What Empathy Is (And Isn't)

One of the problems I have consistently encountered is that when terminology goes viral, it often loses it’s true meaning. Today I want to talk about empathy, which I find has become a buzz word in a lot of contexts, but has also started to lose a cohesive meaning in the process.

I want to offer, to my audience of coaches, parents and athletes, a definition of empathy. At the same time, I want to distinguish it from some of the perversions of the term I commonly see.

I come at this from a particular perspective. Empathy is a core value in my own coaching. I think that on my own roster of strengths, if I were below average then my coaching would also follow. So I’d also like to explain how empathy, when properly defined, can help you in whatever you’re setting out to do in the world.

Understanding. Period.

I think the working definition of empathy is actually deceptively simple. To me, empathy is understanding. It almost feels criminal to elaborate and risks expanding the definition beyond where it should rightly go.

Empathy is understanding the circumstances that a person finds themselves in. For all of empathy, a “person” can also be yourself.

Empathy is correctly identifying the emotional state of a person. Quite often this can mean simply accepting what someone else tells you their emotional state is. However, in my line of work I also find there are times when I have to use my best judgment to prod past a smoke screen, most often in the form of anger.

Empathy is comprehending the thought process that a person uses to make decisions. The rationalizations that people come up with are constructed. The ability to visualize those constructions and acknowledge them are a key part of empathy.

Permissiveness and Excuses

One of the most common inaccurate definitions of empathy involve excusing the actions of others, based on the understanding of the above.

So if I can understand what happened to a person, how it made them feel, and the thoughts that formed their next action, then I translate that understanding into permission for them to act however.

I don’t agree, and here is where many self-perceived empaths (myself included) can often get into trouble. The point of the exercise is understanding. But if someone at the end of the process you have correctly observed ends up harming themselves or others, your role is not to chalk it up as just “what happens”.

As coaches we are helping people to be the best version of themselves. To that end we often judge success in the evolving ways people show up. Or put more simply, we evaluate on behavior. We want to see people walk the walk.

So to concede the point on the final step of a process is a critical error. To lower standards and give up below a person’s best is to abandon our responsibility.

The point of empathy is that without understanding, we are hopelessly lost to change behavior. Perhaps we can intercede on the behavior itself, but only superficially, and often cruelly. It’s not built to last.

That understanding is what allows us to be kind, nurturing and optimistic. It is fuel for recommitting ourselves (and the people we coach) to improvement.

Recently I realized (with the help of three-time US Olympic coach Greg Meehan on my podcast) that part of my own struggle with coaching was a lack of empathy for myself. Perfectionism is a practice entirely devoid of empathy. You actively try not to understand why failure is possible so that you can hold yourself to an impossible standard.

Eventually, it can become obvious from the outside looking in that this lack of empathy is limiting our personal growth. Highly competitive people tenaciously hold onto it, as empathy can feel to many as “excusing”, a soft and non-competitive attitude.

But it’s not. It’s about understanding (I know I’ve repeated it enough times by now). It’s actually a very competitive attitude. It’s a commitment to the process of what it means to improve rather than overwhelming and obvious focus on outcomes.

Goal Setting is For Everyone

Goal setting is something that is almost universal in the sport of swimming. A coach sits down with an athlete and the athlete gets to say what is they want to accomplish. Perhaps they will discuss how to get there, how to measure progress along the way. There are more advanced ways to set goals, but more or less this is the process as I’ve seen it in most places.

I have to confess that as an athlete I didn’t always take goal setting seriously. Perhaps it was a by product of just being young and dumb, or my natural distrust for authority, or both. I can remember a particular time when at age 15 I completely blew off a goal setting exercise, after my coach promised that the paper was “just for me” and that he wouldn’t look at it.

He did look at it, and on a six hour car ride back from a meet in Montreal we had to have an awkward conversation about it. Yes, this was also in the days when your swim coach could drive you alone from a travel swim meet (or any swim meet).

