Practical Empathy

For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work

By: Indi Young

Narrated by: Indi Young

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

©2015 Rosenfeld Media (P)2016 Indi Young

Review

The book started very strong and then went in details at the end. It would be nice if for example the writer would have spoken more about examples on how to discover reasons in multiple types of situations.

But overall it is a good introduction book to empathy.

Great concept but full of contradictions...

Be authentic, and non judgemental and this how you do it. The thesis is that being empathetic can be beneficial in innovation and leadership, is a good one and I think their are some good parts about the book and what she is theoretically trying to do. I love that she brings up this idea! Her thesis is fine, but then she introduces this active listening thing, where you are supposed to come across as curious and be authentic, she gives explicit examples of what to say and in some cases how you should be feeling when you say these things. I think the big problem is she separates personal empathy away from empathy you experience for another person, I think that's her biggest mistake in this book. In my imagination empathy needs to start with me, I need to do an inventory about what I'm feeling, so that's I'm able to look at my own reactions and find a place where I am genuinely interested in a person weather I'm interested in them or not, your own personal presence is probably the most important and probably most difficult thing to start with. The conversation to be normal and natural needs to come from the heart not the head like she is talking about or at least that's how I look at it, also she doesn't really say anything about how to make assumptions implicit witch is a key part of empathy. If you are genuinely curious you don't need to worry that much about what questions you are asking. Her way of teaching communication felt like trying to manipulate someone into feeling safe or whatever she was trying to get across, maybe it wasn't manipulative but it felt manipulative to me. Another thing is her performance was not great, funny that wile she was talking a lot about how to pay attention to someone's voice she wasn't really listening to her own. She did that thing where she turned regular statements into questions, made it sound like she had doubts about what she was saying. After that, she seemed to have lost all the wind out of her body as her voice got continually tighter and rougher, some people, do a great job reading their own books, others would be better off hiring someone, in doing her own book she just set's up another contradiction. In general their is a lot of cognitive dissonance between what's she's saying and how she is sounding. It was more concerned with how to come across rather than how to BE empathetic.