Over the last few months, I’ve been meditating with a local Buddhist group. That activity has gotten me thinking about compassion and how we exercise it in our lives or don’t.
So I read a recent HBR post by Allison Rimm on compassion and difficult conversations with a lot of interest.
In this particular post, Ms. Rimm speaks of a superior whose disruptive behavior had endangered a project she was leading. Believing that his actions arose from suffering, she gently invited him to share what might be causing his distress, and she heard him out during a 20-minute rant. At the next meeting, she reports, he was back to his former “collaborative, witty self.”
Compassion may well not come naturally in the normal course of a day. I live and work in Silicon Valley and can testify to that. We like to think of ourselves as fair and friendly, but at some level, many of us may be watching for our colleagues’—and even our friends’ and lovers’—vulnerabilities and distresses and perhaps deriving satisfaction from them.
I believe that compassion, even if it doesn’t seem innate, can and should be learned. We all want others to empathize when we hit the inevitable rough patches in life. And so we must learn to pay it forward by showing them compassion when they are struggling.
Compassion is not a soft-headed or soft-hearted approach to life. Indeed, I think it requires a tremendous amount of courage and self-control to stop ourselves when we are ready to launch mindlessly into a pattern of behavior we may have been practicing most of our lives.
Leave a Comment