For me, empathy is easy; I can’t turn it off. But in order to feel compassion for another person, I have to want it. While empathy is often considered a “higher level” of compassion, I don’t experience it that way.

My empathy is tuned so high that I literally feel the pain another person is experiencing; they bump their elbow on the wall, I get a shooting pain through my funny bone. Someone shares their story of fighting cancer, I imagine myself in the chemo chair. They talk about their newborn keeping them up at night, I feel myself getting tired. They can’t find their way out of a dead-end job, I can’t help but identify with what’s getting in their way.

There’s “cognitive empathy” (being able to share another person’s perspective) and there’s “emotional empathy” (taking on the emotional state of another). Both of these types of empathy come naturally to me. But there’s a third kind of empathy that I have to be conscious of in order to achieve: compassionate empathy, or “empathic concern.” Not only to share in another person’s emotions, but also to see them in a positive light and to want to help. It is less fleeting; it presumes action. It is what I call embodying empathy.

I’m working towards it, but I’m not there yet. Even though I may be empathizing with someone, I don’t always care to put their needs before my own. I see them as just getting in my way. I matter more to me than they do, and I refuse to turn my compassion on. I’d much rather be annoyed. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

She’s so lazy. He’s so rude. They’re so stupid. What I perceive as their laziness, rudeness and stupidity is a barrier to me getting my needs met — or so I believe.

But what if living more compassionately helped me to see beyond the surface layer and enabled me to be of service to them? What if empathic concern has a greater benefit to the universe than me being personally fulfilled?

The late writer David Foster Wallace had some very powerful thoughts on what it means to live a compassionate life, in choosing a new way of thinking about the tedium of every day adulthood. Wallace got some renewed and much deserved attention over the weekend when his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College was turned into a film by The Glossary. It already has 4 million views on YouTube.

It is my natural default setting. It is the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrated, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

~ David Foster Wallace, This is Water

Well worth watching:

What can each one of us do to change our default setting for compassion to On? What can we do to see those around us in a more positive light?

Thank you to Ty Johnston for sharing this video with me.

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Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But it’s not enough to understand, we have to act. Understanding happens in the mind. Action happens in the body.

To care is to feel, to recognize the importance; it’s an internal emotional state. But to take care is an external performance; it is a behavior. Only when it is observable and experienced by others does it have impact.

Feeling empathy is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It must be perceptible. We must express it, perform it. To embody empathy is to quite literally give our body to it. To allow it to fill us completely.

When we embody something, it becomes tangible and we become a symbol of it. It is no longer something to turn on or off, something to choose to pay attention to inside of us. It is us.

Embodying empathy is the act of giving ourselves to others. In every exchange, every meeting, every decision, being constantly filled with the awareness of others’ needs. They do not diminish our own, but they slowly integrate with our own. We can then act on the other’s behalf as a true proxy.

That is the job of a designer: to be a proxy for the intended audience. Just as the job of a manager is to be a proxy for his staff. And the job of a leader is to be a proxy for her community.

It’s not enough to feel the feelings of another; we have to represent them.

So are you just experiencing empathy, or are others experiencing the effects of it?

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Though I’ve spent the last eight years helping businesses build greater empathy for their customers, a culture shift can only occur when they take the time to build greater empathy for one another. I want to show them how.

As a consultant, I do the heavy lifting for my clients: lead projects, establish process, produce deliverables and solve problems. But in the end, they are outsourcing their empathy. Once I’m gone, things tend to go back to the way they were.

I want to help my clients help themselves. It’s just not effective to tell them what to do, or worse, to do it for them; they have to discover their own right path. I no longer want to train skills, I want to develop capacities. I want to work with individuals and teams who strive to make a lasting impact on their organizations and themselves personally. And I believe the best way to do that is as their coach.

