Yet empathy, the ability to walk in someone else’s place and truly feel what they experience, gives children a way to understand the world differently. That’s where RedRover comes in. This organization has invested in building a program that teaches empathy to third and fourth graders.

The Restricted Adventures of Raja, written by Nicole Forsyth and illustrated by Bryan Huff

Empathy Goes to The Dogs… and Cats

Let’s suppose we’re part of a class. The teacher tells us that we are trying The RedRover Reading Program today. Everybody becomes involved and you find out that our best friend has an amazing human-animal bond. He never told anyone about his relationship with his pet before because… who talks about feelings? You also discovered that the girl who lives down the street throws sticks at dogs. She never thought about it before, but now as you describe your own experience with Heidi, your pet Doberman, she starts to see that maybe the dog has feelings after all.

As the children get involved, critical questions cause them to look more deeply into their own lives. They draw on their own emotions and personal experiences to bring life to the story. They see that how they treat animals has an impact on others… and the learning environment become rich. This unique discussion about feelings and their pets sets the stage for change.

That’s when the magic happens. Why would our youth talk about anything so personal? They wouldn’t unless being prompted by a teacher or parent. Kids talking about their cats, dogs, or other animals (and how they make them feel) just doesn’t come up in normal conversation. But everyone has a perspective on animals. Having a conversation about animal behavior and emotions lets children practice some self-awareness and emotional recognition. Kids and teachers love it.

An e-Book Today… that Supports Tomorrow

The folks at RedRover have found that teachers are the best resource for the RedRover Readers Technique. About 750 teachers have taken classes online or in person.

RedRover has also taken extra steps to reach out to the community and created a mini version of the RedRover Reading Program. An e-Book called The Restricted Adventures of Raja is available through both the Android and iTunes stores. RedRover has slated the second e-Book to come out by the end of the year. Both are available in English and Spanish.

Through the e-Book, parents can get involved in the story. Or, the graphic novel offers kids a great device for learning and experience it on their own. Critical questions stop kids to make them think, “What would I do in this situation?”

The analysis provides a key element for third and fourth graders. Their brains have developed enough so that cognitive thinking skills can understand, and show, empathy. This helps us build a better tomorrow.

And, building a better tomorrow is what RedRover’s all about. Think what it would be like to prevent abuse, neglect, and cruelty to animals. If our children can put themselves in the other person’s shoes for a split second, then they are really unlikely to do something physically wrong toward that person.

Ben Dean interviewed Walter Mischel and you can see the interview here.

I had the opportunity to see him live with Angela Duckworth last spring.  Angela, in place of  David Brooks, conducted the interview and did a wonderful job.  He was promoting his new book, The Marshmallow Test:  Why Self Control is the Engine of Success.  While Duckworth secretly wanted to know how to get her daughter to do her math homework, my biggest takeaway was one of Mischel’s strategies for not eating dessert.  He said he imagines a cockroach crawling over the chocolate mousse in the kitchen of the restaurant and that keeps him from ordering it.  Not an appetizing image, but an effective and creative technique.  His research is seminal and I highly recommend the book, The Marshmallow Test. 

In January 2010, we phoned each other after watching a PBS documentary called This Emotional Life. There was one scene where a middle-aged husband was recently fired from his job and on top of this, could barely sleep and rarely connected with his wife because of their difficulties parenting a newborn child. What does psychology have to offer to help a person dealing with so many stressors at one time? In this PBS special, a positive psychology coach taught him to keep a journal so that he could record three bits of daily appreciation. Telling someone who is experiencing hardship to be grateful may or may not be the wisest approach. There is certainly research evidence suggesting that daily gratitude can boost happiness but reframing misfortune as opportunity can also come across as invalidating and Pollyanna-ish. Isn’t there more research that could potentially have informed this particular case? We thought about all of the great scientific research that people ignore because they were not written by academic celebrities who give TED talks, write popular books, and go on public speaking tours. And from this, our book was born…..

Buy on Amazon

We know why some people don’t buy our new book - “The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self – Not Just Your “Good Self” – Drives Success and Fulfillment”

We expose some of the flaws in modern thinking about how to live a fulfilling life and how to become a great leader. We hate to burst the bubble on the happiness industry but human beings cannot will them to happiness. There is no switch to shut off sadness and turn on happiness. There is no dial to turn for feeling less anxious. But even if there was…your desire to turn the dial or flick the switch would cause unintended, new problems.