While we’re all having a good laugh at another tale of ignorant youth, ask yourself this. Do you have a formal goal setting process? I do, kind of. Far from what it should be. Sometimes things are so obviously staring us in the face that we can’t see them. How is it that goals are so universally accepted as part of the process for young athletes and then we largely abandon them thereafter?

Instead of breaking down how I organize a goal setting process, I’m going to make an argument for why to set goals in the first place. Because, I think before you learn how to set goals, you should actually want to set goals. If you don’t see the point in the first place, if you’re just faking the an attitude around goal setting until you make it, you’re destined to fail.

Knowing what you Want

You might be surprised to find out how many people have no idea what it is they want. Usually this is manifested by incessant complaining. Complaining is all well and good, and I’ll write another blog sometime about how to turn complaints into what you want. But if you’re mostly or only complaining, you’re only talking about what it is you DON’T want. And the opposite of what you don’t want is not necessarily what you want.

For example. Many club coaches may complain about parents barraging them with e-mails. Ask them if they don’t want to have any conversations with parents. Show me somebody who says yes to that question and I’ll show you somebody who doesn’t understand the job. If you’re a club swimming coach in America, parents are your customers. You may not like the way they communicate with you, but you want them to communicate with you.

Knowing what you want gives you a destination, and a destination gives you direction. Imagine getting in your car and setting your phone to navigate you to “NOT” Philadelphia. There would be no direction.

Figuring out how to get there

There’s a bit of nuance to the next facet of goal setting. Often when it’s applied with young athletes, I think there’s an assumption that it is important to get athletes to communicate a process so they commit to some actionable steps.

What I find more interesting is to probe athletes on what they believe will get them there. It’s pretty easy to tell when athletes are reciting back to you what they want to hear and when they are actually stating what it is they believe. I once coached an athlete, who in response to me asking her what actions might lead to the outcomes she wanted, would finish each statement with a question mark. So it would go something like this:

Athlete: “I’d like to swim a 1:06 in the 100 butterfly”

Me: Tell me one thing you can do that will make that more likely

Athlete: Have 100% practice attendance?

Again, faking will greatly decrease the likelihood of anyone being successful. So an athlete that is simply telling you what you want to hear is very unlikely to either do those things or get the effective benefit from doing those things. Getting people to believe something that you want to believe is much harder than getting them to repeat you, but it’s worth understanding as a coach where you stand. Are you believed or are they patronizing you?

Acknowledging progress

One of the things that makes goal setting all the more important as you grow older is that likely there is more space, not less, between you setting a goal and actually achieving it. You athletes can often set a goal and achieve it within a matter of months. Often the places we want to get to as adults are going to be the results of years (if not decades) of progress.

You know what is perhaps the single most demotivating thought you can have? Is one that focuses on how long you have to go to reach a goal. Let’s say your goal for the purposes of analogy is to walk 100 miles. After 10 miles, you still have 90 miles to go. That’s a long way!

As your goals get longer and more drawn out, it becomes essential to provide a counterweight to constant rumination on how far you have left to go. I would say it’s fascinating how people resist this if I myself wasn’t so spectacularly skilled not acknowledging my own process.

This is a deeper layer of belief. You’ve decided that you have a set of directions to get where you want to go. Now do you believe that if you just do them once you will get there? Or do you believe that reaching the destination is an accumulation of perhaps thousands of efforts. How will you figure out if your efforts are making progress?

Not deciding how to mark progress is deciding that you won’t acknowledge progress. And I have to tell you, if you don’t have a system for acknowledging progress, then your chances of staying in the game long enough to achieve long term goals approaches zero very quickly.

Beyond achievement

Finally, as we grow beyond youth goal setting actually broadens. I know many people yearn for the simplicity of youth. I don’t find myself in that place, maybe because I found being a teenager pretty miserable.

For many though, the simplicity of just focusing on your grades, your swim times and whether or not you have a date to the dance is alluring.

“Adulting” rarely grants us the opportunity to be so simply focused. If you can acknowledge that it can actually be a boon. If your goal setting is focused on one area of achievement that achievement becomes a winner take all situation.

