A Lack Of Empathy Is A Lack Of Leadership
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In the midst of an international crisis like a pandemic, the ways in which people are expressing empathy become much more apparent. People go out there and help out the businesses that won’t survive without their continued patronage because, at the end of the day, their leaders aren’t showing themselves to have the capability to do so. Bill Stierle and Tom talk about expressing empathy in relation to leadership, and how empathy goes hand-in-hand with leadership. People think leadership is simply about making strong statements and getting people to do things, but they’re wrong. Leadership is definitely composed of a unique skillset, and at the core of that is empathy.
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Bill, I always feel better after I talk with you. These days that need to talk with you is getting stronger. With all the things happening in our world on a daily basis and it is changing daily. I’m talking about the Coronavirus. There is much uncertainty and also a lack of leadership is the big thing I’m seeing. Do you see that?
We’re struggling that with leadership because people think leadership is making a strong statement and then getting people to do things, whereas leadership takes another languaging skill. That’s one style of leadership. “Let me cough that up easily and do it my way. We’ll do with the wreckage later.” As we mentioned in our episode around here are five things not to do in communication and here are five things to do to restore trust. We’ve got to look at our internal leadership and then our expression of external leadership.
Internal leadership is we’ve got to do something. I’m holding my hands up above my ears to the voices that keep saying things to us. There are these different sentences that come in, then somebody says a sentence from the outside and then that internal voice takes it and amplifies it. It’s going back and forth. We’ve got to stabilize two things. The external voices or the things that are coming at us, and then the internal voices or the things we say to ourselves. If we allow a thought called, “I am stuck in my house and I can’t go out.”
Allow that thought to ruminate inside our head, 7 to 14 days from now, it is miserable for us because the thought has already built up this chemical response inside our body. The neuropeptides we talked about or the 297 different molecules of emotion inside our body. These molecules’ emotions will take us on a spin with a thought stimulus with a message. The thing is we’ve got to get space in two different ways and create the space between the stimulus and the response. Create the space between what this thought is and how we make meaning out of that thought.
Create space there so that it’s not such an emotional drain, even though it’s an extraordinary circumstance. In the book Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl, he talks about and one of his famous quotes is, between the stimulus and the response, what somebody is doing and how you take it is all the freedom that a human being needs in that space between what they did and how you took it. That allowed him to observe his fellow human beings in a Nazi concentration camp as a psychologist viewing this and saying, “Why is this person dying over here? Why is this person living over here?”
One of the primary things was the people that did not manage the space between the stimulus and response didn’t do well with that. They died quicker. Why? Their stress is higher, they’re panic, they’re worried about loved ones, their ability to know what’s going to happen and when is this going to end would be a very toxic thought inside a concentration camp? We’re sitting here with a virus and we have to manage that same process between the stimulus and the response. How do we take it? The quickest way to get greater distance is to apply empathy for space in between. If I have a tragic thought, when is this going to be over? Is it going to be four weeks or is it going to be eight weeks? Is it going to go into the fall?
To see how even my talk through it, there’s a little bit anxious and nervousness that could show up in our bodies because this will immediately have to change our behavioral pattern and our habit brain, the back part of our brain does not like to change habits that much. It doesn’t. Why? I don’t want to rethink that thing I have been doing tragically for 1, 5, 17, 50 years. It’s doesn’t want to rethink the thought. This circumstance makes us rethink the thought, makes us rethink the habit. We have to create the space then so we have compassion for the person or the thought that we had, what they said, the thought that happened in our mind. There are several different examples we could roll our sleeves up and say, “Let me check in with you to see how this little monologue and informational piece, how they resonate with you and what are some of your thoughts about that?” That allows us to contribute to people.
I enjoy hearing that and I liked the idea that there’s this space between that thought or statement and action you can take. It allows you some freedom. Many people are fearful. I’m going to label this something that my mother always said to me growing up. She said, “Don’t borrow trouble.” It was one of the critic cliché expressions which to her meant don’t worry about something potentially becoming a whole lot worse than it is. Deal with what we know. The idea of borrowing trouble is taking this thought of potential in the future going more toward the dark and bringing that forward to be worrying about it when we’re not there yet.