In order for organizational change to last, it has to happen simultaneously from the top down and the bottom up; the former alone is inauthentic, the latter alone is inefficient. My goal is to coach both product teams and senior leaders. While my educational background and decade of experience in UX give me the credibility and technical know-how needed to engage with implementation teams of designers and developers, the strategic and operational drivers in a mature organization require a different set of credentials and methods. That is why I’m ready to invest in becoming a certified professional coach.

It’s not my style to get things done quickly and easily without regard for quality and rigor. After extensive research on the discipline of professional coaching, the credentials offered by the International Coach Federation, and the wide array of accredited coaching training programs, I realized that the right program for me would take place in person over an extended period of time, with a particular focus on coaching the whole person (not just their professional “self”) and a philosophy that a coach must undertake their own self-development before they are qualified to aid in the development of others. That program is New Ventures West.

I found out I was accepted last night. What you are reading was my application essay.

As an only child, native New Yorker, natural introvert and sole proprietor, I am quite accustomed to taking care of myself. While I’m incredibly proud of all I have achieved, my independence has been both a blessing and curse. My need for self-reliance has often meant an inability to rely on others, a reluctance to trust, and an regretful judgmental streak. Unsurprisingly, the person I am most critical of is myself.

I have a deep emotional reservoir which I can tap into effortlessly. While I lead with my intellect, I am probably best known, personally and professionally, for my adeptness at exploring my own feelings and my eerie intuition in many areas of life. I’m not scared of what I feel (though fear is sometimes one of those feelings) and I’m not ashamed to share it. Similarly, I am often encouraging of others to express how they feel, drawing it out of them and giving them a safe place to share. Since empathy is the core of my work, I find it easy and necessary to be present in this space, and get enormous satisfaction out of building bridges between people who find they share common ground emotionally even when they may be worlds apart cognitively.

As such, I put a tremendous amount of effort in establishing and maintaining personal and professional relationships with a diverse group of people worldwide. I draw inspiration from them daily and give of myself freely and openly. But save for a few close friends from high school and college, I don’t let very many people in. I am incredibly close with my parents, though our relationship has been tumultuous at times. All families have their challenges, but our intense dynamic continues to infiltrate me in profound ways. Only since turning 30 have I finally begun to let the past go and write a new narrative for myself.

Six months ago, my boyfriend and I sold or threw away almost all of our belongings and left New York City for the Florida Keys. He quit a lucrative IT job and is now pursuing his captain’s license while working as a mate for a charter sailboat company. I’m testing the theory of location independence, flying to see my clients as necessary, and flying home to paradise. It has been renewing for both of us to say the least, and I couldn’t imagine doing it with anyone else.

My boyfriend is my rock, accepts me for exactly who I am, and is slowly teaching me how to accept myself. He’s a macho man with the world’s biggest heart, a lifelong angler, a gourmet cook, and an amateur race car driver. We have diametrically opposed personalities, but hold the same values. We are truly each other’s match in mind, heart and body. There is never a dull moment between us.

But no one can be your everything. It would do me heaps of good to have my own coach to help me focus on self-care and self-love. I am constantly feeding my mind and am deeply attuned to my emotional state, but I have often fallen short of taking care of my body with kindness. My spiritual journey has been profound but inconsistent, as I allow the natural fluctuations of my business to dictate my daily schedule. As a result, I fail to maintain any routine that accounts for regular meditation, exercise, predictable meals, and the like. I am well-versed in how my body communicates its pains and overuse, and am fairly good at responding to it by giving it what it needs, but I can’t say that I’ve done a good enough job paying attention to its rhythms to know how to prevent error rather than just recover from it.

My conflation of spirituality and somatics is deliberate. If my body is my temple, then its lack of maintenance could be to blame for the incessant feeling I have that “belonging” is just out of reach. While my pursuits and purpose are thoroughly in service to the universe and for the benefit of all humankind, I am still inclined to measure success by materialistic means. I have spent years trying to rid myself of this burden, unsuccessfully.