As an adult you actually have an opportunity to diversify your investment. In my life, beyond my professional aspirations I have goals for my body, my own athletic performance, my relationship with my wife and with my kids. I have goals for maintaining and building friendships I’ve had for decades.

That means that in moments where I’m “failing” in one area, I have the opportunity to be successful in others. Whether or not I achieve precisely what I want to do in one area is not make or break for my entire psyche.

We would do well to consider the same for youth athletes. Is it really so awesome that they focus their goal setting so narrowly? Is it helping them psychologically?

Goal Setting is For everyone

I want to push people, particularly coaches, to go beyond the “goal setting for thee but not for me” mentality. While it’s true that there are many good reasons for athletes to set goals, these reasons are all the more true for the “adults” in the room. Goal setting becomes more important as we go on in life, not less.

Are you looking to up your coaching game? Then now is the perfect time to line up working on it in the New Year. I’m currently running a sale on coaching packages with 20% off. Write me for a free consultation!

Positivity is Always True

It’s not fair to say that I hate “fake it til you make it”. It’s not because, as people say “hate is a strong word”. A more apt description of my attitude towards this statement of unproductive positivity is the same one I have to the famed Danish restaurant Noma. That is, I’m constitutionally opposed to it. Thinking about the statement “fake it til you make it” gives me a queasy feeling.

What is vastly under-discussed when it comes to positivity, optimism and the process of cognitive perspective shift is that it must be true. Anything that your mind finds untrue will ultimately be rejected, no matter how hard you try to force it in. This leads a lot of people to frustration, as they continually try to command their mind to accommodate a foreign lie.

Positivity is always true. The process of shifting something is remarkably slow. In my individual coaching with athletes, I often work with them for 3-6 months. In terms of perspective shift, that is a very short time. So what do I do with the limited time I have? I help people to seed positivity. Once something enters your mind, if it passes the “true” filter, it has a chance to grow.

Finding what is both true, and positive, is never easy. It’s almost impossible to do by yourself, except of course for things you don’t care about. When I was a schoolkid, much to my parents chagrin, I didn’t care whether I got good grades. It was easy to have a positive attitude about each and every test I took. There were no emotions to cloud my judgment and promote doubt.

This is one reason why (usually in combination with high innate ability) some people seem to thrive competitively despite a lackadaisical approach to the sport. They just don’t care enough to doubt themselves!

But if we accept that for each individual person to realize their maximum potential, emotional investment is a necessary ingredient, then we must also prepare for what’s next. Thank goodness coaches exist, because good coaches can empathetically reflect that emotion while offering a dispassionate, thoughtful, positive point of view to athletes.

At this point, I feel compelled to offer some examples of positivity that are true and avoid the fake it til you make it trap. The following comes out of thousands of interactions with athletes where I have wrestled with how to influence and seed positivity in such a way that the effect is barely noticeable at first but has a long term pay off.

They are presented alongside the pervasive negativity that you are almost guaranteed to come across in your day to day work as a coach.

1. It’s been forever since I’ve improved. If you’re in the sport of swimming past the age of 13 you’ve probably felt like you’re hitting a wall. Now, ruminating on your lack of apparent progress does not help you very much to improve. This one has so much branching opportunity for perspective shifts that I won’t list all of them here, Instead, here are three I find myself returning to over and over:

   • Ask an athlete to talk to you in detail about when they last thought they “swam well” and everything since then. I can say that about 9/10, they will slip up and admit to incremental improvement over that time period, a fact that they will now have to accept as true.

   • Ask an athlete what they think will create improvement. In order to not get mired, keep drilling down this question to a size where they identify something that is wholly within their control that they can decide to do. You’re trying to build a long bridge of connection between action (right now) and improvement (a goal possibly in the long term future)

   • Ask them why they think they have been as successful as they have been. I have a way around people who want to argue with you about whether they are successful too, don’t worry. If someone is being that argumentative, ask them to rate their success on a scale of 1-10. Usually they’ll pick something in the middle, like 6. Then you ask “why not 5”, and sit back and listen to them reflexively talk about themselves more honestly and positively.

   2. That sucked

   • Read my last blog will you?

