The word empathy refers to the (often-hard-to-achieve) realization that other people exist and have their own thoughts, feelings, and needs. It is the awareness of that reality, and it can also be the marriage of that awareness with some compassion in our dealings with those other real people.
You are creating for yourself, but you are also creating for other people; you are relating to other people; you are working with marketplace players and selling to your audience — all this requires that you understand the reality of other human beings and, to a certain extent and in a measured way, that you care about them.
A creative life requires that you remain aware of others and that you exhibit some fellow feeling. You do not want to give too much of yourself away in the process, but you do want to know what it feels like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
One unfortunate but typical way for artists to behave is to picture buyers as people who deserve to be manipulated and who must be reached by virtue of sales tactics that play on human weaknesses such as greed and envy. A second, better way to behave is to picture buyers as your fellow human beings who can be met without manipulation and trickery. If the question is “Which behavior garners the better results?,” sadly enough the answer may be the first. However, if the question is “How do you want to lead your life?,” the answer is surely by practicing the second approach — by practicing empathy and by championing the principle that people do not exist only to be manipulated.
What does the phrase practicing empathy mean? It means developing your personality sufficiently that you experience people as real human beings with needs, desires, and a point of view rather than as props in your personal play. If you are a parent, it means recognizing that it hurts your child if you do not honor your agreements, if you fail to pick him up when you say you will, and if you strike him because you are upset and he is handy to hit. If you are a teacher, it means providing feedback in a humane and careful way and not, just because you possess the power, in cruel and toxic ways. If you are a soldier, it means understanding that the people you are killing are human beings and not characters in a video game. It means investing in the reality of other human beings.
This way of being may not help you get what you want as often as leading from unbridled self-interest might. I know someone who tends to get his way in his business dealings because he talks nonstop and argues for his positions with such seamless ferocity that you have no chance to voice an objection or present your side of the story. As a result, he does very well. He gets without giving, has you do his work, increases his share and reduces yours, and nicely grows his business. If you complain, he has no idea what you’re talking about and will produce a thousand reasons why you are wrong. He is defensive, combative, and argumentative. As I say, he does very nicely.
You do not have to be like this person.
The average person is relatively defenseless against the extraordinarily resolute manipulations of the business sociopath. But while we may have great trouble protecting ourselves against them or dealing sensibly with them, that doesn’t mean we ought to become them. You want to practice empathy not because it is the best sales tactic but because it is the honorable way to relate to other human beings. It is the least cruel way, the least harmful way, the least bullying way. It is the way we make ourselves proud.
Nor does it preclude sales! It does reduce the number of tactics we can use as we go about the business of selling our wares, but we embrace that reality because we don’t want to live as if ethics were a silly word used only by fools.
Say you’ve produced a new series of twelve paintings. What would it look like not to practice empathy? Telling everyone that there is only one painting left and that they must hurry, even though all twelve remain. Telling everyone that the prince of Prussia has purchased three and that the queen of Sheba is about to snatch up the rest. Calling up two collectors and telling each that the other is about to grab up Number 3, the best painting in the series. Knowing that the series is weak and touting it as great. Talking befuddled little old men and little old ladies into buying. Tripling the price and giving everyone a 50 percent discount. Explaining that your paintings with the violent imagery would make perfect Christmas gifts. Twisting the arm of your sister-in-law and guilt-tripping your friend from college into buying. And so on.
All these tactics are practiced in business. And they work. But they are not the only ways to deal with other human beings. You can be as energetic, powerful, and assertive as you like and still practice empathy. You can advocate for your new paintings with great gusto by telling everyone that they exist, by making phone calls and sending out emails spreading the news, by approaching everyone on your contact list, by asking your friend John if he will bring your paintings to the attention of gallery owner Sue (but not demanding that he do so), and by articulating their virtues and doing an excellent job of expressing their value.
You can sell with great enthusiasm while still minding the rights and realities of others. Yes, by operating this way you write off many standard sales tactics. But countless avenues requiring only your energy and your acumen remain open to you.
Empathy is a word from developmental psychology. If our parents were genuinely responsive to our needs, it is likely that we developed an ability to empathize with others. But many people had a poorer experience that resulted in lifelong relational difficulties.
However, even if they had that poorer experience in childhood, it is their job as adults to heal those wounds and make the conscious decision to treat the people around them decently. That is what we want in the world of art sales and in the broader world as well. We begin with ourselves by practicing empathy and by treating potential customers and marketplace players as we would like to be treated.
