Roll the Tape: How to Develop Empathy

A simple trick to help you build your empathy muscle.

Hey ,

I want to talk this week about empathy.

Empathy is a tremendous ability: To be able to see the world through another person’s eyes, to think the way they think, to feel the way they feel—it’s a super power.

Empathy can make you a better:

• Writer
• Speaker
• Presenter
• Leader
• Teammate
• Salesperson
• Spouse
• Parent
• Friend

…and a whole lot more.

But empathy is funny, you know? Despite all of us having the potential to develop it, and the fact that we all want others to show it to us, we often fail to show it ourselves.

There’s a simple, psychological reason we’re bad at showing empathy. It’s called the “perspective gap.”

The perspective gap says that, unless we’re experiencing a situation or set of circumstances in a given moment, it’s hard to imagine how we’d react in that situation. Even when we’ve experienced a situation similar to the person with whom we’re trying to empathize, we remember dealing with those circumstances much better than we actually did.

For example, Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren conducted an experiment in which participants predicted how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. A first group made their predictions while holding an arm in a bucket of warm water. A second group did so while holding an arm in a bucket of ice water.

As you might guess, the people with arms in cold water expected to feel the most pain.

But there was a third group, who also stuck one of their arms in a bucket of ice water. These participants then took their arm out and waited ten minutes before estimating how painful it would be to sit in the freezing room.

The result? Their predictions were identical to those in the warm-water group.

The third group had experienced ice-cold temperatures just ten minutes earlier, but as soon as they were no longer exposed to that degree of pain, they couldn’t effectively remember it.

So, how do you bridge the perspective gap? How do you increase your ability to show empathy?

You have to view empathy like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

And in order to build the muscle, you can try a simple trick I like to call…

Roll the tape
“Roll the tape” is an old expression that means to play back a recording, in order to review footage. It came from the way movies used to be recorded onto rolls of film (tape) that could be played and replayed over and over.

Metaphorically, you can roll the tape whenever you communicate. Do so by reviewing any message you deliver, after the fact.

But here’s the key: You have to try to do so through the eyes of the recipient.

For example:

• Read your email or text message after you’ve sent it
• Listen to your voice message after you’ve pushed it out
• Watch your presentation after you’ve delivered it
• Think about your conversation after you’ve had it

As you read, listen, watch, or think, ask yourself:

• What’s comes off differently than I thought?
• What could be easily misunderstood?
• What might I tweak in the future to be more clear or to better accomplish my goal (to inform, persuade, motivate)?

This trick is so useful because when you originally communicate, you’re doing it from your perspective. This is true even if you try to keep the audience in mind.

Because no matter how hard you try…

There’s a perspective gap.

That’s why you cringe when you see or hear a recording of yourself.

I really sound like that???

But when you review your communication after the fact, with the audience in mind, it allows you to see and hear it from their perspective. If you do this over and over, you slowly and gradually build your empathy muscle.

So, I advise you to get in the practice: As often as you can after communicating, take a few moments afterwards and…

Roll the tape.

As you do, you’ll start to see yourself through the eyes of others. You’ll learn how to bridge the perspective gap. And you’ll communicate with more empathy.

And that’s good for everyone.

Talk soon,
Justin