A little bit of what you went on about it going to be 4 weeks, 8 weeks, going into the fall, a lot of people are naturally doing that. They’re naturally borrowing trouble and they’re fearful of the uncertainty. A lot of the messaging coming from our leaders is not helpful in this regard. Leadership right now has been behind the eight ball in acknowledging it, in taking this crisis seriously, in preparing for it and in taking action. Now that some action is being taken, there’s concern that the action may be an over-reaction. It’s certainly not full of enough empathy and compassion, at least from my perspective.
They’re missing the empathy and compassion piece. They’re doing a thing called problem-solving before empathy. They think and their belief is if I explain enough, people are going to trust me. That’s not the way you get trust. When you get trust is you got to extend to and give a solid line of empathy and the direction of the fear. Could you be feeling fearful because you need some protection and you would like some certainty from me? The person will say yes to that. What would certainty look like? Can you give me some clear numbers? Great. There’s a narrative that’s needed for protection. There’s a narrative that’s needed for certainty. There’s a narrative that’s needed for clarity about what that looks like, then you might get a shot at having a conversation about what truth is.
Where the administration and how they’re trying to exhibit leadership, where that’s going is, they’ve retreated to their safe space of money. The business leader thinks that marketing wins all, sales cures all, money ultimately fixes things. Donald Trump has been working with Steven Mnuchin to come up with a stimulus package for the economy and saying, “They’re going to get everybody checks within two weeks.” Here’s again the sizzle and the dopamine hit that they’re trying to do. You’ve seen all this.
That messaging is so upsetting because you’re saying a statement. It’s binary logical things. “I, Steven Mnuchin, am going to give you a check,” instead of “Here is the path for you to get the check.”
Even that, here are the problems we’re facing as a country. A lot of you are out of work because you can’t wait tables at a restaurant. A lot of retail jobs are gone in a hurry here or at least if not laid off, hourly workers have no work. Rather than exhibit leadership saying, “We’re going to get everybody to work in this amount of time. You’re going to have this finite amount of time that you’re out of work and then we’ll get everybody back to work or something else.” Instead of dealing with the real issues that result in people being short of money in their bank account, they’re going straight to, “We need to print more money and get everybody money and checks in their hands.” That contributes to the fear and uncertainty instead of solving a problem. A lot of people are like, “What good is it going to do to me to have $1,000 check in my account when I can’t buy any toilet paper at the store anyway?”
Where’s the second $1,000 check coming from? Where’s the third $1,000 check from? Is this going to be regular? Is this going to be a one-time payment? I’m having flashbacks to the George Bush tax cuts when he made tax cuts. He sent everybody a check from the tax cuts. “It’s great. I got a check in the mail for about $300.” Let’s go like, “That was it? All of that generated this? Is this all?”
All it does too is amplify to me proportionalize the reality of, “That $1,000 check isn’t going to cover my rent entirely.” If it does cover your entire rent, if you live in a place where that would cover it, it’s going to cover it for one month maybe, but not the 2nd and 3rd month. To me, it highlights all of the concerns.
That’s tragic messaging. We’ve got to have empathy about truth here because what they don’t know what Donald Trump, Steven Mnuchin, and the entire crew, I’m not saying the Democrats are all that much better, but at least they’re a third of the way there. Their messaging has got to be one that a person can believe it without having doubt or skepticism. Those specifically two emotions to show up inside the body. As soon as doubt and skepticism show up in a body, they stop listening. We stop listening, Tom. We don’t believe it. Doubt and skepticism are very important emotions for us to experience so we can get the space between the stimulus and response. When he said that thing, “You’re going to get a check in two weeks.” I’m going like, “You guys can’t even get yourself out of a brown paper bag for God’s sake.” You and him, you two guys because you’re going to throw money at us, that’s going to make it work. They’re not going to look at the money that is going to be stable. They’re going to be money in order to make their agreement that at least we gave you money.
It’s like throwing a piece of scrap to somebody or feeding a homeless person for one night. It’s like great gesture but you’re not working at the systemic problem. You’re not stabilizing the economy. Steven Mnuchin could have nailed it by saying, “Whatever income that you’re making right now within a guideline is we are going to stabilize that income for the next six months. Whatever bills you need to pay, we’re going to match that.” Immediately everybody would have calmed down because he would have been talking about not money anymore but the need for stability. “Whatever your last paycheck was, we’re going to stabilize that paycheck.” That’s unsettling because the person making $250,000, that’s a bigger paycheck to them. He needed to say within certain parameters. Within certain income levels, these are going to be, “What income levels.” It’s like, “If you’re $250,000, you’re SOL. You’re $250,000 above,” but it’s, “If you’re $1 million above, you aren’t getting any money.”
