How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 129

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Empathy is important in all three kinds of risk communication, but not necessarily in the same way.
Empathy is obviously crucial to outrage management – when people are upset about a risk even though you’re
pretty confident they’re not actually very endangered. Under those circumstances, the toughest part of the risk
communication job is to reassure your stakeholders that the technical risk is low. Especially if you’re
responsible for causing the risk in the first place and have an economic interest in dissuading them from
objecting to it, your stakeholders have good reasons not to believe your reassurances, even when your evidence
is strong. In this situation, establishing an emotional connection is incredibly difficult and absolutely essential.
Whether you think of it as “showing empathy” or simply as acknowledging people’s grievances and concerns,
it’s a prerequisite to progress.
Without an empathic approach, it is virtually impossible to tell people that they are wrong to be upset about
some situation or wrong to blame you for it.
The role of empathy in precaution advocacy is quite different. Unlike outrage management, in which people are
upset (often about you) and need an emotional bond to help them calm down, precaution advocacy is all about
talking to people who are apathetic. Your job is to make the issue interesting. There’s no need to be endlessly
expressing your understanding and compassion for people who are barely paying attention.
But you’ll need all the empathy you can muster to figure out how to get them to pay attention. The empathic
challenge in precaution advocacy isn’t in how you communicate your fellow-feeling; it’s in how you feel your
way into your stakeholders’ state of mind so you can appreciate why your issue isn’t firing them up and what
might have the capacity to fire them up. You don’t have to show them you understand their apathy – but you
will have to understand it deeply if you’re going to have much of a chance to overcome it.
Sometimes, moreover, what looks like apathy about a risk is really something else entirely. Two possibilities of
special relevance to empathic communication:
Denial can masquerade as apathy. Far from being apathetic, stakeholders may be so upset about a risk that they