All of these ways of being are integrated in my daily life, each with varying volume depending on context. There are times of day, environments, people, circumstances, etc. in which I have greater awareness of and adherence to cognition or emotion or somatics or relationships or spirituality, while the others become quieter but never muted. When it’s time to make a decision, I find myself consulting with all five intelligences, as they each have something unique to say. They are, after all, all a part of me.

We are whole human beings with one self, not a work self and home self, personal self and professional self. I believe that way of thinking about who we are and how we show up in the world is incredibly damaging to our society. People end up forging relationships with “parts” of people, failing to see all of their facets because they’ve been obscured. This breeds apathy, dehumanization, and demoralization. Our bonds are weaker, our collective force less effective.

Integral living leads to integral community leads to integral civilization. That’s the world I want to live in, and that’s the world I aim to create.

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The funny thing about self-awareness though is that we all think we have it. We feel so tapped into our own motivations and desires, the modern, intellectual people that we are. But our concept of self-awareness is grossly limited.

As a society we talk a lot about self-awareness — the ability to know oneself — as introspection, solely as it relates to thoughts (cognition) and feelings (emotion). We get to know our moods and rhythms, set up routines and systems to make us more productive, and compensate for our natural way of being. But in this self-development obsessed culture, it seems all we’re ever really focused on is what’s happening from the neck up.

How well do we know our bodies? What are our bodies telling us about who we are? How are our bodies determining the outcomes of our lives?

I’m just starting to become aware the world of Somatics — “the body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche.” At first I thought it was a bunch of New Age wackadoo, but as I continue to explore it, I’m finding there’s quite a bit of wisdom trapped in these bodies of ours — and we do a very poor job of listening to it.

Our body language is far more than just something we use to non-verbally communicate with others. It turns out that the way we sit and stand, the poses and postures we position ourselves in, have an enormous biological and emotional impact on us.

In a TED talk titled, Your body language shapes who you are, social psychologist Amy Cuddy shares her research on “power posing” — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident. Her findings conclude that our body language can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, which significantly impact our behavior and its consequences.

Watch the video:

What struck me the most from Cuddy’s findings is that the simple act of changing our posture can impact our feelings about ourselves and how others perceive us. And we don’t even have to believe it in order for it to work, we just have to do it. “Fake it ’til you become it,” she says.

Self-awareness leads to self-management, which in turn leads to self-care, which ultimately leads to self-love.

So as Cuddy suggests, take two minutes to audit your body and strike a pose. Look down, not just in. We have the power to reshape our bodies and our lives.

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I do it. I know you’re doing it, too.

As much as it hurts not to be liked, it hurts even more not to like someone. Every moment that you’re in contact with that person, your mind is filled with negative thoughts. And that negativity permeates your being.

There is one reliable way to overcome this: choose to make this person your friend. “But I don’t want to!” is the natural response. Yes, you absolutely don’t want to. No one does. And that’s why doing it anyway is so crucial. Be the one who tries.

Start by sending a simple email. “I want to know you better.” Ask her to lunch. Ask him to join you for a drink after work.

The worst they can say is No. But you’ll still know you tried. And so will they.

Chances are they’ll say Yes, tentatively. Choose a date and time, sometime soon, to show them you mean it. Go by their desk and say, “I know this seems totally out of left field, but I’m really looking forward to it.” Help them look forward to it, too.

When you’re finally there, sitting across from this person you’ve spent so much energy avoiding, release your perceptions and judgments. This is your chance to meet each other again as if for the first time. There is no need to dredge up the past. Your only goal is to create a new present for you both.

Relieve the awkwardness with honesty. “I’ve never felt like we get along.” “I’ve never really taken the time to understand what you do.” “I don’t get you, but I want to.” I’m here, and I’m trying.

Where is he from? Where does she live? How long has she been married? How old are his kids? What did he study in college? When did she move here?

Can you answer any of these questions now?

How long have they been working at your company? How did they come to work there? What do they do day-to-day? How much is it what they expected it would be? How has it changed over time? How well do they get along with their manager? How effective are their direct reports? What about their job do they love the most? What do they wish they could change? How can you help them to change it?