Consider those moments when you dare greatly:

-  The feeling you get when you see someone being bullied and you commit to say something and put a stop to it.

-  The feeling you get before sending that blog post, doubting where there is any worth to those written words and why the world needs one more voice to add to the chatter.

-  The feeling you get when you stand in line for the high diving board before you are alone staring at the water below.

-  The feeling a public speaker gets between the time they are introduced and the time they go on.

-  The feeling of hugging a disappointed child.

These are not happy moments. And yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments. What you do in response to these feelings and thoughts will determine what you accomplish in your life, how much fulfillment you acquire. No single moment matters. The pattern does. Do you pursue what matters most to you despite the presence of pain? Or will you wait until the anxiety, anger, self-doubt, and sadness disappear?

Negative emotions are not a sign of weakness. Reducing negative emotions or increasing positive emotions should never be the goal of living. Because emotions are signals from the mind and body for what just happened. They offer information about what to do next. Woe to the human being that ignores the intuition offered up to us from tens of thousands of years of evolutionary carving. We ask you to put a moratorium on asking, “how does this make me feel” in hopes of gaining positivity. Instead, consider asking, “what does this do for me?”

You are vulnerable because you are strong. You are about to enter the arena. You are about to risk failure. You are about to push boundaries. To do anything less is to give up on your personal growth and what makes us feel fully alive.

We love and hate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Robert and I grew tired of advice to smile more, laugh more, relax more, even when there are reasons to feel somber or frustrated. We grew tired of advice to use strengths more and feel grateful more often, even when there are real obstacles that cannot be ignored such as how to find a new job, how to start tough conversations with a disrespectful romantic partner, and how to raise a baby – because the truth is, nobody knows what they are doing as a first-time parent.

With 15 years of experience as psychologists, Robert and I synthesized decades of work, hundreds of studies, leading to a compelling story about how to become emotionally agile – where we use emotions as tools to work toward goals that are most meaningful to us; socially agile – where we are kind but selective about how we act depending on the situation being confronted; mentally agile – where we recognize that mindfulness and mindlessness are both beneficial and by learning this, we can be better decision-makers, better relationship partners, and more efficient and effective in work, love, and play. We turned scientific knowledge into a series of stories. If you want to follow the breadcrumbs about the science behind the advice, you can turn to the 50 pages of endnotes in the back.

If you want to know how to be happy, engaged, with a sense of meaning and purpose, you cannot prematurely rule out the advantages of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors that are uncomfortable and socially undesirable. We all have biases about what we want to feel and how we should behave. We learn this from our parents and friends. We learn this from the culture we identify with. We want to gain approval from other people, so we try to put on a happy face and talk about our kind, selfless motivations. This makes sense. Your relationships and the work you create to improve the world will both be unsatisfactory without the support, knowledge, and wisdom of other people.

But here we offer the simple message that you don’t need to choose between feeling good or bad, being kind or selfish, being mindful or mindless. Your evolutionary birth right is to be psychologically flexible. You were born with a complex personality with various emotional shades for a reason. To get the best possible outcome in a situation, you will have to deviate from positivity (some of the time). To develop the healthiest relationships, you will have to deviate from positivity (some of the time). To create great work that matters, you will have to deviate from positivity (some of the time).

Learn how.
Learn when.
Learn why.

By doing so, you will become bigger, stronger, agile. And as a person that harnesses the different sides of your personality, you will end up becoming whole with a happier, fulfilling life.

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a professor of psychology and senior scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University, and Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is a researcher and trainer, and both authored the new book, “The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self – Not Just Your “Good Self” – Drives Success and Fulfillment”.

On our January 16, 2013 blog, I gave an overview of cognitive bias (our tendency to filter information through our own past experiences, likes, and dislikes) and surmised that it can lead to judgments that are faulty.  We have been exploring how these biases affect the ability to lead and make good decisions.

In the 6th in our series, I wanted to talk about Bandwidth Bias.  This is the tendency to go with the crowd.  It can also be called “groupthink” and when it turns negative, it can be a “mob mentality.”   And this can happen in groups large and small.  It can happen in your family, in your department or team at work, or across an entire culture.

Why does this happen?

