What is it that brings a person, maybe you, into a coaching relationship? Is it a feeling of being stuck? Is it a challenging event causing confusion, concern, or something even deeper? Is it one of those “lightbulb moments” where we realize something has to change but we don’t know where to go from that inflection point?
Every new coaching client brings a unique blend of life events and challenges, and what often seems universal when it comes to this yearning for growth and depth is an acknowledgement on the coach’s part, the seemingly simple act saying, “I see you.” This supportive practice of seeing is both essential and challenging. This might be because we are falling into a misunderstanding of the role empathy plays and, more importantly, the limits of empathy.
Here There Be Dragons
I’m reminded of the notations ancient cartographers would inscribe on the areas of their maps about which little or nothing was known. “Here There Be Dragons,” the map would read. A powerful metaphor for the distillation of the unknown as dangerous and frightening, and exploring the unexplored is certainly a theme that bubbles through the hearts of many clients seeking clarity.
In the face of those fears, moving through inquiry is my Polaris, and it is also a fundamental necessity that can lead to real growth and discovery. We tread lightly, but with a sensation housed in curiosity. Where is the quicksand a client feels they are falling into? Where are the secret trapdoors? Where are the locked rooms? Where, in short, are the areas of their personal map that require continuous inquiry? Here there be dragons, indeed. In these conversations, it can feel very normal to express empathy as a means of support. This act of feeling what a client is feeling, to sense what the client is sensing, to experience that Vulcan mind meld of leaning into a powerful shared identification. How could the desire and expression be anything less than a bonding housed in loving kindness? Isn’t empathy the gold standard of care?
Well…?
The Coaching Toolbox
I’m a coach who also happens to be blind, and I work with a lot of people who are at various stages along their experience with blindness. Some have been blind since birth. Some are experiencing varying degrees of sight loss. Some have no amount of sight loss themselves but are married to someone who is experiencing this, or they have children experiencing this.
Because I live in San Francisco, where multiple income streams are table stakes for living here, I have also followed my calling to be of service to my community and teach accessible technology skills to people who are blind and vision impaired. It is the greatest privilege to teach a tech client the skills they need to get or keep a job, to pursue their education or start a business, and when it comes to my tech clients, it is usually only a matter of time until we discuss the following challenge: how much training do they need? Do they really, I am asked, need to know how to use at least two different types of screen reading platforms? Do they really need to learn Braille? Do they really need to know how to use a portable audio memo recorder that looks like it jumped out of a time machine whose last stop was 1997?
So many questions in this vein, but my answer is usually the same. We don’t, I offer, show up to build a house with just a hammer. We show up with a fully stocked toolbox, because showing up without the tools we may need makes your job that much harder.
The Empathy Conundrum
If you believe in the value of empathy, and why wouldn’t you, prioritizing empathetic energy seems self-evident. After all, we are not made of stone, nor should we be. Feeling into our client’s feelings, really being in that moment, just has to help, right?
Right?
I have an inquiry I invite you to move through. What if expressing empathy does more harm than good? If I am a fully sighted coach and my client is blind and expressing a feeling of despair or loss, can I truly know what the despair they are feeling is like? I’ve felt despair and loss in my life, but does expressing and feeling into my own stories of loss and despair do more to help or hurt the conversation? I may have felt a particular type of loneliness at stages in my life, but can I truly feel the level of isolation that comes with trading in a driver’s license for a bus pass?
Let’s take a more widespread and also meaningful example of a crisis that brings people into coaching. If I am employed, can I truly, in the moment of a coaching conversation, really feel the emotions of lost identity, confusion and sometimes outright fear that come with not knowing if there are enough savings to get through this crisis, not knowing what your spouse or children think of you, or where your support network will come from now. My attempts, while well intentioned, can very well appear as hollow and lead to that dreaded (for us) reaction: you have no idea what I’m going through.
Is it actually possible that, in our effort to identify and empathize with a client’s pain, empathy can be the wrong tool in some moments of conversation?
The Siren Song of Empathy
Empathy alone seems like the gold standard., but sometimes, it’s pyrite, also known as Fool’s Gold. This is a controversial idea, but walk with me for a moment while I quote Norman Fischer, who made a fascinating observation in his book, Training in Compassion.
“Real empathy requires that we develop the capacity to put our own concerns aside long enough to notice what someone else is going through internally, without reference to ourselves. But Empathy does not necessarily mean we care. We can be good at sensing what people are feeling just enough to be able to control or manipulate them. Sociopaths and con artists are quite empathetic, uncanny in their ability to feel the feelings of others.”