The answers to the questions hold the key, the key to your empathy. It may be tough to unlock. You’ve invested so much in characterizing them as the antagonist in your story, even if they don’t know it. Recasting them will go against your instincts. But asking these critical questions and carefully listening to the answers will give you no choice but to reconsider the role.

Imagine the weight that will be lifted off your shoulders. Imagine the power and satisfaction of creating a new alliance, all because of your willingness to let go. Imagine the positive chain reaction you’ll create in their lives, enabling them to follow your lead in reaching out to the people they’ve discounted and don’t really understand. Imagine the culture of organizational empathy you can cultivate.

So bust down the fences. Extend an olive branch. Acknowledge the whole person you haven’t been appreciating.

Compassion is contagious.

Make peace.

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Skin care company Dove wants you to know that you are more beautiful than you think.

According to their research, only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful. The other 96% spend so much time focused on their imperfections, we’ve completely exaggerated them. We’ve tied our self-identity to an outer image that doesn’t even exist.

So to prove it, Dove conducted a fascinating social experiment they call Real Beauty Sketches. They hired an FBI-trained forensic artist to draw two sketches of each woman while separated by a curtain: the first based solely on the woman’s description of herself; the second based solely on the woman’s description by someone she had just met in the waiting room.

The results are heartbreaking. Watch:

It got me to thinking: if we want to be perceived a certain way, the first step is to change how we see ourselves. What we believe about ourselves is what we portray. A stranger might not be able to see it right away, but we can be sure our family, friends and colleagues do. We’re putting ourselves into a box of our own making.

An experiment focused on the exterior is helpful because we can all see the discrepancies, but that doesn’t mean its lessons are any less relevant to what’s happening on the inside.

If we don’t see our true selves, how will we ever see the truth inside another human being? If we’re so disconnected from our own reality, how will we ever come to understand theirs?

Empathy starts with self-love. And self-love starts with self-awareness. It should be no surprise then that self-awareness starts with an awareness of how we are perceived by others.

It’s time to hold the mirror up and get to know that person staring back at us, through someone else’s eyes. And in return, we can show them the beauty we see inside of them.

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You made a choice today. A choice that will forever alter the course of your life and the lives of those around you. The lives of your closest friends and family, and the lives of perfect strangers. You, yes you. You chose pain.

The pain inside yourself is the only explanation for your desire to cause pain in others. And your pain is only a symptom of fear. Your fear is due to a lack of understanding, and your lack of understanding is due to an unwillingness to learn. Your unwillingness to learn is due to your resistance to change, and your resistance to change is due to a theory of change which is fundamentally flawed.

You believe that change requires loss. Loss of status, loss of comfort, loss of identity. You are right, change requires all of those things. But in choosing to focus on the negative, you neglect to acknowledge the positive.

With every change comes tremendous gain, even if you have to look hard to find it. Change is an opportunity for growth, for openness, for beginning, for realignment, for progress, for healing. It can ultimately provide you with far greater status, far greater comfort, and a far grander identity and purpose than you ever dreamed possible. Had you not entertained the change, you never would have discovered it.

When the pain is deep, fear becomes a way of life. You feel out of sync, disconnected. The only way to find harmony — a pleasing and consistent wholeness — is to cultivate empathy. To work to understand the feelings of another. To challenge your assumptions, your values, your attachment to the past. You need to observe, you need to ask, and you need to listen.

I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Empathy is the antidote to loneliness. Empathy is the antidote to bullying. Empathy is the antidote to fear. Empathy is the antidote to shame.

Empathy creates harmony, within yourself and amongst others. And in order to restore harmony, we each have to form the bonds today.

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And in a search for a new home, I had to admit that I no longer felt at home in my work either.

Home: the place where one lives.

I was not living in my work. I had constructed a work self that was fragmented from my home self, and in doing so had lost my home.