We like to conform.  We like to fit in.  Consider the famous experiments by Solomon Asch, psychologist from the 1950s, who conducted experiments where participants were part of vision exercise where they had to gauge line lengths and compare them.   Participants made these assessments in a group with others.  Although these “others” were assumed to be participants, they were not.  They were in on the experiment and would knowingly give incorrect answers.  The result was the tendency for participants to provide incorrect answers as a result of being influenced by the intentional wrong answers of the group. In fact, 75% went along with the group at least one time with answers that were clearly not right.

What else did Asch learn from his experiment?

1. The number of people present had an effect.  The larger the number of people, the more people felt the need to conform.
2. If even one other person gives the actual correct answer, the need to conform is lessened.  Think social support.
3. People cite not wanting to risk ridicule as a reason for conforming or that they doubted their own judgment

How does this impact business?

Teams can jump on the bandwagon to support team members even when they see a flaw.  Or sometimes, it can cause a sudden release of similar products that are not well received in the market.   It can cause the recruiting of candidates that are not as strong simply because their alma mater has prestige.  Or it can cause your company to pass on the perfect candidate because they fear their extended unemployment is more meaningful than it is.

What does this mean for leadership? -

1. Create a culture where employees can dissent
2. Assign someone to be the devil’s advocate – not to be belligerent and petty, but to find logical arguments and unseen consequences
3. Hire people in your organization that do not think like you do
4. In a brainstorm or discussion, stop and ask, what can go wrong here?  What contingency should we prepare for?  What are other alternatives?  Ask these questions even when you all agree you have the perfect answer.  The goals are to get you and your team thinking critically.  

Have other suggestions on how we can lead to avoid this or other cognitive biases?  Comment below. We’d love to hear your ideas.

In the fifth in our series, I am expanding on the Illusion of Control Bias – the tendency to overestimate your degree of influence over external events. The classic example is gambling…think someone who is convinced they have a system for choosing the right random Keno or lottery numbers.

This cognitive bias is a particularly interesting bias to me because unlike other biases, this one has an interesting upside.   It can encourage people to take responsibility or to act on something they otherwise wouldn’t. Consider entrepreneurship, which requires real risk taking – the chances of success are stacked against you.  In this case, overestimating potential control over the successful outcome causes the entrepreneur to act in the first place.  And let’s face it, without trying; you would never get there.

But like all biases, there is a definite darker side.   For decision making to lead to optimal results, the leader must be able to accurately assess the situation.  Bad assumptions can lead to not only negative results, but also less inclination to learn from mistakes and decreased sensitivity to feedback.

Wondering if you suffer from this bias?  Think harder in situations where you are particularly familiar.  Familiarity can increase the likelihood of this bias.  Also, if you are very clear on the desired outcome, you may be especially susceptible.

Power can also contribute. According, to Niro Sivanathan, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, ”Power can over inflate self-esteem to the extent that people believe they have more control over outcomes than they actually do.” Niro’s work explored how individuals cope with the sudden acquisition or loss of power. What he found is that rapid increases in power can prompt people to overreact to their newly enjoyed power with very negative outcomes as a result of the illusion of control.    Niro found that people in power believed themselves to have control over uncontrollable situations, such as predicting the outcome of a die roll.  It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could lead to leadership and decision making snafus.   Niro’s studies include concrete examples of companies that have collapsed after the overambitious decisions of those ‘drunk on power’, as well as political leaders whose overestimation of their strength has led them into conflict.

What does this mean for your organization?  Try to be aware, especially in situations where you are familiar or are especially clear on the desired outcome.  Also, think about areas where you are estimating effort, time, money and other resources.   Be sure to listen to the facts and measure results as you proceed.  When appropriate, use analytical and process management tools that can help expose blind spots and weaknesses.  And finally, if you have a culture that encourages open communication, use one of the best overall tools of all – listen (one of my favorite positive business skills).  Because as we have all experienced, often, upon looking back, we will see the information was there all along.

We wanted to give you something that would help make your life a little better next year.   Keep these things in mind when you are crafting your New Year’s Resolutions.

