Empathy and compassion

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To paraphrase Rasmus Hougaard, empathise is to join in with someone else’s suffering without necessarily doing anything to help. To be compassionate is to recognise suffering, but step back from it and ask “how can I help?”

Hougaard ’s four reasons:

Empathy is divisive. Compassion is unifying.

To be empathetic is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, to live their lived experience; to look at the world from their perspective. It is to take sides. This is something to value in the family dog, and your own mother. Not a leader. Leaders have to be independent, to have no interest in the matter, and recuse herself when she does. Leaders need sometimes to make decisions their subordinates might not like, and sometimes to arbitrate — to settle disputes between subordinates that at least one of them definitely will not like.