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings and the desire to do just that. It is both understanding and willingness. It is the mind-reading, feeling-reading ability built into us that many of us have trouble accessing or do not much want to access. It is in many ways an inconvenient ability, because it makes the people around us real — and how much more convenient it would be if they remained unreal!
Why is it important to empathize? It’s important for all sorts of simple, straightforward reasons — but let’s focus on its importance for the sake of your career in the arts. If you don’t really get what marketplace players are thinking and feeling, you are much less likely to be able to deal with them or sell to them. The better you understand other people, the better your chances for success.
Let’s take a simple example. You sell a book to an editor. The book comes out. You present her with an idea for a second book, and she declines. If you take her at face value and take no interest in what she is thinking and feeling or what is going on in her world, all you are left with is a no. If, instead, you empathize with her as a person and with her in her position as editor, you have created at the very least the chance to get some more information — information that may make all the difference with respect both to selling her this second book and to selling anyone this second book.
Empathizing here means understanding your editor’s reality. This has two separate and different meanings: understanding her as a person and understanding her role in her publishing house. Is she, as a person, someone who makes snap decisions but who can then be invited to rethink her snap decision based on rational arguments? Is she, as an editor, someone who has to answer to a lot of people about her decisions and who therefore needs to be armed — by you — with lots of good ammunition to present to those other people? If you don’t think about these things, then you won’t be aware of how much ammunition you should present her with when you first propose a project or of how to help her change her mind after she’s said no.
Remember that although the word empathy contains the idea of compassion, it is not exactly the same thing as sympathy or compassion. At its heart it is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and fathom what is going on in human interactions. Understanding where your editor is coming from is different from sympathizing with her plight as a harried editor who is daily bombarded by hundreds of emails and different from feeling compassion for her inability to get her own book written.
The proper antonym of empathy, as we’re using it here, is not unfeelingness but misunderstanding. The proof that we are not empathizing with people is that we find ourselves not fully understanding where people are coming from or even completely misunderstanding. To take a simple example, if you send your editor an email and take personally the fact that she hasn’t replied to you in twenty-four hours, you are not empathizing with her situation — that is, you are almost surely misunderstanding where she is coming from.
Especially if you have given her something that she actually has to think about, it should follow that she needs some time to think about it. It may be your experience that in the past she has replied instantly to your emails — but think through whether this email is like those other ones. If she has replied instantly to your chatty emails with chatty emails of her own but in this email you asked her what she thought about your idea for your next book, you are failing to empathize if you expect that sort of email to get an instant response as well.
Most artists are susceptible to lots of these misunderstandings for two primary reasons. The first is that they don’t get sufficient opportunity to deal with marketplace players and so don’t have a clear picture of who they are, how they operate, and what their universe looks like. The second is that because marketplace players matter so much to artists and make them so anxious, they can’t think very clearly about who these people really are. Marketplace players are lionized, demonized, and fantasized about — but rarely thought clearly about.
To repeat: there are real, concrete reasons why artists fail to empathize with marketplace players, two being that they deal with them too infrequently and that when they do deal with them the interactions matter so much. It follows that because you typically have too few interactions with marketplace players, you want to create opportunities to meet these people and learn about them for the sake of learning about their reality.
It may therefore benefit you to attend a writers’ conference where many agents and editors are in attendance, not just for the sake of pitching your work but also for the sake of seeing these strange creatures close-up and beginning to fathom what makes them tick. The obvious follow-up point is that if you do go where these strange creatures congregate, you don’t want to hang back and let your anxiety and pride keep you from meeting them, chatting with them, and so on. When you get the chance to interact with marketplace players, don’t let your fears or your ego get in the way of learning what makes them tick.
You want to normalize your relationship with marketplace players and envision them as human beings rather than as mythological creatures. You do this normalizing by thinking more than reacting or feeling. Sympathy and compassion have a large feeling component, but empathy is much more about thinking. When you think about a literary agent, what she needs from you, and what her job actually entails, you want to be thinking rather than feeling anxious, feeling upset with the marketplace, feeling predisappointed that she won’t want what you’re selling, or feeling anything else negative with respect to her. In order to empathize we need to step back, think more, and feel less.
Remember that two people can relate, even an artist and a marketplace player! Two people can share common interests, affinities, and easy rapport; they can appreciate each other. Relating is possible. It is easy enough, if we get too much criticism or silence from the marketplace, to get it into our heads that it will never be possible to relate to marketplace players. You want to avoid going to that dark place of imagining that you will never be able to relate to them and decide instead that your best bet is to keep an open mind, think rather than feel, and practice empathy.
