Empathy Builds On Self Awareness

Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings, our own as well as 'others'.

Self-awareness is the skill of being aware of and understanding your feelings and emotions as they occur, and as they evolve. It is not that emotions by themselves are either positive or negative....maybe a better way would be to think of them as appropriate or inappropriate. The feelings will happen, they come from an emotional brain, that's as real as the cognitive brain, and it's power is extraordinary.

And as your awareness grows, you'll start to recognize them even as they happen, and you then get a chance to figure what might have triggered them, if they're appropriate or not, and then design your behavior accordingly. You're in more conscious behavior space.

Self awareness is pretty much directly correlated to empathy. The higher your awareness of self, the higher will be your ability to empathize, to genuinely understand the other. The quality of self-awareness promotes (although it does not always guarantee) the development of ‘other' awareness. And needless to say, this is a useful attribute in a vast array of life arenas, from sales and management to romance and parenting, to compassion and political action.

"In tests with over seven thousand people in the United States and eighteen other countries, the benefits of being able to read feelings included being better adjusted emotionally, more sensitive, more outgoing, and, perhaps not surprisingly, more popular. And Empathy, it should be no surprise to learn, helps with romantic life." - Daniel Goleman

Here's also a piece I read on this in Psychology Today:

"Here's an interesting caveat; if self-awareness, and empathy by association, are evolutionary imperatives shared by higher functioning species, why is it that human beings can exercise a lack of empathy? It is because we choose to do so.

Chimpanzees, gorillas, bottle-nosed dolphins and elephants all demonstrate unbidden and unconditional empathy toward their brethren whenever the situation calls for it. Yes, chimpanzees will hunt (with spears, no less), kill and eat bush babies (another type of monkey), but it is unlikely that we will ever witness the primate equivalent of Rwanda or holocaust, or even apartheid.

It would appear, once again, that the very thing that makes us human - free will -- continues to be our greatest obstacle and challenge, even in the face of a force as relentless as evolution."