   3. I’m not talented/I’m never going to be the best- One of the best experiences of my coaching career was the first time I didn’t work with the “best” athletes on a team. At Jersey Wahoos I was responsible for the Senior Group, athletes aged 13-18 who didn’t make the standard to be in our top competitive National Squad or Age Group team.

   My whole career I’d worked with athletes that, whether they’d admit it or not, were more predisposed to a certain level of commitment because they knew they were good. They might still compare upwards, as most of us do, and find themselves lacking.

   Still, theres a whole different level where some athletes just don’t think they’re good enough to warrant working hard. What’s the point, they figure? It seems almost more common as the competitive level has gone up and it’s a trap I’ve fallen into many times as a coach too. What’s the point of working hard on my coaching if I’m not going to be the top psychology guru in the world?

   • Don’t be afraid to probe past the question they are narrowing in on. Is being the best REALLY the only reason they’re there? If you want to shift their perspective, insist on knowing any and all other reasons they find for doing what they do. A zero sum game where people only competed and tried would leave us with no athletes.

   • What is their definition of “good”. A lot of people actually have a definition that is actually a goal within their grasp. Getting them to think about where they WANT to be vs where they CAN’T get to is a massive win.

   Organized Positivity

   Positivity is something that can’t merely be flipped into place. Like any kind of training, it’s a process, and the most important part of that process is that you must start with something that is true. When you accept that something is true continuing nurturing it, you have a chance to make a powerful shift.

"That Sucked"

“That sucked”

If coaches got a nickel for every time they heard that, there might still be Coin Star machines in front of grocery stores. Last week, I was working with some coaches and one of them interrupted me with a question. He wanted to know if he was reacting well when athletes walked back from a race and said “that sucked.”

So I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss what is really going on when an athlete (or anyone, really) says this. Where are there are opportunities when you’re on the receiving end? But before I do that, I feel inspired to comment on a part of my methodology that will be important to understanding how look at situations like this.

Soft vs Hard Power

Almost all of what I advocate I would define as tactics for executing soft power? What is soft power, and what is “hard” power? For the purposes of this blog I’ll keep it really simple.

Hard power is often the most brute force, compelling way to move something or someone from point a to point b. If a child won’t leave the playground and you physically pick them up and carry them away, that is hard power. When a coach tells an athlete that they should do something or else a bad consequence will follow, that is hard power.

As you can see, hard power is all about compulsion. You want someone to do something, so you look very locally at the thing you want them to do, and you execute whatever power you have for them to do it. I am not saying there are never instances to execute hard power, only that hard power has several drawbacks that mean you should exercise great restraint in using it.

One is that hard power is locally effective and systemically ineffective. Meaning, you can influence one specific behavior but it does not effective behavior generally. If you lift a kid off the playground- they are off the playground but the behavior that caused you to lift them is very likely to repeat.

Because hard power is systemically ineffective, it takes a ton of work to maintain. It does not build new independence or skills in the person you are trying to intervene with. At best it instills fear, and that’s at BEST. Fear has a nasty habit of overwhelming our sense and reason, which makes it very hard to act any other way than instinctually, which is not what you’re looking for when trying to change a habit.

Soft power exists at the other end of the spectrum. It is indirect and gentle. When best executed it is so gentle that it doesn’t seem like power at all. Soft power is planting a seed and patiently waiting 3-6 months for a tree to sprout.

Soft power has the disadvantage of not being immediately satisfying. It is not problem solving. Soft power is proactive, and being proactive hardly ever feels effective in the moment because the moment we should feel that sense of what we have accomplished is so distant.

You’ll see a little better what soft power is as you read, because that is precisely what i’m going to suggest when faced with extremely unproductive attitude of “that sucked”.

Empathy First

Empathy is the first step of any execution of soft power. It is an often misunderstood and misrepresented concept, especially by the lazy advocates of hard power.

The goal of empathy is understanding, and fully communicating that understanding to another person. That is it, in entirety. People get tripped up with empathy because they do not understand its boundary.

Empathy does not mean you excuse any and all behavior. To return to a parenting example, if one child hits the other, you can understand why or what led to the moment of frustration, without condoning physical violence.

