Skip to main content

Alan Alda: Build empathy. Monitor your relationships.


#Empathy #AlanAlda  #BigThinkEdge  #Communication 

Empathy is a superpower for connecting and communicating with others, but it can be surprisingly fragile. Even a bad mood or preoccupied mind can easily close us off to the people – even the ones we're closest to, let alone to colleagues or strangers on the daily commute.

Noticing this, Alan Alda wondered what exercises could help bulk up his "empathy muscle" regardless of shifting circumstances. An exercise he invented became the focus of a psychological study that discovered a way to significantly increase empathy.

Alan Alda teaches "The Art and Science of Relating: Build and Monitor Empathy" for Big Think Edge.

Empathy tends to evaporate when we don't practice it. At Big Think Edge, Alan Alda teaches an immediately actionable video lesson that will teach you exercises to significantly grow your capacity for empathy.

Greater empathy is an asset whether you're looking to boost your career, inspire and connect with a team you manage, or have more peaceful and thoughtful relationships in your personal life.

Subscribe to Big Think Edge and you'll access a diverse collection of lessons taught by the world's top thinkers and doers, like Alan Alda, Malcolm Gladwell, Bryan Cranston, Linda Hill, John Cleese and Navy SEAL Rob Roy.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are we really listening to what MLK had to say?

#MartinLutherKingJr #MLK #CivilRights #DrKing In 2020, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls in a national election year, one that reminds us of the importance of voting rights, citizenship and political activism to the health of our democracy. King imagined America as a "beloved community" capable of defeating what he characterized as the triple threats of racism, militarism and materialism. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, alongside the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision, represents the crown jewels of the civil rights movement's heroic period. Yet King quickly realized that policy transformations alone, including the right to vote, would be insufficient in realizing his goal of institutionalizing radical black citizenship toward the creation of the "beloved community." King argued that justice was what love looked like in public. 2020 also marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Voting...

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe  #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP

9 things about MLK's speech and the March on Washington

 #MLK  #MartinLutherKingJr  #MarchonWashington #IHaveaDream "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in US history. King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963. Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again. As we all know, that didn't happen. But how this pivotal speech was crafted is just one of several interesting facts about what is one of the most important moments in the 2...

A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement

       #MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #IHaveaDream I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., that was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington. The one-day event both protested racial discrimination and encouraged the passage of civil rights legislation; at the time, the Civil Rights Act was being discussed in Congress. The march featured various speeches as well as musical performances before King, a celebrated orator, appeared as the final official speaker; A. Philip Randolph and Benjamin Mays ended the proceedings with a pledge and a benediction, respectively. Early in his prepared speech, King referenced Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with “Five score years ago….” He then spoke a...