It’s weird to say this, but they need to stabilize 50% of the population and they don’t want to do it. They most certainly don’t want to do the bottom 10% or the bottom of 20% because they have all kinds of judgments around that as well as the immigrants that are playing in that space. It’s like, “You’re bailing them out. Who are you bailing them out with?” All the people that you told them that you’re not going to bail them out, you’ve got to bail them out to get these people off the streets so that the virus doesn’t take place. There’s a level of free fall in the economy. What was the last financial guidance piece I got? This will trigger your brain by the way. What are your emotions when I say this? Watch how your emotions will change.
This will tell you how much space you have between the stimulus and response? Watch out where this is. Financial advice. Bill, you need to go into all of your automated payments and shut all of your automated payments off, so there’s no more automatic withdraws from your accounts. Your eyes went sideways. You’re going like, “What?” The money is going to go out but that doesn’t help you with the money coming in. Do you see what happens? It’s like, “Make them wait.” That’s the disaster of a free-fall economy. You’re not allowing money to come in and go out and run your life within that budget or within that acceptable parameter that we do. Watch your body unsettled. Am I guessing that right?
Yes.
A little bit nervous, maybe or possibly anxious. Is it going to get that bad in six months that I wish I would’ve listened to Bill’s advice to shut off my automatic papers so I could hoard the money like the toilet paper? I got to keep the money on this side and not let the automatic money going this side, going the other side. There are people that are thinking to themselves, I cannot make my house payment. I cannot make my payment for my rent. There are building owners that are going like, “Who’s going to bail me out for this income when so-and-so or half my resonance doesn’t pay? How am I going to make my payments to the bank and what’s going to happen to my reserves?” I’m working in the housing market, let alone food, restaurants, bars and retail.
Restaurants are going to happen first. It’s terrible. I went out and got takeout here in Southern California. All the restaurants are closed for dine-in but they’re allowed to be open for take-out. I’m the only person that was in this restaurant at the time I was there. Nobody else. Even though I made a nice order and I gave him a large tip because they’re there making food and trying to make a living. I’m like, “I want to be generous with the tip.” I’m like, “How long are they going to be able to do this and stay open at this small level?”
It’s troublesome. That’s not getting to the waitresses that have been laid off, the busboys that are laid off and those kinds of things.
One of the things and a public service announcement here for our readers, anybody reading this blog. It was a brilliant idea. I heard first from my sister in Colorado who lives in a rural area. There are some small family-owned restaurants, not these big chains or anything. We have a lot of friends in Southern California. People in their community are going out and buying gift cards from these restaurants and not cashing them in anytime soon, but buying a gift card to help a restaurant get some more revenue. Try to hopefully be able to make whatever minor ends meet are necessary to stay in business. For those of us that might have the money and be able to afford to buy a gift card and not need to get immediate value for it. It’s going to take compassion like that to help certain businesses survive.
Those are the support elements. All of those people have got to still talk through than feeling anxious, nervous, worried and scared about their need for certainty, trust and stability for the financial security that’s not in place. Certain beliefs work but if we’re not talking about stability and financial security, what winds up happening is any kind of money fix will only be temporary. If you don’t narrate it from a place of stability, the person’s going to feel nervous, anxious, worried and scared. You’ve got to provide leadership at this point that’s going to provides stability narrative over six months.
The numbers in China, the way it looked is when you have a society that has the ability, it doesn’t mean ours does not, it means theirs did, build a hospital in the smallest amount of time. Quarantine and put in place all of the safety issues needed in order to stabilize the pandemic. A country like Italy did not provide that and did not have the governmental bandwidth to do that. Our government is not taking the actions that are having some similarities to what China did. You don’t have to do it the way they did it but a similarity would be by a hotel converted into a hospital/care place and then stick people that you need to watch that are infected but not serious in a spot, deliver them food and call it a day. They have to sweat it out for the next 14 to 21 days.
