Renowned psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman have identified three components of empathy: (1) Cognitive, (2) Emotional and (3) Compassionate.
The first form is “cognitive empathy” – simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective-taking.
However, to truly connect with someone, you need to share their feelings. This is where the second form, emotional empathy, comes in. Emotional empathy is when you feel physically along with the other person, as though their emotions were contagious. This type of empathy can also extend to physical sensations, which is why we often cringe when someone else stubs their toe.
To practice emotional empathy with a person who is anxious about the future, you might look inwards to identify a situation where you were similarly anxious about the future. The situation itself need not be identical, as each person is different. What’s important is that the emotions resulting from the situation are felt the same.
Once you’ve used cognitive empathy to understand what someone is feeling and then put yourself in a similar emotional space with emotional empathy, you can also use the insights gleaned from cognitive and emotional empathy to have compassionate empathy.
With compassionate empathy, we not not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them, but we’re spontaneously moved to help, if needed. It is the balance between cognitive and emotional empathy that enables us to act without being overcome with feeling or jumping straight into a problem solving process, and compassionate empathy can motivate us to help another person.