How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! Narratives by survivors of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center frequently emphasize the empathy and compassion shown by firefighters, police, and their fellow survivors as they struggled to find their way to safety. They emphasize the practical help too. It’s not either/or. The most famous quotation to come out of 9/11 was what New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told a reporter who asked how many people had died in the Twin Towers. “The number of casualties,” he said, “will be more than any of us can bear.” Why did his words resonate so deeply? Giuliani was saying, in effect, that the attack was unbearable. He was bearing it, but with difficulty – and he let the difficulty show. That’s what helped New Yorkers (and the rest of us) bear it too. Interestingly, Giuliani’s speeches since then have expressed the view that it was his strong, calm leadership that rallied New Yorkers after the attack. I think it was his empathy and compassion. Of course it was important that he didn’t fall apart. But the unexpected blessing was that we could all watch him struggling, successfully, not to fall apart. Watching Giuliani hold it together helped millions of us to hold it together too. Empathy in a genuine crisis is different from empathy when people are understandably but unnecessarily upset about a small risk. Since the crisis is genuine, presumably you are upset too, not just your stakeholders. So you can go beyond sort-of acknowledging their feelings to showing that you share their feelings – and that you too are struggling to bear it all and carry on. This is what Mayor Giuliani did so magnificently in the crucial period after the 9/11 attacks. In a crisis, empathy should be deployed to help you guide people, to help you help them cope with the crisis – not to reassure them falsely. Crisis managers who imagine that showing empathy means over-reassuring people, “emphasizing the positive” or “calming them down,” are way off the mark. But so are crisis managers who neglect showing empathy in their haste to tell people what to do. Specific elements of empathic communication. 1. Feeling and Attitude: Empathy Isn’t a Strategy Empathy is first and foremost a feeling. In Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s alienation was grounded in his belief that other people “don’t get me.” The Martian verb in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was “grok”: “I grok you.” You actually can feel some of your stakeholders’ pain, and that can help relieve the pain. As Les Havens puts it: Contagion of every affect [emotion] has been reported by therapists: anxiety, depression, anger, excitement, ecstasy, even affectlessness…. Often if the therapist of a depressed person feels depressed himself, the patient improves. It is as if the therapist has relieved the patient of his despondency. It is a dangerous sign if a worker does not become depressed while caring for a suicidal patient; he may not have come close enough to aid the suffering person. Nor is it just therapists who feel spontaneous empathy. Havens references a photograph of people “who twist in unison while observing a pole-vaulter clear the bar.” Similarly, I have noticed that when my risk communication seminars dwell on atomic radiation (and fear of atomic radiation) as an example, many of the men in the audience cross their legs. Feeling your way into other people’s feelings is a capacity we all have, though of course not all the time. Old couples and young lovers sometimes can complete each other’s sentences; Havens says empathic therapists sometimes can (silently) complete their patients’ sentences. When I say empathy is a feeling, I don’t mean to imply

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