Gearup_Pre-work.md

1. Empathy plays a huge roll in my life. For one, I feel like It is one of the primary foundations for interacting with others. By having a good understanding of empathy you intrinsiclly understand how others feel. To understand how others feel will dictate how you move forward in each interaction. For instance you might wonder, does this person approve my current understanding? From here,you can use empathy to either modify your approach or continue with what you were doing.

2. Empathy can help you to build better software, because it can help you find a need in your community. For instance, Im hoping to build software to help make therapies more accessable to people at home. Having empathy, will help me to understand what I can help create to ameliorate the struggle for some people.

3. Empathy can deffinately help you to work on a team, because this will utimately help you to collaborate with others. One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was to assume that the people you are talking to, or interacting with, know something you don't. Also, an environment where there is good clean empathy is a comfortable environment. Here people will fill comfortable projecting ideas and more importantly others might feel more comfortable sharing something a little outside the box, and not be affraid of scrutiny.

4. An instance where my ability to empathize with a colleague was useful was when my boss had to go to the emergincy room for a life threatening affliction. I was working in a nursing home at the time and this left a ton of paperwork and an upcoming state audit all up to me. My empathy helped me to quickly understand that I needed to let her recover and take responsibility for getting these things done. I took tons of paper work home to figure out and also made it through the audit with zero flags. Being constantly in touch with her would have been such a disservice to her recovery in a time when she reallyneeded her family.

5. What I really struggle with in regards to empathy in professional settings is when there is someone who uses it against others. In other words the 'egomaniac'. This is hard for me because I see my coworkers as equals, and when theres an imbalance like this, I see potentially someone thinking they are better. To tackle this problem, I think it is best for me to look inside and check my own ego. Understand that there might just be different circumstances where this particular person might just be having a moment. Or, maybe Im just having a moment. In other words, I think it's best to give things like that time and just focus on my work and helping the team.