1. Give something away.  It makes you happier than buying something for yourself.  College students were given money to either give away or spend on themselves.  Guess which group was happier.  When we buy stuff, we always think it will make us happier, for a longer period of time, than it actually does.  Think – what did you give for the holidays versus what did you get?
2. Give an experience.  If you are going to give something away, research shows that giving someone an experience versus a thing you can hold, makes people happier.  It also makes people happier to be with others (even if you are an introvert).  For example I gave my husband a trip around a racetrack for his birthday one year.  He’s still talking about it.
3. Stop watching the news.  It’s depressing.  There is a ratio of 27:1 negative to positive news.  So no wonder you’re depressed watching it or reading about it.  You’ll find out about the important things eventually.  And with all that free time you could do something that actually makes you happier.
4. Spice Up That Date Night.  Don’t do the thing you always do – dinner and a movie.  Do something new.  Do something active.  Research shows that couples are happier when they do something novel together.
5. Fight Your Confirmation Bias.  What is that, you ask?  It’s your tendency to always confirm your own beliefs and ignore facts that don’t fit your beliefs.  For example, I will get an email and KNOW someone is upset with something.  When I consult my husband he invariably asks, “What did the email actually say?”  And he’s usually right.  Play the ‘devil’s advocate’ when there is a situation in which the facts are a bit fuzzy.
6. Manage Up.  It’s gotta be done so don’t wimp out on that conversation.  But be saavy.  Learn what makes your boss tick before you do.  Is there a way this person likes to communicate?  Phone/email/instant message?  What are this person’s strengths?  And what is the specific thing you are asking for (within reason)?  Then start with asking their perspective.  Because it’s not a conversation until you ask a question.
7. Sleep More.  This is a ‘duh’ research finding.  But Tom Rath encapsulates loads of research in his book Eat Sleep Move that you are warding off depression, processing things you’ve learned, performing better at work and at home with just a few extra Z’s.
8. Move more.  Like the above, we all know we should get more movement in our day, but did you know you can actually fight off cancer by vigorously exercising 30 minutes/day?  Not to mention people who exercise do better on academic tests.  (Read:  You’re smarter than a couch potato.)  Better than a pill, that exercising thing.
9. Plan Your Meetings Ahead of Time.  A lot of your day is spent in meetings.  We get it.  You barely have time to breathe, nonetheless have time to Google the person you are meeting with.  But in order to make your life more productive, you’ll need to plan ahead.  What topics are you going to cover?  How much time will they take?  Who is speaking to them?  Who is taking notes? Facilitating? Keeping time?  (Hint:  These last three should not all be the same person.)
10. Create a “Grati-do” list – I get stressed out just looking at all the of the things that I need to get done.  Even crossing them off doesn’t make me feel better.  I just replace that item with something else.  So in my phone, I’ve created a list that I add to with all the things I’m grateful for.  And looking back on the list when I open it makes me happy all over again.  Oh, yes, I remember when my daughter first said ‘Mama’.  It’s one list that you can add to forever.  And it helps you know what makes you happy, so you can do more of those things (i.e. being in nature, being with family, etc.)
11. Create your “To NOT do” list – I am very good at putting things on my list.  But not very good at taking them off.  And the more I add, the most stressed I get.  As the old adage goes, “Less is more.”  So go through your list and see (as Julie Morgenstern says) what you can ‘Delete, Delay, Delegate, or Diminsh.’  You’ll never be happier underachieving.
12. Vision Your Future.   Imagine yourself 5 years from now and everything is going just as you wanted it to.  Even better, actually, at work and at home.  What does it look like?  Who is with you?  Take 15 minutes to write that down and be as specific as possible.
13. Ask yourself provocative questions.  Before crafting your New Years Resolutions, try asking yourself this:  What is the smallest change you could make to your life next year (work or home) that would have the biggest impact?
14. If there is one thing you do next year to make yourself happier and more productive, it is MEDITATE.  I spoke with meditation expert Sharon Salzberg and she said the latest neuroscience research shows that all you need to change your brain is 30 minutes/week and it doesn’t have to be all at once.  “Short moments, many times.”  And check out her new book called Real Happiness at Work.

There are many lists for the new year….take a look at the ones on this list that resonate with you.  Choose one or two.  And commit to them.  Change takes about 21 days.  So try them out and let us know how it goes.

After 90 seconds, the initial flood of chemicals has completely dissipated. Dwelling on the situation that caused your feelings in the first place keeps powerful, chemicals flowing and you literally stew in your own juices. It takes a little practice, but rather than stewing, you can hit the ‘reset’ button.

A Relentless Loop

Road Rage offers a prime example of getting stuck in an angry loop. Remember the last person who cut you off? What ran through your head? Did you take it personally, thinking that the other person had done something to you? How long did you hang onto the anger?

