Mastering the Skill of Empathy (and How to Define It) with Andrea Goulet

Have you noticed people cannot talk to each other? Have you noticed there is a them versus us? Andrea Goulet has studied empathy and she has studied it in a way I don't think I've ever seen before and she’s going to share her framework with us. Andrea Goulet is on a mission to make empathy a core technical skill in software development.  She is a sought-after international keynote speaker, experienced software entrepreneur, and award-winning industry leader. Her expertise centers on using empathy and effective communication to modernize legacy and mission-critical software systems.  She is currently working on her first book, Empathy-Driven Software Development, where she aims to provide detailed mechanisms and system schematics of empathy's inner workings in a way that makes sense to engineers. Andrea started her career in strategic communications where she had a technical understanding about empathy and organizational psychology. She was approached by a friend to help build a software company and lead it as the CEO.  They landed on doing consulting together, and also ended up falling in love with each other. (Hollywood screenwriter, where are you?) “What we ended up having in building this business was the stereotypical dynamic of the salesperson and the engineer,” says Andrea. “They don't get along professionally. I did not understand how his brain worked. I had never worked in software.” It was 2009, and they wanted to have a software company where empathy was at the core of the organization. She says they were advised not to do that to avoid being “laughed out of the industry.” Andrea doubled down. “[Empathy] was the thing that drove business profitability, that drove business efficiency, that contributed to organizational effectiveness,” says Andrea. And it wasn’t just in working with clients – empathy was needed in her daily operations with her now husband and business partner, Scott. She recalls an incident where she needed to pull Scott into a client meeting, and walked over to his desk. Her ask pulled him out of his work process that led to a visceral reaction. When they sat down to discuss why he was so upset, he likened it to the movie Inception – saying he was nine levels down, and the action of interrupting him had ripped him from the solution he was on the cusp of solving.  The feeling of being completely ripped out of something Andrea could understand. And together they came up with a way to move forward, which became the subject of Andrea’s keynotes at software development conferences. Over the course of her work, Andrea realized there was no consensus as to what empathy meant. Phrases like walking in someone else’s shoes, treating people how they want to be treated were often heard.  “The reason that we have evolved empathy as a species is so that we work together. And as a species we don't go extinct. So we are a hyper social species,” says Andrea. “Empathy is the mechanism that enables collaboration.” She defines empathy is a functional system of emotion, cognition, regulation, and motivation that is influenced by external factors such as culture, context, capacity, and skill. To make empathy more concrete; she uses a model called structured reappraisal.  A reappraisal is a psychological term for taking a beat before you act. And the pause can be learned and practiced. What to do once you pause is where the structure comes in. The three rules are: collect, connect, and communicate. Listen in for ways to practice this framework. Empathy can help us navigate through all of those different systems and then create something that is more effective through these experiments and through implementing these improvements. But you can't get there unless both people are willing to do it. Connect with Andrew Goulet : https://andreagoulet.com  Other GoG episodes you might want to check out: Top Strengths of the Highly Sensitive Entrepreneur: https://sarahwalton.com/highly-sensitive-person/  The Art of Self-Control: https://sarahwalton.com/take-back-self-control/  You can check out our podcast interviews on YouTube, too! http://bit.ly/YouTubeSWalton   Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be so grateful if you could leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking “Write a review.” Then we’ll get to inspire even more people! (If you’re not sure how to leave a review, you can watch this quick tutorial.)