In chapter 7 of "Search Inside Yourself" the book moves beyond the focus on yourself to using the greater awareness of yourself
in order to improve your interpersonal relationships and ultimately enhance the lives of others. The chapter places an emphasis on
building a foundation of trust through empathy in your personal and work relationships and how this leads to people being more open,
which in turn leads to a freer and more effective exchange of ideas. It's important to remember however that empathy means looking to understand
others rather than to explain or accept their reactions.
Personally I reacted quite strongly to this as in myself I recognise a tendancy to be guarded and distrustful in my interactions with
new people. The author discussed similar feelings in the chapter with a new manager he encountered and how he felt a cognitive dissonance
between his mental and emotional response to this new manager. I feel the same way in that there is little logical reason to be distrustful
of new people however there is still an emotional response that arises out of wanting to protect yourself. The chapter discusses an
approach to control this response of creating desired mental habits. The idea is to make a conscious effort to have a thought of positivity
arise when you see a new person and eventually this will form a part of your unconscious mental subroutine, causing feelings of trust
and warmth to arise in you which should engender the same in the other person.
Connected to this is the practice of "loving kindness meditation" discussed in the chapter. The idea behind this practice is to highlight
your connection to others and the good wishes you have for them with the aim of creating a mental habit of kindness. I tried this during
a meditation thinking of people I care about and found it to be a positive experience. Ultimately I would like to try use it as the author
suggests in order to resolve conflicts you may have with other people.
I have yet to try the empathic listening practice however I can see that being a useful tool to practice during group work in the upcoming weeks.
The concept I most enjoyed reading about in this chapter was the discussion of mirror neurons and their influence on how we build empathy with
others. I had previously heard about research in this area and would highly recommend the following Radiolab episode which touches on the topic:
In this episode they discuss the theory that there is an evolutionary advantage to "goodness" and caring for others, within some more social
species at least. This seems to run contrary to a purely Darwinian model of natural selection where you might imagine the only goal of an organism is to survive
and pass on its own genes. Instead the idea is that as an individual of the species it is good for you to care for other members of your group
as it increases the overall chance of your species continuing into the future.
I like this theory of there being a physiological basis to human empathy arising our of an evolutionary advantage, that by feeling very deeply the experiences
of others this provides advantages to us as a social animal. The obvious side benefit of this being that the quality of empathy that we value
as being a positive force for good should arise naturally since it is hardwired in our bodies.
The author talks about how we can make use of this mirror neuron effect since strengthening our own ability for self awareness will
simultaneously improve our ability to understand others. Because you are naturally feeling the experience of others as you observe them,
the better you are at recognising your own emotions and their physiological manifestations, the better equiped you are to understand these mirrored
feelings you experience.
This is all quite positive but there is a study he mentions which shows that we do need to be careful of the mirror neuron effect as well.
In that study it noted that where participants watched physical stimulation this increased their own actual sensitivity to it, allowing them
to perceive stimulus they previously wouldn't have noticed, an amazing effect! The study also demonstrated however that this effect was
heightened when the person they were watching was the same ethnicity or even from the same political organisation as them. This seems to
show that there is a physiological basis for the tribalism we see in the world which poses great problems for society and is something we
must fight to overcome. The author talks about how the solution to this is to create a mental habit of kindness and connectedness to others,
that they are not so different from yourself.