Let’s replay that scenario. Someone cuts you off. Maybe you were in their blind spot. Maybe they realized they were about to miss their exit and reacted without thinking or looking in the rear view mirror. Maybe they were distracted by a personal emergency. None of the likely reasons that caused the other driver to cut you off had intent to harm.

That’s the way it is in a lot of situations that trigger anger. We create a story and interpret intent behind the other person’s actions. Most often our stories are wrong. Dwelling on the story keeps the anger churning.

Hit The Reset Button

You can use a number of different techniques to stop the flood of chemicals that keep you stewing. It starts by recognizing you’re in the throes of an amygdala hijack. Clenched jaw. Racing heart. BP spike. When angry or afraid, we take short, panting breaths. To interrupt the amygdala hijack, take a few long, deep breaths from the diaphragm.

Next, acknowledge how you feel. Rather than saying to yourself, “I am angry,” phrase your self-talk as, “I feel anger.” Verbs are small, powerful words that create your reality. The nuance of language actually does make a difference.

Finally, rewrite the story you’re telling yourself. Unless you’re a mind reader, you cannot possibly know what’s going on in another person’s head. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the first story you’ve told yourself is off target.

Self-management Builds Leaders

We know from Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee‘s work that a large component of leadership is the ability to manage your own emotions. Part of communication is the biochemical influence we have on others within our sphere of influence. Communication isn’t constrained to word choice, tone of voice, and body language. The chemicals we release also play a significant role in the communication. Great leaders know how they impact others and have learned when to hit the reset button—an important element of emotional intelligence.

It appears as if social science and neuroscience are coming to the same conclusions about human behavior… at least in some instances.

In a Ted Talk entitled Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are, Amy Cuddy speaks about how adjusting your posture for two minutes will change hormone levels, which will either make you more powerful or less powerful. It’s interesting, because the postures Cuddy highlights are clearly instinctive power or submissive moves. The hormones involved? Testosterone (the dominance hormone) and cortisol (the stress hormone).

As people interact with one another, those hormone levels translate to body language. This has serious consequences personally and professionally. As a leader, one of the most important skills I taught my direct reports was how to interpret body language during interviews. Of course, the skill applied to all interpersonal interactions, but it was really during the job interview where we debriefed about what we saw and how we interpreted subliminal clues.

The Effect of Moderating Body Language

What’s interesting about body language, though, is that we frequently forgot to monitor our own. To turn the tables, then, think about the messages that you send. How do you prepare for a job interview? Or interact with your boss on a regular basis? What posture, or status, do you take—peer, subordinate, or power pose?

Before an important meeting, I prepare by envisioning the optimal path the meeting will take and my behavior under perceived circumstances. (Note: ‘optimal path’ is a relative term here. Some of these discussions have been very challenging.) I am purposely trying to regulate body language and chemistry as a means of improving my own behavior, communication, and effecting positive outcomes.

Through the open loop system described by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, in Primal Leadership, we know that we subliminally communicate with the people around us through the biochemicals we emit. By training your brain to react to situations in a certain way, you regulate hormones, which in turn regulates your stress responses and interactions with other people.

For example, you can keep a room full of people on a constructive track when working through really tough, even contentious issues if you have trained your brain to resist certain negative stress reactions. The research indicates that thinking about an action fires the neurons in the same manner as performing the action itself. It follows that you can establish and deepen neuropathways that will produce the predominant thought patterns and behaviors you want to embed. At its core, this is mindfulness.

Primal Leadership also describes the role mirror neurons have in our ability to relate to (and lead) others. One interesting take away from Cuddy’s Ted Talk: When power comes into play, the mirroring neurons appear to go into hiding. When one person pulls a power posture, others assume submissive poses. These reactions would then translate to changes in testosterone and cortisol levels.

Posture, Cell Memory, and Hormones

By now, you may have figured out that chemistry is where social science and neuroscience dovetail rather nicely. According to Cuddy, adopting a power stance for as little as two minutes increases testosterone by 20% and decreases cortisol by 25%. A sustained submissive posture produces a 10% decrease in testosterone and a 15% increase in cortisol.

“When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So, do you want the high-power leader that’s dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who’s powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who’s laid back.” —Amy Cuddy

If you’ve read Candace Pert’s work*, then you know that cells have memory. You also know that every cell in the human body has neuroreceptors. It follows, then, that whatever posture you choose to take in an effort to mimic or produce an emotion will naturally change your body chemistry and you will start to feel that emotion. Feelings. Thoughts. Physiology. They’re intertwined and together, they drive behavior and attitude.

