gear_up_prework.md

Empathy

1. Empathy does and has always played an important role in my life. In many instances, it has helped me better focus my energy. When one of my friends or family members has a personal struggle, I am able to step back from my personal struggles and be there for them just as I would want them to do for me.
2. I believe that empathy helps you build better software because it gives you the ability to take feedback. With an empathic mindset, developers are able to truly put themselves into someone else's shoes and evaluate whether their work is effective for various users, groups, and cultures. This kind of thinking can even help developers find gaps in their own code. If developers are not empathetic then they may miss out on how their code affects whole groups of people entirely.
3. Empathy is important for working on a team because it can help a team communicate more effectively. For instance developers may be more likely to create meaningful work if they are all working towards one goal and have similar mindsets.
4. At my previous job working as an electro-mechanical engineer, I would come across situations where a customer of ours would have a machine go down in their plant and would need replacement parts as soon as possible. The down-time in the customer's plant could cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars and because everything we did was custom designed, it could take days or even weeks to provide our customers with a solution. Empathizing with our customers when something like this happened was very helpful because it allowed me to become better at setting aside less important tasks and keeping our customers as happy as possible.
5. I find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings when I become overly stressed. When this happens, I very often detach myself from my emotions. I think the best thing I can do to improve my skills in these scenarios would be to implement some meditation and breathing techniques to ground myself. Just simply learning to step away and take a deep breath to bring myself back to reality will definitely be something I try more moving forward.