How effective empathy skills can help you and your child live a better life

Humans are highly social beings and are naturally drawn to others. We enjoy interacting with each other, sharing our personal experiences and feel like we belong. Otherwise, we feel lonely and isolated. The important thing here to remember that, in order to get along with people, we need to practice empathy.

Empathy is a skill that helps us be aware and understanding of others peoples feelings and emotions. It can be practiced, learned and trained. By simply putting effort into listening or observing facial expressions, gestures and eye expressions of the other person, we can read and understand what they are feeling. Presence of empathy will help avoid conflict, impulsivity and anger, both in adults and children.

How does empathy help build better relationships? It's simple. Most of the time people argue because they don't make effort into understanding other persons feelings ( in other words, lack of empathy). Many arguments stem from blaming each other, being too self-involved and the desire to be the right one. There just so many times when people just can't see that the person is angry because they repress the sadness they feel. Having good empathy skills will help you control your impulsivity, anger and the chances of misunderstanding the topics.

Feeling and staying humble in relationships is so important both for adults and children to enhance empathy. If you think you know everything, or you know better than someone else, try doing something you are not so good at. Try and learn a different language, explore different cultures or see how life can be different for different people. Understanding these vital differences and practicing humility can help acquire more mature understanding skills, decrease defensiveness, lessen arguments and one-sidedness.

Therapies such as mindfulness and counseling can help children and adults ways to enhance their empathy skills by teaching them effective listening and non-verbal communication skills. This, in return will minimize impulsiveness, aggressiveness and destructiveness that can negatively effect the quality of any form of relationship.