Components: Empathy

Empathy

What does Birkman mean by Empathy?

The Need for Empathy – Emotional Expressiveness

How you express or deal with feelings.

Logic vs. Feeling

EMPATHY addresses comfort with emotional expression and involvement of feelings.

• High scores reflect emotionally expressive, emotionally creative behaviors with a preference for open expression of emotions and open involvement with emotional issues. Also, high scores reflect a tendency to appear overly emotional when stressed by a perceived lack of attention to emotions or excessive demands for pragmatism and urgency of action.
• Low scores reflect unemotional, optimistic behavior and a preference for practical tasks and unemotional relationships. Also, low scores reflect a tendency to appear to be unfeeling or to avoid emotional issues when stressed by encounters with emotional behavior or issues.

Both are useful…

If a high Empathy (99) and a low Empathy (1) person are in a room together and a child comes in, stumbles and gets bruised on the furniture – the high Empathy person is likely to run over to comfort the child, and say “are you OK?” while the low Empathy person is likely to call the nurse.

The child needs both.

Components – Four Possible Patterns

In reviewing any of the Birkman Components, there are four possible patterns that might be generated. We have listed the combinations here for Empathy with the approximate percentage of the population that will show each pattern, as well as some narrative descriptions for how to understand these patterns.