New Consciousness Review Winter 2015 | Page 18

INSPIRATION
Habit 4: Practice the Craft of Conversation
Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening and taking off our emotional masks.
Habit 5: Travel in Your Armchair
Transporting ourselves into other people’s minds
with the help of art, literature, film, and online social networks.
Habit 6: Inspire a Revolution
Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change and extending our empathy skills to
embrace the natural world.
There are habits to suit every temperament and
personality, whether you are an extrovert or an in-

trovert, a risk-taking adventurer or a connoisseur of
intimacy and subtle emotions. Making them part of
your everyday life will change how you think, how
you feel, and what you do. You’ll start to be fascinated by entering people’s mind-sets and trying to
see where they are coming from—their underlying
motives, aspirations, and beliefs. Your understanding of what makes people tick will expand beyond
measure and, like many highly empathic people,
you may begin to find others more interesting than
yourself.
There is nothing utopian about living by these six
habits: the capacity to empathize is one of the great
hidden talents possessed by almost every human
being.

EXTRACT
The capacity to empathize is one of
the great hidden talents possessed by
almost every human being.
Nearly all of us have it—even if we don’t always put it
to use. Only a tiny proportion of people display what
the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen calls “zero degrees of empathy.” Among them are psychopaths, who
have a cognitive ability to enter your mind but make
no emotional bond with you (think Hannibal Lecter),
and, arguably, some people with autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome, who have a harder
time understanding the emotions and experiences of
others. Together they account for no more than around
2 percent of the general population. The other 98 percent of humanity is born to empathize and wired for
social connection.5
We also empathize much more frequently than we
would ever imagine. Most of us exercise our empathic
brains every day, although we are often not conscious
of doing so. When you notice a new work colleague is
nervous before giving a presentation, you might try
to imagine the anxiety and uncertainty she is feeling,
and give her the reassurance she needs. You see someone begging under a bridge, and rather than just pitying him (remember, that’s sympathy), you may think
about what it feels like to sleep out on a cold winter

night or to have people walk straight past you without
even bothering to look you in the eye. But empathy is
not just about an awareness of the pain and suffering
around us. Even when choosing a birthday present for
your favorite aunt, you think about the kind of gift that
would really delight her—someone with her particular
tastes, and of her age and background—not what you
might personally wish for as a present.
I am convinced that we cannot explain vast realms of
social life without acknowledging the reality and importance of everyday empathy. Just try to imagine a
world where it did not exist. It is almost impossible to
do so. Mothers would ignore the hunger cries of newborn babies. Charities fighting child poverty would fold
due to lack of donations. Few people would make the
effort to help a person in a wheelchair trying to open a
shop door. Your friends would yawn with boredom as
you told them about your marriage breaking up.
This heartless world of indifference is not the one we
live in. Open your eyes to it, and you will realize that
empathy is all around us; it’s the stuff we swim in. Yet
if that is the case, what’s the problem? Why should we
care about cultivating the six habits of highly empathic
people? Because at this moment in history we are suffering from an acute empathy deficit, both as a society
and in our individual lives.

Excerpted from Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It by Roman Krznaric. © 2014 by Roman
Krznaric. Perigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Reprinted with permission.

18 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW