After reading the articles above, create a gist on Github and reflect (4-6 sentences) on the following prompts.
What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you? How does empathy help you build better software? Why is empathy important for working on a team? Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful. When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
I read "The Surprising (and Non-Technical) Skill You Need to Succeed in Tech" and "Three Kind of Empathy."
I generally consider myself a fairly empathic person. I almost always experience "cognitive empathy," as Daniel Goleman calls it, in which I can recognize what another person is likely to feel, but I generally feel "emotional empathy" and "compassionate empathy" as well. It's easy for me to feel the physical impact of another person's emotions and to spontaneously adjust my approach to try to help them. I have had to work over time to ensure that my own emotional needs don't outweigh the need to address another person's feelings, but that has become significantly easier with greater emotional and personal awareness.
Empathy is a critical ingredient to success in software teams because it allows you to understand the experiences of your customer and of your teammates. This means that not only are you more likely to build something that will be useful to its users, but you are also more likely to build it in a way that keeps your group working cohesively and happily.
Empathy has been especially useful to me anytime I have had to deliver critical feedback. It is the key difference between delivering opinions that make a person feel vulnerable, attacked, and defensive, vs. the kind that make them feel normal, valued, and human. Empathy gives me the ability to remember that the person to whom I'm giving feedback is no different than I am, and won't respond to harsh criticism any better than I do. This has been especially helpful for me to remember when someone is delivering harsh criticism to me, as well. Those comments are not necessarily a direct reflection of me, but of that individual's perspective.
Recently, when a VP of my company openly and harshly vocalized a negative opinion of me in front of a group, empathy allowed me to remember that responding in kind was not likley to help him recognize that his approach was hurting me. Instead, I quietly commented that he seemed very frustrated, and that I'd like to understand why. I wouldn't have been able to gather further info on his position if I hadn't been able to empathize with him.
At the same time, however, this was a particularly difficult person for me to empathize with because I felt vulnerable and attacked in the situation. My own emotions were running high, which made it challenging to pause and remember that he was only a human being, having a human experience. The thing that allowed me to respond well despite being triggered was that I recognized the sense of defensiveness building up inside of me. I have to practice this constantly, and am not able to do it all the time, but noticing those types of feelings helps remind me that I'm not thinking totally rationally at the moment, and that there's probably something deeper going on inside me that I should try to be aware of. Meditation and journaling have been critical in helping me to build this awareness, and I definitely intend to keep them up to help me grow more in the future.