So in this challenge on empathy I actually decided to take the clip that was given as an example by Professor Gibbs.
I have learned about Bréne Brown before on her book, Daring Greatly, that I have mentioned before in my Back-up and Review post and her stuff intrigues me so much. After watching this video of hers, it definitely brought the two differences between empathy and sympathy to light. I have always thought of myself as an empathetic person towards others, though I have never gone through certain struggles, I always connected with them and wanted to help, knowing that I couldn't. Then there were moments where I just couldn't differentiate between whether I was being empathetic or just being plain sympathetic, but she put that in perspective. She made me realize that I actually fight between the two. If I truly care about the person, I am empathetic, whereas if I didn't care about the person enough, then I didn't care as much and just sympathized with them without even thinking twice about it. She is right that it is all about connection and if there isn't any, then people won't understand in the way that we hope they will. It also reminds me of when I think of the way some people think, it's either black and white, there are no gray areas; I always try to see myself as viewing gray, as much as I can.
This topic is so great to delve deeper into and I plan to do just that. It's definitely an eye opener.
(Empathy is reaching a hand out. Flickr.)
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