<h1>Brene Brown Empathy Video</h1>

I came across this video by renowned author and research professor BRENE BROWN  several months back and thought it would be appropriate to share Brown’s empathy video with you through this blog. Although there are a number of other videos available on the internet about empathy, Brene Brown’s Empathy video by far is the best one I’ve seen. The video is short yet concise. In the 3 minutes you’d spend watching the video, you would have a much clearer understanding what empathy actually is and why empathy is valuable as far as connecting with people is concerned.

Why Empathy

AER…AER… Ever since Training101, we’ve been taught to Acknowledge, Empathize and Resolve… AER… AER… As a newbie on training, I would go to bed with AER playing in my head. Later on, we were given a couple of canned empathy scripts we were required to say to customers along with a stern warning that failure to “recite” these empathy scripts would earn us an autofail from QA. And usually it’s 3 autofails and you’re out! The end effect here is that we would mechanically “recite” our empathy statement merely for the sake of QA and not necessarily for the customer’s benefit. This defeats the very purpose why we had to empathize. Why is empathy important in the first place? Empathy makes us human. In today’s age of Artificial Intelligence, talking to a live human being is probably the only reason customers still prefer waiting 15 minutes for a call center representative rather than quickly doing business with an automated system. Customers yearn for a human being to connect with and feel how upset and inconvenienced the customer feels with their service and how this connection can help both parties find the best resolution. As terrible as this may sound but the ability to vent out one’s frustration and to hear a human being empathize with their frustration is actually a blessing in disguise for call center representatives because customers cannot vent out their frustrations to a machine and expect to get any empathy. No algorithm has yet been developed to replace human empathy. So please be human when you empathize. Screw those canned empathy scripts! In an ARTICLE written by Katherine Reynolds Lewis for fortune.com, Bruce Temkin of Boston-based customer experience consultancy The Temkin Group stated: “You can’t script empathy. The right way to do it is to teach the agents about why you’re trying to show empathy, what is it, and why is it important. For empathy to be genuine, the agents must have autonomy over how they respond, and choose what course of action to take and what words to say. After all, even the best actor will sound wooden after 10 repetitions of a similar script.”

Brene Brown Empathy Video

In this short 3-minute video, Brene Brown talks about empathy and how it is very different from sympathy. Brene tells us how empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection. She comes up with 4 qualities of empathy, which are:

Perspective Taking

The ability to take the perspective of another person, or recognize their perspective as their truth.

Staying out of Judgement

Recognizing Emotion in Other People then Communicating That Emotion

Empathy is Feeling WITH People

Brene Brown illustrates empathy like when someone’s in a deep hole and they shout from the bottom, “Help, I’m stuck!” and we look down the hole and say, “Hey, don’t worry I’m climbing down to help you…” Sympathy on the other hand just looks down the hole and says, “Ooh! It’s bad huh?” but does nothing else to help ease the pain. Empathy is a choice and in order to connect with the person, you have to connect with something within yourself that knows the feeling of being in a similar situation. Sympathy simply silver lines the situation to try and make things better but the truth is rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is human connection.

Effective Empathy over the Phone

The term “empathy’ comes from the German word “infühlung” (from ein “in” + Fühlung “feeling”) first coined in 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze. Someone who has not actually “experienced” the suffering or sorrow that another is going through cannot have empathy for them, they can however have sympathy. Either way, empathy and sympathy are admirable characteristics. For empathy to be effective, it has to be appropriate to the situation and it has to be sincere. It is much worse to express an empathy statement inappropriately than to not express any empathy at all. I remember one particular call where a woman who was about to give birth called customer service complaining that she was unable to make calls with her phone. The call center rep empathized with a scripted “I understand exactly how you’re feeling right now…” which would have been fine except the rep was male and had never been pregnant so how in Zeus’ name could he “understand exactly how the pregnant woman was feeling right now”? If you cannot avoid being mechanical with your scripted empathy statements, might as well not empathize at all. As call center reps, it is only through the tone of our voice and with the words we use that we can express sincere and appropriate empathy so choose your words well. If you have not experienced a situation that will connect you with your customer, might as well be frank about it and, as the Brene Brown Empathy Video says, just empathize with a sincere “I don’t even know what to say but I’m glad you called me. Let me help you.”

I hope you enjoyed Brene Brown’s Empathy Video as much as I did. More importantly, I hope you learned a lot about what empathy really is and get to apply at work what you learned from this article. If you have friends and family who you feel can also benefit from this article, please SHARE this with them. Thank you once again for sharing a few minutes of your time to visit SUP CALL. Have a wonderful day!

Credits:
fortune.com
butterflyvoyage.wordpress.com
brenebrown.com