I also learnt not to take it personally, some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see and a little bit of empathy goes a long way.
I think this is a big one. When I am upset and calling Comcast (as an example that I think most people can relate to) it's always a frustrating customer experience. When I catch myself getting angry, I always try to tell the tech I'm talking to: "Listen, I'm sorry I'm snappy. It's obviously not you, it's your company's process that is making me angry" and try to make sure they understand that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but as a customer, I try really hard to make that difference clear.
It's more about demonstrating that you (the customer) don't blame them (the agent of XYZ faceless corporation) that you know where the blame lies. They know they didn't create company policy, but they deal with a lot of people who don't appear to realize that. I find that showing empathy for the person on the other side of the dialogue while politely reiterating my frustration with the situation goes a long way toward them going the extra mile to try to help me out rather than trying to end the interaction as quickly as possible.
I began operating this way after my own observations working in a support position and it works a lot more often than not. Also, as an aside, remember to use the name of the company when stating an issue rather than saying "you." For example: "Comcast over billed me," and not "You over billed me."
I learned that terrible managers can be quite successful. The chain I was part of had 800+ stores, and MY store had the highest turnover rate of them all (because the manager was angry and mean). But we made our numbers, so upper management didn't care.
I learned there is a lot of risk being taken behind the scenes. When our accountant quit (because of manager), he had no one else to do the job so he stuck our newly hired 16 year old on the job (she came on a month after I did and had no more accounting background than I did, but he had no one else). One day I ended up doing an extra shift because it was a holiday sale and our asst manager was brand new. He relied on me a lot, and at the end of the day my register was somehow a few hundred short (honestly no idea how - probably accumulated errors over the 13 hour day, but I was normally dead on) and I never heard a second word about it even though that'd normally be an immediate firing.
I learned my coworkers (mainly 40-50 year old women) wished their husbands did more in the marriage. I also learned I'm a bit of an elitist snob. My favorite line: "Bill and I never go on dates anymore. But the tractor pull is this weekend so I'm hoping!"
The store bought overstock and sold it, and I learned a bit about what the difference between junk, junk with a brand name, and brand name goods that actually had value.
I learned that if you stocked unheard-of brands of condoms, people would still buy them.
>some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see and a little bit of empathy goes a long way
I don't see how you can have much empathy. Patience, yes. Compassion, yes. Full sharing of feelings, no, purely by the description of the scenario.
"Sympathy (from the Greek words syn "together" and pathos "feeling" which means "fellow-feeling") is the perception, understanding, and reaction to the distress or need of another human being."[0]
"When you sympathize with someone, you have compassion for that person, but you don’t necessarily feel her feelings."[1]
Generally the difference between empathy and sympathy is the internal response to the feelings of others. If you personally are feeling the same thing as the person, then that's generally empathy, otherwise it's generally sympathy.
define pity
pit·y
ˈpidē/
noun
noun: pity
1.
the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.
>some times people are having a really bad day for reasons you can't see
It's not clear how you know someone is having a "really bad day" when you explicitly rule out knowing the reasons why the person is having a really bad day.
Maybe they told you they are having a really bad day? That is fine and fairly easy to empathize with.
Maybe you are just assuming someone is having a really bad day because of how you perceive their actions?
Personal note, empathy is SO much easier for me the less I know. If they share their problems, I instinctively start dissecting and analyzing their situation.. It's easier to just recognize suffering and to try not to contribute to it or lessen it.
A sociopath is an adult who never developed this facility. Children don't have empathy- it's one of the things that makes them children. That's why some kids do things like torture or kill animals...in their minds, those animals aren't creatures with sensory experiences like themselves, rather those animals (or even other people) are perceived as meat robots, for lack of a better term. Lacking empathy means when they hurt someone, they don't feel anything themselves because there is no background thread in their subconscious reminding them that the person they are hurting is another thinking, perceiving, feeling being like themselves.
Psychiatrists can't diagnose someone as a sociopath until they're 18, by which time people's brains are expected to have developed some capacity for it. People on the autistic spectrum also have a lesser capacity for empathy, that's part of what defines them as being autistic. They can't perceive subtle social queues because of this lack of empathy.
There are plenty of people who are self-aware, functioning sociopaths- they've spent their lives having fundamental social problems, never relating to other people the way that everyone else seems to be able relate to each other. At some point in life they discover that their cognitive development wasn't perfect, and once they understand the nature of the issue they can compensate by making a conscious effort to do so. There are also plenty of sociopaths who never made this leap, and basically all you can do is stay as far away from them as possible, because who wants to deal with someone who thinks you're a meat robot?
In the context of this thread, people aren't talking about sociopaths or anyone with autism/Asperger's/etc., but imagine a seemingly normal adult with underdeveloped empathy- it manifests in all sorts of ways, from being jerks to retail employees to stiffing waiters to just being an unpleasant person to interact with. Those people don't realize they have an underdeveloped cognitive process, they just go through life wondering why so many people think they're jerks, and saying things like "99% of humanity is way too sensitive". I would attribute a lack of self-awareness to a lack of empathy as well- if someone is incapable of seeing themselves through other people's eyes, then they have no way of gauging their own behavior or feelings.
I think the problem with this conception of empathy is that it seemingly derives solely from the person experiencing it. This type of empathy requires a subconscious background thread to be keeping track of signals which may or may not exist in the external reality. If it is at all possible to know (whether or not such signals exist), it would appear to at least require some communication. Otherwise you are just trying to make inferences off of what you observe, which is probably a near insignificant amount of what the person you are supposedly empathizing with has observed (leaving the question: How do you actually know that the things you are feeling are actually, exactly the same as what the other person is feeling?). I believe this definition of empathy allows people to feel good about themselves, that they are not a sociopath, while still allowing for the possibility that the empath is not actually feeling the same thing as their target.