The Power of Positive Empathy in the Workplace

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
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)
Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach. We've got Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher with us again. Today, we're going to dive into the cheerleader's guide to corporate success, or rather the power of positive empathy in the workplace.
Imagine making work a little less like work and a whole lot more fun and meaningful. I think for 95% of you out there, maybe a little less. I think that sounds like an impossible thing. I know how we're all feeling it sometimes. But when you start stacking up little changes on top of little changes at the workplace to improve culture and the environment, you can make it happen. So how do we build the feel good factory? Well, check out these podcasts, of course, share them with your colleagues. The goal of these podcasts is to help you build a more authentic loving company. And yes, it's important to do because it's the right thing to do. It's the future of business, but also it pays off. I mean, the holy grail of marketing is when you have people who genuinely love what they do, care about their customers and the organization, and where your customers love you so much that they actually do the marketing for you.
So if you're in marketing or sales out there, know that these topics are just about building company culture or personal development. They are to level up your company in a way that few have mastered. And that's why this is The Bliss Business Podcast, where we help you build love into scalable systems.
So in the last show, we talked about the importance of empathetic leadership. And when we think of empathy, I think the first thing that comes to mind for most people is feeling someone else's pain. But there are two sides to this coin.
Why not feel and share in the joy of others as well, right? That's what positive empathy is. It's about this other side of empathy that is typically ignored. So when we talk about positive empathy, it refers to this ability to share and understand and respond to the positive emotions of others. It leads to increased connection, joy and this mutual well-being. It goes beyond just merely recognizing someone's happiness. It actually involves participating in their joy or success. So when we share some personal achievement, going beyond, if Ash tells me something that just great that happened and me just saying congrats and going on to my next thing, actually just celebrating that experience with him.
Or, you know, even if we're going through some sort of personal growth, sharing those milestones with others, you know, let them be the cheerleader along with you on that ride. So putting a little energy in this direction toward positive empathy, I think is a great way to really develop that deeper connection with people. Ash and Tullio, I want to start out with a question. So Tullio, outside of your marriage or the birth of your kids, tell me about one of your top 20 days ever.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:41)
Oh, good one. I think one related to work was in 2005, when one of the investors of the company I was at a sales and marketing with came to me and said, you know, I'd like to see if we can take the experience you've had working with Facebook and YouTube. At the time, I was instrumental in helping those two companies monetize their traffic. This was before they became as big as they were.
And so I was part of a team that helped them do that and learned a lot about the future of social media and how we could introduce contextual analytics and things of that sort.
And it was exciting to be recognized by someone where they were like, we should start a company. We'd like you to be the founder and CEO. And just to get validated that way was incredibly, it tickled me. It was like me?
I was just a kid of a farmer. I grew up in a small town in Europe. I'm not some tech CEO. So it was just my first glimpse really in seeing myself through the eyes of someone else who had seen my progression and the work that I had done and who believed in me. And it really tickled me. It made me want to believe in myself a little bit more as well. So it was a happy moment to have someone show belief in me and yourself and very empowering. And I thought it was a very great example of positive empathy.