Compassion comes to people naturally.  Even in the nursery, infants experience empathic distress–when one baby cries, ALL babies start to cry. 

Problems experiencing and expressing compassion tend to arise the more involved we get in the complexities of social give and take.  Compassion becomes especially tricky in a couple of different scenarios:

First, I might have trouble feeling compassion for others if I feel like I am sacrificing more than you are.  Or, perhaps I feel like you’re getting more back than I am if we sacrifice the same amount.  Worse still, I might see that you sacrifice less than me and get more back.  

Politicians, financiers, billionaires are all easy targets for antagonism because many people agree they don’t deserve our compassion.  Why? Because we believe they often make more than us, pay less taxes, and/or work less.

The second reason compassion can be tricky is if I don’t see you as belonging to the same group.  Nationalist and racial examples abound here.  A less emotionally charged example would be the world of professional sports.  If I’m a Yankee fan, I might have a hard time feeling compassion for a player on the Red Sox.  Why? Because I don’t believe I’m a member of that tribe.  My emotional energy does not contribute to the Red Sox community and I also don’t get anything back from them.  They might as well be from a different planet!

How To Be More Compassionate

Let’s get right into how to allow give more emotional energy to the feelings and needs to others. The tips that follow are more about mindset than specific actions. Remember, compassion comes naturally. And while the tips I present here may be simple, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are always easy to apply.

Tip 1: Take Heart

The first tip I would give anyone seeking to feel more compassion for others is to remember that it comes to you naturally.  You don’t lack empathy or compassion, you simply have learned ways of being in the world that make giving others’ pain its due recognition difficult or impossible.

Narcissists and psychopaths, famous for their inability to feel empathy and compassion, arrive at their tortured states due to chronic states of profound lack–whether that be kindness, nurturance, care, decency, emotional validation, or some other emotional necessity.

But unless you are an extreme case, finding compassion is just a matter of returning to your natural state of being. So, first take heart that if you’re reading this and want to improve how empathic you are, you’re probably not a psychopath.

Tip 2: Tend to yourself first

My second tip is a paradoxical one: take care of yourself first.  Compassion and empathy are difficult when we feel stretched too thin.  Maybe your bills are overwhelming, your family demands too much, you have too little time, or perhaps feel like no one cares what you are thinking and feeling.  Under these circumstances, it’s extremely difficult to truly attend to and empathize with someone else’s emotional needs.

Taking time and space to feel your own feelings and work on setting appropriate boundaries might give you a bit more emotional fuel to go on a compassionate journey with someone else.

Tip 3: Check your envy

A third tip for how to enhance compassion is to check your own envy.  Envy is pervasive and pernicious in our current culture.  Social media notoriously stokes envy, magnifying our own sense of lack and encourages us to even enjoy others’ misfortune (celebrity gossip makes a killing off of our envy).  

Envy can be hard to deal with, but I like to encourage people to see it as desire in disguise.  Perhaps someone else’s good fortune can lead you to setting a goal for yourself.  Envy is only a problem when it makes you want to tear others down.  What if it could help you lift yourself up?  If it can, then envy can lead you to compassion by becoming curious about another person’s struggle to reach the goal you would like to reach yourself.

Tip 4: Find your strongest bond

One final tip for enhancing compassion is to find your highest common denominator.  I say the highest common denominator because of course we are all human.  But humanity alone doesn’t always feel like a strong enough connection. Try to find a higher level of commonality. 

What if you knew more about another person’s struggles or inner world?  What if you learned that the person you struggle to feel compassion for also has a critical mother or a domineering father?  Perhaps both you and the individual you can’t seem to feel empathy for both have a child with the same learning difficulty, medical issue, or style of acting out?  

The more you can relate the other person’s life to your own and see them as an avatar for yourself, the more you learn about yourself.

This benefits us too, not just others.  I see in my practice all the time people learn about their biggest pain points and darkest emotions by having some profound and unexpected fit of compassion for someone they see suffer on the news.  Connecting with yourself and connecting with others go hand in hand.

Wrapping Up

Being impacted by others sometimes feels impossible, or at least, overwhelming. But being impacted by others is really a passive process, not an active one. The tips I’ve provided here are more about removing barriers–that is active processes–that get in the way of us experiencing our natural reactions to others.

Be easy with yourself and you’ll be much more receptive to the needs of others. Again, simple but not always easy.

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