Here is a lovely 3 minute YouTube video by Brene Brown on The Difference between Empathy and Sympathy.
There are four qualities of empathy:
- You’re able to take the other person’s perspective.
- You stay out of judgment (not easy when you enjoy judging as much as most of us do).
- You connect with something in yourself that lets you sense what the other person is feeling.
- You never try to silver line it, make it better or tell the other person how to fix it.
Can you really tell the difference between empathy and sympathy?