Now, I feel it is a rare situation indeed that a coach, a therapist or a mentor is consciously trying to manipulate, let alone con a client. However, can we admit that it is within the realm of possibility that there may be just a smidge of unconscious manipulating, or managing if we want to use a softer word, if we are of the misguided notion that coaching is designed to take the client to where we want them to go, rather than meeting them where they are? “I know how to help this client,” we might say, because I have felt into their pain, and I know what I would do not only if I were in their shoes, but thanks to empathy, I feel I actually am in their shoes.
Here’s the thing. These are dangerous waters, because it can be all too tempting for us as coaches to feel, through empathy, that we “know” what a client is feeling. Yes, as Fischer observes, real empathy requires us not to internalize our client’s story as our own, but the temptation of That story, that we can empathically bond with a client through a common experience we perceive we have shared, takes us out of the path of inquiry. Empathy can move us a long way down the coaching road, but I invite you to question whether or not it can and should take us only so far.
The Compassion Alternative
How does offering compassion differ from offering empathy? Compassion may be thought of as part of a triad of heartfelt caring, where we are experiencing empathy, sympathy and compassion. I should note that there is a certain amount of porousness in all three of these concepts, and that’s why they should all be part of our coaching toolbox. As Fischer continues, “Compassion is sympathy for others specifically in the case of their suffering. Although it is uncomfortable, we are willing to feel the suffering of others and the experience of others.”
Sympathy, I feel, often gets a bad rap, because it is often viewed as synonymous with pity. This is a misidentification. Continuing to quote Fischer:
“When we are sympathetic to others, we want them to be happy and well. We don’t want them to be upset or unhappy. We actually care about them.”
In other words, sympathy and caring may be thought of as both independent ways of being in connection, and are also important states that allow both empathy and compassion to exist.
What I feel Fisher is saying is that in the work of both sending and receiving, a central aspect of the Mahayana Buddhism philosophy he is relating, empathy is but the receiving part of the relationship. We are taking in the client’s suffering, but it is stuck at the receiving capacity. What are we sending back to the client in this act of service? Compassion allows for an unfolding of sympathy and true offering. We feel the suffering and we communicate that we have true sympathy for that suffering. I propose that what our clients need may not be simply empathy but compassion, thanks to the mutual receiving and sending that can unfold in the sharing of a client’s challenge. This is a distinction with a difference, and allow me to say with conviction that the sympathy aspect of compassion is not a synonym for pity. Compassion, at its heart, is the act of seeing, hearing and sensing the power that a wounding is having on a client. To feel compassion is to offer an act of being in both a receiving and sending state. In my opinion, it can be one of the highest acts of service, this practice of saying “I see you for who you are, and I have true gratitude for this part of yourself you are sharing with me. I love and embrace that private part of you as much as any other public part of your identity.”
Living in Nondualism
I feel it’s important to note that the empathy and compassion decision should not move us into dualism. This is not an either/or choice a coach has to make. The same conversation with a client can offer opportunities for both empathy and compassion.
There will be points in any coaching conversation that involves the mind, the heart and the body where we do feel truly that we are feeling into what a client is themselves feeling. When I truly feel that this identification is present, I voice it. It’s a central core of another concept called focusing, a topic for another article, but suffice to say that we may, with skill, mirror back this empathy to the client when that identification feels true. It’s risky because a client may not be ready for that mirror. However, I feel that a client can almost always be ready for genuine compassion because of the porous bonding it creates between a client’s lived experience and our desire and ability to offer heartfelt sending of sympathy for their suffering.
An Offering and an Invitation
If you are a coach, my offering is this. Can you truly, through your lived experience be able to say to your client, “I can feel into what you’re expressing.” If the answer to this question is yes, that your lived experience and emotional journey can provide support to your client, and if you feel that your own emotional strength can hold those emotions in the moment while also holding space for your abilities as a coach to maintain inquiry directed towards support, then your ability to relate empathy is a valuable tool in your toolbox, and you should use it. You can also move into the deeper level of compassion.
If you are a coaching client, I offer this. Even if you feel that what you truly need is a coach who can bond with your exact lived experience, a coach who can match you wounding for wounding, explore the possibility of a safe holding space that enables empathy to unfold into compassion. If you are working with an integral coach, there is every chance this unfolding will flourish. Integral coaching very much takes into account this holistic flow of receiving and sending.
My invitation in both these cases and others, though, is to Maintain a sense of curiosity and inquiry. Be willing to go where there may be dragons and see what you discover – about yourself if you’re the client and about both your client and yourself if you’re the coach. Inquiry is so very much the path to deeper understanding and bonding, and isn’t that what the coaching relationship is all about?
Onwards!
Michael Schwartz is an Accessible Technology Trainer and Certified Integral Coach®.