One of the things I’m wondering, it says something about leadership or lack thereof, but it also comes back to some of the things we’ve talked about in the past, especially with labeling and diagnoses. Have you seen how the President has been labeling this the Chinese virus?
Yes, and it’s disheartening to personalize it or assign it to. My request is that people convert it and don’t address it. At this point, I would convert this. He says the Chinese virus, we get to say back to it like, “The Coronavirus from your perspective.” You re-label it right on top of his label. Don’t even acknowledge the dog whistle and the racism that’s in it. You’ve got to manage the stimulus. Regrettably, the press doesn’t know how to do it. They’re picking the wrong through line and it’s a distracting through line because he said it. Somebody called them on it and it gives them the opportunity to say, “That’s where it came from.” In other words, I’m arguing from a partial truth but I am not being a leader that’s inclusive. I’m assigning something blame to something outside myself instead of doing what I need to do as a leader to step up and face the problems and keep my language there. They’re still regrettably using these distraction languaging techniques in order to create the us versus them mindset instead of going like, “This is not the time to whether you’re for LSU or Alabama.”
It’s like, “You’re still got to remember what game you’re playing here.” The game is protection, certainty and how the safety takes place? How do clarity and information take place? You got to stay tied to it. The way I’m defining empathy and we’ve done this several times, is whenever there’s a feeling word attached to a need word, that’s when empathy takes place. You’re feeling scared because you need some certainty. That is the thing that allows us to talk about certainty and not talk about scared. Our brain will naturally shift to the need once it’s attached to the feeling, if I’m feeling doubtful because my need for truth isn’t met. I didn’t have greater access to pursue truth. My doubt disappears like the wind because I self-connected to myself. If I feel skeptical because my need for trust isn’t met, then I’m going to talk about what trust looks like. That’s the thing that’s going to get rid of skepticism not, “I’m skeptical,” or “You’re a liar.” That’s the need for truth again. I don’t need to call the person that. I’m just going, “That’s not my version of the truth. It’s not the way I see it. You can try to sell it to me in a different way but that’s not the way I see it.”
I agree with you. The needs are the key. It takes a certain amount of empathy and compassion inherently to be able to speak to those needs and provide what people need right now. Regrettably, the President does not have an empathetic bone in his body, which is a cliché I would use, which maybe is not helpful. He doesn’t have, not just the skills. If he has enough of the skills, he’d be faking it at least and doing better than he is now.
Awareness is the bigger need that you’re pointing out. When somebody was brought up in a wealthy environment that there’s no need to practice care for another person because you’re focusing on what the goal of the monetary income is. You’re noticing how much respect people give you for the money that you or your family has? It’s disheartening because then you’re not looking to people as people, you’re looking that like them as commodities. The current narrative is people are commodities, not as human beings going through something. The level of shallowness that sits there is unsettling. That’s the hard part about this.
It’s in moments like this that you discover whether you believe that in the beginning or not what leader you got in the last election.
This is the leader they got. For some of the people that are closer to the center, not the ones that have already taken the hook line and sinker. They’re on the propaganda narrative and they’re stuck there because of whatever it’s called a moment of investment. The thing they’re invested. I know one person is invested in Donald Trump because of the abortion issue. That’s it.
You’re not going to move them off of that point and nothing else matters. They’re going to stay there for that one issue.
Instead of productively working at the abortion issue, which is if you want to get rid of the abortion issues, it’s not bad. You’ve got to institute. This is where it gets unsettling quickly. Institute sex education earlier inside the system. When a sex education piece is done thoroughly through 7th, 8th and 9th grade, the numbers of unwanted pregnancy completely plummet. They don’t want to talk about that either because then you got to talk about sex, which is unsettling for people because even in their adult life, they don’t talk about sex. It’ll say, “How was that for you they’re not doing that question?” Even most married couples aren’t checking in every once in a while. You may want to check in, see if somebody is checking out.
There might not be as much fulfillment as you think there is like check-in, which is a little dangerous because that opens you up to you’ve got to make some changes, again unsettling. That’s the scary honesty piece on this. I am getting calls and I am providing people support. I am doing some online webinars and training for people to jump on and to practice these skills in real-time. I’m starting to do that so that during this downtime that we’re being able to handle the space between the stimulus and response. We’re able to take our internal and external conflicts and be able to provide empathy and provide new stability during this new normal. The new normal is don’t go out much. You still have freedom. Go for a walk. It doesn’t mean stay in your house. It means don’t go near people.
