Empathy Expansion Kit: Cultivating Empathy - A Daily Practice for Leaders

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. This episode is part of our new Empathy Expansion Kit Series.
I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:27)
Hey everybody.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:29)
One of our main goals of our podcast is to help you build a more authentic business or work life.
One of the ways to build that is through adding empathy and love into what you do. So we're going to break this up into a lot of bite-sized topics, some very short podcasts when you don't have time for the longer episodes. In our first episode, we cover cultivating empathy and building a daily practice for leaders. So some practical exercises and habits that you can adopt to be a more compassionate leader and build a more compassionate workplace. All right, Tullio, let's dive in here. For me, I've got a few things that I work on. I mean, obviously, I think one of the foundational things for any leader is to read widely, read diversely, read a lot, get a lot of perspectives, read stuff. If you don't want to read a full book, I do a lot of book summaries. So read stuff you would never maybe even grab for a book and spend days or a week doing. Spend 20 minutes. Even that, I think, will give you just this very diverse perspective on stuff.
I'm sure you're a big reader yourself.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:44)
I've actually been using the audio Cliff Notes or book summaries for a long time. It's a great way to consume a massive amounts of information very quickly and usually when I'm driving or I'm just sitting still. It's an opportunity to get through a lot of information. Those that really resonate with me and then I'll pick up and read them.
It's almost like watching a preview for a movie and then picking the one you want to go see. But it's a lot deeper than just the preview.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:15)
Yeah, it's a lot deeper. I mean, for me, it's like what maybe 20 minutes ish, you know, sort of a session. So it's not just like the three minute trailer. It's like a full point by point. And then you'll you know, you may listen to 30 or 40 of those and you'll find one like, oh, I want to really let this absorb this.
So, yeah, I think that's just a big practice for any leader for sure.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:37)
The TEDx talk of a book, really, that's what it is. You're going to get a lot of value in a short period of time.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:44)
Yeah, exactly.
So, this next idea, Tullio, something that we've talked about, sort of the appreciation audit or reflective audit kind of thing at the end of the day. Talk about kind of what you do for that.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:59)
Yeah, so I do this sort of retrospective at the end of each day, and it's an audit, if you will, but it's more than this, an audit. It's actually an opportunity to go back in time and consciously change the outcome of a situation that I was responsible for. So, just to give you an example, I look at where did I miss an opportunity to be empathetic throughout the day, whether it was someone I work with, could have been on the highway, could have been my children. There's a number of areas we interact with individuals that at one given time or another, we all know it, we've been snippy or short or downright, just not very pleasant. So, not that we want it to be that way, but sometimes it just happened, you're overwhelmed, you got a lot going on and you snap. So, I do an audit of that every end of the day and I look at and identify, okay, who could I have been more empathetic to that I wasn't? And then I not only identify where it happened, I put myself in that person's shoes.
I start to imagine what it was like to be on the receiving end of that.
What feeling that might have conjured up both emotionally and physically, because sometimes people have a visceral physical reaction to negative emotions as well. And even if it created a bad taste, so to speak, in their mouth, right? So, I go through that experience of putting myself in their own shoes, being the recipient of that and what that experience might have been like for them. Because I want to go through it myself.