My life looks very different today. I have made a new home, in a new climate with a rich ecology. The environment energizes me. It feeds me. It never depletes me. It allows me to be me — a whole human being.

Being a whole person, at home in my surroundings and in my own skin, has had an amazing side-effect: it has enabled me to see other people as whole human beings, too. I have greater appreciation of their differences. I have greater empathy for their suffering. I have a better understanding of their needs. I judge less. I require less. I relate so much more.

So I implore you: be fully you. If you find yourself in an environment, in any context, that no longer feels like home, if you can see that you’re compartmentalizing yourself and not allowing yourself to be yourself wherever you may be, you’re holding yourself back. You’re denying a vital part of who you are. And eventually when you stop feeding that part of you for long enough, it will die.

Stop. Take a deep breath. Take your whole self with you and leave now. Find a new home. One where business and pleasure co-exist, where you are expected and encouraged to be a whole, beautifully complex person, who is loved unconditionally for being fully you, where you can love your whole self unconditionally, and where you can’t help but love the whole people all around you.

Home: the place where one lives.

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Design turns an invention into a solution. It is an act of problem solving. In order to solve a problem, one must first take the time to understand it. And when a founding team is laser-focused on creation, they routinely neglect to gather intel from the outside world to inform their decisions.

That is why designers are so critical to a startup’s success. A designer’s purpose is to create meaning for the target audience. It takes effective communication, a rigorous process, and a deep capacity for empathy. A product can exist without a business, but a business cannot exist without a product that satisfies customers’ needs.

Unfortunately not every startup can attract or afford the best design talent to work on their product full-time. That’s why I recommend they seek out a design advisor instead.

Benefits of a Design Advisor

Like any startup advisor, a design advisor offers mentorship to help the business grow. But they also help new companies get their feet wet when it comes to design. They can give the founding team a taste of how a designer works, how a designer thinks, and how a designer can shape product decisions that ultimately impact the bottom line.

A design advisor has four key missions: defining the problem, solving the problem, establishing the process, and building a design team.

Defining the Problem

When a startup is hellbent on getting its V1 out the door, it double-downs on talent that knows how to make stuff work. Developers. Engineers. Builders. But unfortunately people who are experts at the how don’t always know the why. They aren’t experts in the market, haven’t done the competitive analysis, and very likely haven’t internalized the needs of the customer.

A design advisor can provide guidance on conducting customer research, hone in on the problem that needs to be solved, encourage empathy for the target audience. They can help narrow the scope of work, prioritize the feature set, and create a product roadmap that simultaneously meets the business objectives and the needs of the customer.

Solving the Problem

When the team inevitably comes to a standstill over a disagreement on the design — due to too much subjective decision-making and/or a lack of data to allow for objectivity — a design advisor can take a step back and help find clarity.

They can draw upon their prior experience, their knowledge of best practices, or their educational background to provide examples of how this particular problem has been solved in the past. They can be a sounding board for the team’s ideas. Or they can facilitate brainstorming sessions to generate new ones.

Establishing the Process

A design advisor can also help a startup to establish a design process that will sustainably turn out high quality, consistent work using the minimal amount of overhead.

They’ll advocate for sketching and prototyping of new ideas, testing those ideas with potential customers, and using those newfound insights to iterate and improve. They’ll oversee the transition from wireframes to mockups to development, and will be adept at noticing when concepts haven’t been accurately carried through. They’ll get the team comfortable with using new tools and terminology, and above all else, help keep the lines of communication open.

Building a Design Team

Once they’ve oiled the wheels, a design advisor can be a huge help in finding a full-time designer to manage a startup’s longer-term, day-to-day needs. They’ll be able to gauge when the startup is ready to hire, provide guidance on the type of designers to look for, and best of all, wield the power of their network to find potential candidates. They can even help interview candidates to find the best match and vouch for the startup’s design culture.

How to Evaluate a Design Advisor

Any startup will want to keep these four benefits in mind when it comes to evaluating a design advisor for their company.