As Cuddy puts it, “Fake it ’til you make it”… or really, become whoever it is you’re striving to become. These inner body relationships are something to think about before going to work tomorrow, walking into the next meeting with your boss, and even preparing for your next performance evaluation. Attentively changing your body language can make you a super star… and über promotable.

*Note: Pert was the first neuroscientist to discover neuroreceptors in the brain and wrote Molecules of Emotion.

Please don’t label me a crackpot just yet. The science shows that people in leadership positions who demonstrate high degrees of empathy have a greater propensity to lead rather than manage. In the startup environment, leading with empathy qualifies as a critical success factor that influences the level of trust that can form across the team, which then affects quality and speed of decision-making, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and ultimately product quality and time to market.

The “Squishy” Side of Leadership

For those of you who think empathy is an emotion that’s too squishy to have much influence over business outcomes, think again. A few months ago we reported on Empathy in Business, an event sponsored by Arlington Economic Development’s Business Investment Group. Some of the area’s (and world’s) heaviest hitters gave personal insight about the role empathy plays in their business lives. This is what Ángel Cabrera, President of George Mason University, Carly Fiorina, CEO of Carly Fiorina Enterprises (and former CEO of HP), and Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka Innovators for the Public had to say on the subject:

“What if we didn’t try to be the best university in the world but the best university FOR the world?” — Ángel Cabrera

“We need to understand that the quality of our lives is directly related to the quality of other people’s lives.” — Carly Fiorina

“2/3 of people’s motivation is wanting to help. Why do we focus on the 1/3?” — Bill Drayton

For a quick recap, research shows people can experience and exhibit three kinds of empathy:

1. Cognitive
2. Emotional
3. Compassionate

Cognitive empathy involves the ability to sense how other people feel and what they might be thinking. This ability plays an integral role in effective leadership because it helps you understand motivation from other people’s perspectives. Great leaders rely on cognitive empathy to build high performing organizations. But… they need more.

To respond appropriately to crises, the person at an organization’s helm also needs to exhibit emotional empathy. Our brains are wired to respond to the emotions of others on a very personal level. Connecting emotionally draws people in and creates trust.

Compassionate empathy causes people to reach out and help those around them—an element of problem solving if you will.

Despite the degree of empathy you personally feel and demonstrate, all healthy people experience it. (To read the entire article, please click here.)

Empathy’s Gender Bias

Management Today reports that there does appear to be a gender bias when it comes to empathy. Research conducted in the UK indicates that female managers demonstrated greater degrees of empathy, and therefore, developed deeper levels of trust with others in the organization—including the men who reported to them. I’m not convinced that the results are based solely on biology. Rather, I suspect that there may be general tendencies for women to more freely express empathy while concurrently cultural norms inhibit most men from showing empathy as deeply as they feel it.

If this is really the case, then can we teach empathy to both genders and make it acceptable to show in the workplace? After all, we’ve been taught to leave our personal lives (aka emotions) at the door. The Canadians seem to think so. They’ve begun an experiment to deliberately deprogram our empathy-hostile cultural bias. So far, the results look quite interesting.

Experiment: Roots of Empathy

Roots of Empathy program

A public school in Toronto has launched a program to teach empathy to 8- and 9-year-olds. The program, called Roots of Empathy (ROE), brings a loving mother and baby into the classroom once a month. The kids observe the mother’s and baby’s behaviors and then discuss what they see. In addition, the school has developed a curriculum to round out the ROE program.

Teaching the dynamics of interpersonal relationships through observation will enable these kids to read between the lines when they interact with others throughout their lives. When you think about it, the teachers in Toronto are actually changing the way their students’ brains are wired. We all notice what’s going on in other people to one degree or another. Whether or not we pay attention is another thing. The emphasis and acceptance of empathy deliberately sets the critical building blocks for developing a heightened degree of emotional intelligence.

If you’re interested in the article, you can find it in a special edition of Time entitled The Science of You: The Factors that Shape Your Personality. The article has not made its way to an online version… yet.

What critical success factors will you look in the CEOs who present at Capital Connection 2013? Please comment below.

Originally published by Modern DC Business Magazine on May 29, 2013.