completes itself in care. Goleman summarizes the progression: "I notice you. I feel with you, and so I act to help you."

None of these dimensions is enough on its own. Cognitive empathy without warmth leaves people feeling analyzed rather than met. Emotional empathy without regulation produces flooding and eventually burnout. Compassionate empathy without the first two produces well-meant interventions that miss the actual person. The integration is the point, and the integration is what this essay has been describing in different language all along. You perceive what is there. You allow yourself to feel some of it. You respond in a way the situation can use.

What Becomes Possible

When Sarah and Marcus began to offer each other empathy, something fundamental shifted. They had not suddenly become more skilled. Each had been received well enough, privately and in the cards session, that their nervous systems had settled enough to turn outward again. The capacity to empathize had been in both of them all along, buried under their own activation. When the activation eased, the capacity returned.

This is what I have learned across thousands of hours of this work. Empathy is not a personality trait some people have and others lack. It is a capacity almost all of us carry, that opens or closes depending on the state of our own nervous system, and that develops with practice into something more reliable and more available. Wiseman is careful on this point. Empathy is not a fixed trait. It is what people become capable of when conditions allow.

That is what I watched in the mediation. Two people who had not been able to see each other across six months of damage, slowly remembering how. And then doing it for one another. That is always the most powerful moment in this work, when empathy stops needing me to carry it and begins to move between the people who need it most.

The Empathy Set®, the cards you saw in use in the opening, is my primary tool for the daily practice of empathy, the slow work of finding the language that lets you read what is actually present in yourself and in another person. It builds the vocabulary, and with it the perception, that empathy depends on. Tracking Triggers: From Reactivity to Responsiveness, explores how empathy survives under pressure, when one or both of you has been activated and the stakes are high. Both are extensions of the work this essay has named.

To be seen, to be known, to be met: these are among the deepest things we want from one another, and empathy is how they are given and received. It does not remove difficulty or conflict from a relationship. It changes what difficulty and conflict do to us. It places us alongside each other rather than across, present rather than performing. The practice is demanding and never quite finished. Its reward is the oldest comfort we know, the sense of not being alone inside our own experience.

Related Insight Essays

Empathy and the Art of Tracking — Following the trail of another person's experience, drawing on the tracking traditions behind the work.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, and the Power of Empathy — The roots of the feelings-and-needs approach and why empathy sits at its center.

Empathy vs Sympathy — Why entering someone's experience connects where drawing on your own does not.

Cultivating Empathy and Compassion — Paul Ekman on the steps from recognizing emotion to acting with care.

Elon Musk's "Suicidal Empathy" — A look at the claim that empathy can be a weakness, and what it gets wrong.