Empathy

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
- George Washington Carver

How do you treat the people around you? One of the most important components of success at anything is to nurture your relationships; with people, with nature, and with God. If you think back to all the times you felt most happy and fulfilled, learned the most, acheived the most, chances are that all or most of them involved relationships. One can't have a meaningful life without good relationships.

Probably the single most important factor in developing relationships is empathy. It is the ability to see and appreciate the needs of others, so that we can help them get what they really need or, if we can't, at least show them that we understand and care about what they really need. Sometimes all other people need is the knowledge that we really care about their needs.

The way to develop empathy with someone is to remember (or visualize) a time when you were like them and what you really needed (or would need) from others at the time. When you were young, you needed tenderness, when you are aged you will need compassion, when you were striving for something you needed sympathy. When you are different from another person in any way, you need tolerance from them. So these are the things that you must remember to give others who need them.

You become successful by giving others what they need and want. So you must first understand what that is by being able to empathize with them. Your ability to do that will determine how successful you are, how far you get in acheiving your own goals.

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