Take a good look at their previous work and have them walk through the process they used to get there. Ask them stories about the meaningful experiences they’ve created for their customers and how they were able to measure their success. Make sure they’ve been around the block a few times and have a wide enough range of experiences that they’ll be poised to provide the best guidance when a new challenge arises on the team.

Most of all, be sure they have worked with other startups before and can appreciate the constraints of a small business with limited resources.

How to Engage a Design Advisor

They are three ways a startup can compensate a design advisor: 1) a flat fee; 2) a monthly retainer; or 3) an equity arrangement.

A flat fee typically accompanies a short-term engagement where a startup brings on a design consultant to resolve a specific, acute problem. After the engagement ends, the designer may agree to periodically check in on progress and maintain the title of design advisor for the mutual brand equity, without further compensation.

Others may request a monthly retainer or other ongoing payment to ensure they can carve out enough of their time to focus on the company’s needs and be actively involved in long-term strategy.

When the business is strapped for cash, they may choose to offer equity in exchange for a discounted monthly rate — which may also be more appealing to a design advisor who sees the startup’s potential for big growth.

Regardless of how the relationship is structured, a design advisor can only be useful to a startup when it is open to help. Members of the team — especially the founders — need to make themselves accessible to the design advisor, be present for ongoing meetings, and be eager to shift strategies as a result of new insights.

Startups that truly care about their customers and want to give them the best may already have a culture of empathy, even if they don’t have design talent on the team yet. They know how they want to change the world, they just might not know how to get there. A design advisor can go a long way to pointing them in the right direction.

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I interviewed Holocaust survivors. Four words that still send shivers down my spine. Their stories were meant to shape my research; they ended up shaping me.

It was the project of a lifetime. I was asked to conduct user research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with web design agency Happy Cog. Together we identified several constituents of the Museum to explore: visitors, students, teachers, scholars, activists, volunteers, donors…and survivors. Survivors of the Holocaust. I would be performing the interviews, crafting personas, and reporting on findings to the Museum’s executive board.

As a rule, when I engage with a research participant, I, Whitney Hess, cease to exist. It is a skill I have honed over many years of conducting research. I don’t get hungry, I don’t get tired, I don’t have to pee. I shed my beliefs and my assumptions and my identity. My only need is to listen. My only purpose is to absorb – with total objectivity.

Would it be possible then for me to objectively study Holocaust survivors? I am a Jew.

At first I told myself that being Jewish somehow qualified me to understand their stories and empathize with their pain. Then I feared that I would get so emotional that I wouldn’t be able to make it through an interview.

I was wrong on both counts.

I had the honor and the privilege of interviewing seven survivors – from Germany, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, and Great Britain – all volunteers at the Holocaust Museum in varying capacities. Some interviews were in person at the Museum, others were over the phone. They shared their stories of survival, and they shared their feedback on the website. Both extremes were just as relevant. I listened with reverence and I asked probing questions. I was so busy taking it all in, I didn’t have time to feel anything about it. I was working.

When it came to crafting personas, I started with the teachers and students, moved on to activists and scholars, and eventually I could postpone it no longer – it was time to review my findings from the survivors.

Reading back through my notes and the interview transcripts, I maintained my composure. I kept reminding myself, You have work to do. But in a moment of weakness, I allowed myself to listen to a recording. And then another. Day became night and I was still listening. They recounted the abuse they’d endured, the brutality they’d witnessed, the family they’d lost…it was so raw, so real. I let myself go. I cried, bawled. For what they had overcome, for themselves, for their families, and for me.

In the end, I decided not to create a persona of a survivor, and my teammates and clients understood my reasoning. Their stories were unique; they could not be merged.

Instead I gleaned a few key quotes, to convey the essence of the individuals. What they had to say changed my whole perspective on what we were doing and why we were doing it. Their message had to be heard. I had to share it. I got to share it.

And it changed everything.

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