Building Empathy

“Empathy is caught, not taught.”

– Mary Gordon, Founder of Roots of Empathy

As the Wellness Guide at The Village School, I often find myself seeking moments where I can support our learners with empathy building. Having empathy for others and empathy for yourself is developmental and depends on a number of factors in one’s life. It is not a skill that one day you wake up with and all of the sudden you are able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or feel what someone else feels. In reality, having empathy is hard. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and experienced in order to be developed. It is also a crucial skill that our world needs more of. According to research, empathy is the most important leadership skill needed today. 

Opportunities arise throughout our day at TVS to allow our learners to experience empathy. One way that we plan for this is through storytelling. Storytelling is an essential component of our curriculum. Listening to the stories of others allows us to connect to the human experiences that other people go through, activating our ability to develop emotions and connections with others. Making connections to people that are different from us, builds our ability to have empathy.

One of the most important ways that The Village School builds empathy is through the caring relationships our learners experience. When our learners struggle, our Guides are the model for patience and compassion. Even in a small environment, our learners are not isolated from the stress of the world around them. They all experience bad days, hear about world events, and have outside sources of stress that they carry through the doors of our building. Modeling patience and compassion for each learner builds their ability to have empathy with others. I often find our Guides taking a moment to listen to a learner, or several, as they are struggling to cope with a life stressor. As our learners experience the empathy they are given, those feelings of being heard, being understood, and being valued stick with them. The compassion of others becomes a part of their story until the opportunity arises for them to be the model of empathy, to lead the path for others to experience the same feelings of being heard and being valued.