Why is empathy is more than being in rapport? Empathy is easily confused with sympathy, giving advice, and judgement disguised as concerned.
As clinicians we naturally want to fix people’s problems and give advice, but empathy is about being willing to see another’s situation from their perspective. Not how you might feel in their situation.
Empathy is both a skill and a choice. It is the basis of trust and building a real connection.
There are three sub-skills that you need to develop to be truly empathetic.
Skill 1: Seeing the world from another’s perspective
Each one of us filter the world through our unique lenses which make our interpretation of the world unique. These lenses include:
- Age
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Sex
- Ability
- Spiritual beliefs
- Education
- Insights
- Experience
- Our own personal history
- Social upbringing
If you think you can see the world from another’s perspective, you really can’t. To be empathetic it is more important to honour other people’s perspective as their truth even if it is different to yours.
Perspective taking requires that you are willing to be learner rather than a knower.
As an example, if you are a 45 year old, educated, male Caucasian running a business you will see life very differently to a 25 year old, Asian female with 2 children and responsible for looking after her parents. This is normal.
Clinicians will frequently have very different lives from those of their patients. To be empathetic you will need to take the impact of the lives of your patients into consideration when providing a solution to their problems.
To try and understand the challenges of patients implementing your treatment strategy, here are some options you can use:
- “Tell me what you are thinking about this plan.”
- “Tell me what I might have missed or need to adjust for this plan to fit into your life.”
- Help me with where I might need to adjust this plan to suit your life.”
Being curious and interested in the other person rather than being focused on giving advice will place you in a great place to have empathy with that person.
Skill 2: Avoid being judgmental
From the research done by Brene Brown:
“We are most likely to judge in areas where we’re most susceptible to shame and we judge people who are doing worse than we are in those areas.”
Brene also found that we are less likely to judge where we feel a strong sense of self-worth and grounded confidence.
How might this relate to clinicians?
Physiotherapists are great at providing exercise programs and giving advice on how their patients should be managing their lives in order to recover from an injury.
Those physiotherapists who either don’t exercise very much or are highly disciplined with exercise programs may be more likely to judge the actions of those patients who struggle with complying with exercise programs.
To put this into perspective, reflect on how difficult it would be for you to take on new habits and skills in an area that you wouldn’t normally consider developing and have no interest in.
For many people who are overweight, unfit and struggling with chronic in pain, they may not have your enthusiasm for exercise.
Skill 3: Understand another’s feeling and being able to communicate that feeling
To understand another’s feelings means that we be in touch with our own feelings. For many people this can be quite a challenge. Especially for those who have not been taught to connect with feelings, particularly strong feelings.
Very few people are comfortable talking about feelings. It’s challenging to recognise and discuss strong emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, loss of hope and depressive feelings.
How can you understand and communicate feelings when you’ve never been taught the skill of talking about emotions?
One step you can take to improve communicating feelings is putting a label on an emotion.
For the patient experiencing an unproductive emotion, this may be the first step towards lessening its negative influence on the communication between the two of you.
If you’re with a patient that looks really pissed off, you can ask:
“It seems as if you’re really angry. Do you want to talk about it?”
A question like this demonstrates to the patient that you are willing to have the conversation about what has made them angry and most people will respect you for this.
If you have miss read the emotion, they are likely to correct you and tell you exactly how they’re feeling. Either way you have a basis for a discussion based on a mutual understanding.
Exchanges like this build connection and trust.
Building empathy
To build empathy between you and your patient, you will need to pay attention to more than a condition’s signs, symptoms, irritability and 24-hour pattern.
You will need to be interested in the person rather than just the injury.
This sounds easy and most clinicians will tell me that they are treating the person not the condition.
But to really treat the person and not the condition you must be willing to:
- See another’s perspective as truth
- Suspend the focus on giving advice and work with the person to create a workable treatment plan
- Avoid making judgements on choices people make
- Label and deal with strong emotions
- Stay interested and curious
- Treat each person as unique and understand that you are unique too
Committing to all of these points is not as easy as it sounds. Learning to be empathic rather than sympathetic is a skill.
It takes practice and there will be times you will come up short and get things wrong. Particularly if empathy is not one of your strengths. And it’s not for a great many clinicians. Many mistake being in rapport with being empathetic. They are very different.
You can have great rapport but limited empathy.
To constantly improve your empathy skills, review what works between you and your patient and what doesn’t. Practice some self-compassion and find a colleague with whom you can discuss openly when things haven’t gone as expected. This will happen. It’s a part of learning.
As I mentioned at the beginning empathy is more than being in rapport. It takes real commitment and patience to build the skill of being empathetic.
To learn more about motivational tools through effective communication download my eBook:
“Improving Patient Motivation In Physiotherapy”
I wrote this eBook in response to the most common question I get asked and that is “How do I motivate my patients?”
If you would like to fine-tune your communication skills when working with resistant patients, you might consider working with a coach or mentor.
Or perhaps your staff would benefit from training in this area.
Contact us, and find out more about what we can offer you.
Please share this article with a colleague you care about…