Don’t go near people, schools, concerts and sporting events. None of these things are happening anymore. There are an awful lot of changes.
Millions of dollars of changes. There was an article that crossed the financial piece. You and I, as many Americans went through the real estate crash. Our real estate crashed affected the rest of the world. They weren’t even a part of it. All of a sudden, we stopped spending, they were screwed. We didn’t have resources to spend, they like, “What happened to our contract? I was making $200,000 of this unit and now you only had 100 of them?” It’s like. “You know more about this than I do because you spent time in that space.”
It’s interesting how there’s got to be major shifts, not only in manufacturing in terms of the things that are needed for direct response to this health crisis like masks, gloves, vaccines, medicines, treatment, ventilators. The medical industry is being asked to retool and make different things and prioritize different things. Consumer goods, that whole market is going to tank and the factory of the world in China is going to slow down and suffer significantly as a result. The interesting thing is no one’s writing about it yet because the big story is the health crisis. What’s going to happen to retail America that was already struggling? The physical chains of retail stores, restaurants and all these things. There are many that are not going to recover and our economy is fundamentally changing in many ways. Amazon probably continues to get bigger, faster and stick a fork in a lot of other retail businesses that are now going to be struggling.
That’s why Amazon is hiring immediately 100,000 new delivery workers because there is so much. That’s something we’ve noticed because in our family, we’re big Amazon shoppers on a regular basis. We have been for years. Now ordering something normal that we would order like dog food for instance. We order off Amazon. It’s not that there’s a shortage of dog food by any means. There is plenty of stock available on dog food. No problem, it hasn’t been around on it, but we can’t get prime delivery on it in two days. It’s going to take 5, 6, 7 days to get delivery not because of a supply problem but a delivery capacity problem.
We’re going to have these different communication nuances to go through the situational consequences that are showing up in the new normal. This space between the stimulus and the response is you’re noticing that your habit pattern is going to shift more into things that you’re familiar with. You’re also going to adjust your time perspective and then the habits that come with that. “It takes five days to get this so that means I need to order at this time earlier.” The habit pattern isn’t going in the store on Friday. The habit pattern is which day do I sit at the computer and do all my ordering or automate my ordering. Which day do I check that? It’s all there by Friday. The retail piece is completely out of the mix.
I signed up for what’s called Imperfect Food. It’s all these things that have been mislabeled. Pieces like the carrot didn’t grow straight. It’s a crooked carrot. It can’t go to a retail place because people want to see a perfect looking carrot. This is an imperfect vegetable. Why do I care? I’m cutting the damn carrot anyways and because it’s not straight, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t taste any different. It tastes the same as the straight carrot. It’s a little crooked. It’s got a little knob on it. It’s a shorter stem or it’s smaller than the other one or whatever. We are taking steps in the new normal to meet our needs for certainty and stability, whether we like it or not. Our habit patterns are then able to adjust to something that tends to go and will tend to go better.
The next time, it might be beneficial for us to talk about family dynamics and family interactions, whether it’s relationships or parenting. How do we communicate compassionately in a healthy way when our child says, “Dad, is it okay to go outside and play?” They’re thinking in their mind, they can’t go outside. Their safekeeping brain creates a myth about things. If you think about it, this is the first time in multiple generations that there’s ever been any request to do this isolation in our country. Other countries maybe but I’d have to know. Not in any time in my life, if I’ve ever been asked to stay at home by the government or anything.
I don’t remember that either.
It’s the first same as the housing market first. That level of instability regrettably is caused by the inactions or actions of others in our direction as a society. Our new cultivation of community has to change. There is no planning for stable communities as there once was in the 1950’s post World War II. It was the planning of stable communities. That was the plan. “Here’s what a stable community looks like. Here’s where the community center goes. Here’s where the activities take place in that community. There’s a church here. There’s a grocery store here. There’s this here.” That’s called planning a stable community. We do not have that kind of planning going on very much.
It’s the opposite reaction.
Tom, there’s more to come. This has been a great discussion. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Bill.
Thanks, everybody.