When you’re coaching and an athlete pervasively comes up to you telling you their performance sucks, seek to understand where that is coming from first. Here are a few of the most common reasons. In most cases, more than one of these are true.

1. The athlete motivates themself through being hard on themselves. That is, they execute hard power on themself to motivate. They feel that they want more than what they just did, so they try to spur themselves to do more to achieve it through self-punishment

2. They are overwhelmed by external critique. They seek to pre-empt any critique from you the coach by staking out an extremely negative position. If they already said it sucked, will you go even harder into the negative?

3. They lack skills in goal setting, or don’t set goals whatsoever, leading them to fluctuate wildly in what they expect from themselves, often ramping up expectations wildly in the moment.

4. They do not fully know how to emotionally regulate and separate their feelings from thoughts. “That sucked” is a thought, in case you are playing at home.

5. Returning to point 1, they actually believe that this system of motivation is responsible for their success up to this point.

There are more reasons, but you get the point. Your goal should be to understand, and to communicate to the athlete that you understand. You cannot start a soft power process without empathy. To return to the tree example, it would be like just throwing out the seed wherever. You could be on concrete, you could be on fertile ground. Who knows?

Break the Thought Pattern

With empathy, you have an understanding of both the emotional landscape and the thoughts emanating from it. Any intervention from this point forward should be focused on intervening on the thought level. Anything people believe, they can learn to believe something else.

For a thought like “That sucked”, the emotionality behind it is usually some level of disappointment. They saw a time on the board, their heart sank, and now they have to talk about it!

One thing I try to be extremely disciplined about is that I never argue with athletes over what they should or should not be happy/disappointed with. You may find that you coach athletes that are often disappointed. You want me to reframe that for you? Fine, I will. That is an athlete with high standards!

You might reply that those high standards are not consistent, particularly in the lead up to the performance. Which is where you come in as a coach.

But I digress.

You want to find points of action that lead up to this moment and try to influence a change. Let me give an example for each of the underlying reasons discussed above.

1. Try to help an athlete build positive motivational structure. Most athletes that motivate in this way know what they don’t want. But what do they actually want? Take as many opportunities to actually get them to stop and think: “what do I want?” and “how do I get there?”. Ask them to consider how many actions they can ladder up to making that outcome possible. Avoiding negative outcomes is exhausting in the long term, while feeling like your chipping away at something you dream about is not.

2. Paradoxically, avoiding external critique makes you MORE vulnerable to external critique, until you are so fragile that you can’t take anymore. As a coach you have to find a way to be critical, but only on their actions, never what they are feeling. Allow them to be disappointed, do not hold back from critiquing and evaluating their actions. Being honest with athletes about what you see actually builds trust in the relationship and their confidence over time.

3. Ask them to set goals, always with some emotional distance from the event. I prefer to prompt athletes to set two goals. One is aspirational, what you do you think is possible but not likely. Essentially, what do you think is the high end of your performance? The second is what is good enough. Where is the line where you agree ahead of time you will be satisfied. Now you can hold them accountable if they achieve “good enough”- they told you they would not say “it sucked”.

4. Practice naming the emotions and then separating that from the thought. Disappointment is a feeling. Judging your performance is a thought. So practice with them saying “I’m really disappointed right now”, and taking a beat before they launch into “I thought I could do better…I wanted more…etc”. When you don’t consciously organize these, you can easily think your thoughts are feelings and vice versa, which blurs how you will act.

5. Challenge the system! This is probably the hardest but also the biggest payoff. So many, particularly high achieving, athletes credit their success subconsciously to vicious self punishment. This ultimately becomes a hard cap on their potential. Actually ask them to walk through all the consequences of this self punishment and see if that’s really what they want as a path to sending them down a different set of actions.

Hearts and Minds

“That sucked” is an instinctual reaction. As a coach, if you have the tools you can use it as a branching opportunity to develop the athlete you are coaching. It is crucial to have a plan so that you can act decisively to shift perspective with an athlete and seed the actions and beliefs you want in the future.