If you ever meet me, know that I’m a giver. I really like understanding and helping people, it makes me feel good. I’m the type of person who needs to feel someone’s pain, so it’s natural for me to want mind meld and have a heart to heart with someone. I just can’t discard someone’s pain as if I’m the most important person in the world!
This is called empathy, which helps us understand and influence people. Innovation starts with empathy, I really believe that. It’s no secret that radical innovators are deeply empathetic; they understand and feel the unvoiced needs of customers. Precisely because of that, empathy is a leader’s and innovator’s most powerful weapon.
With that said, I want to share with you an interesting TED talk about empathy by Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s SVP of Retail and former CEO of Burberry; she calls empathy Human energy. In the TED talk below she talks about the positive and transformative power of human energy:
Empathy is the greates creator of energy. – @AngelaAhrendts
— Jorge Barba (@jorgebarba) June 3, 2017
With all the talk about AI and robots taking jobs away from humans, know that empathy is one of three things humans do better than robots. As Ahrendts says, the more technologically advanced society becomes, the more we have to go back to the basic fundamentals of human communication.
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Also published on Medium.