Practicing Empathy and Preserving Art Relationships
Let’s say that you’ve gotten better at empathizing than most artists do and that you’ve made some nice, solid — and valuable — connections in the marketplace. What’s next? Continuing to practice empathy for the sake of preserving those relationships. Let’s take a moment and consider how you might preserve those hard-won relationships: your relationship with the one editor who really loves your work, your relationship with the one reviewer who always has something good to say about your music.
Sometimes it is simply physical distance and a lack of regular contact that begins to wear relationships down; sometimes it is interpersonal difficulty; sometimes it is the demands of life, which seem to steal all our time and leave little time left for even family and friends, let alone our contacts in the marketplace. Let’s focus on one aspect of this larger theme, on preserving your relationships with difficult marketplace players, with folks who are important to your art life but whose personalities and relational styles set you on edge.
Imagine that you have an ongoing relationship with a difficult gallery owner — let’s call him Jim — who, for no reason you can identify, always tries to make you feel small in your interactions with him. You have no idea why he’s being so passive-aggressive; you suspect that he is very different with his customers than he is with you; and you also suspect that he would deal at least marginally differently with you if your work sold better in his shop. Be that as it may, you value your exposure in his gallery — while also hating your interactions with him. How do you preserve a decent working relationship in these circumstances?
First, you want to look in the mirror and make sure that you aren’t the main source or a significant part of the problem. Not infrequently we get into the habit of interacting from our shadowy side — from our insecurities, from the part of us that feels run down by or disappointed with our lack of success, from the part of us that “just isn’t going to take it anymore” — and by acting that way we make life that much harder for ourselves. Many artists (like all human beings) alienate their peers and their supporters by interacting poorly with them. Be wiser and more careful than that.
Don’t make matters worse by adopting a negative or confrontational attitude. If you need to say something important to Jim, be direct and clear, but try not to deliver your message in a spirit of criticism or from a hurt or angry place. Opt for some genuine fellow feeling and some good graces, along with some straight talking. Our first job — and the place where presumably we have the most control — is to make sure that we are not contributing to the problem. Do your part well.
Second, learn to temporize. When you and Jim interact, try not to react. Try to maintain a little calming distance between hearing from Jim and responding to Jim. If you get an email saying that he intends to hang only two of your paintings, even though he promised to hang four, and the email comes with a gratuitous critical dig (“Of course, if you sold better I’d hang all four, but as it is I think that even two might be a stretch”), do not instantly send a heated reply.
If you like, open a new, unaddressed email and write a nasty reply filled with every curse word you’ve ever heard — and then delete the email. Take a deep breath. Walk around the block three or four times. Think. Instead of impulsively reacting from a hurt or angry place, decide how you want to respond. You might want to bite the bullet, not react at all, and say something innocuous like “Two will be a great start! And when those two sell, I know you’ll want to hang the other two.” Think through to what extent calling Jim on his rudeness or his betrayal really serves you, and base your decision on reason and pragmatism, not on impulse and hurt feelings.
Third, keep in touch even if you don’t feel like it. Do more than send an occasional check-in email to those people with whom you want to maintain a real ongoing relationship — even if you find them unpleasant. Set up a meeting for coffee, even if that eats into a good part of a Saturday afternoon. If they live far away, have a phone chat. Try to meet them face-to-face at least every so often. As you think about where to take your next vacation, consider going somewhere where you are represented and visiting with your art contacts. Keep them in mind, and keep in real touch with them.
It may feel hard to keep in touch with someone like Jim with whom you don’t much want to interact. But if you want Jim to continue representing you, then it makes sense to maintain real contact — and maybe even in a spirit of genuine friendship. Get in his shoes and his mind, and consider what he might want to hear from you. Has an article been done on you? Let him know. Have you posted a video on YouTube of one of your painting adventures? Let him know. Think up reasons to be in touch — not to be a pest but to maintain useful contact.
Artists often have only a few advocates in the marketplace, and they really need those advocates to support their efforts. If everyone wanted our wares, we might be much more cavalier about losing a connection here or there. Since in reality not everyone is clamoring for our creations, we need to maintain and preserve the connections we’ve successfully made so far. Just as it makes good sense to carefully preserve your art, it makes good sense to carefully preserve your art relationships too.
If you have the good fortune to possess many relationships in the arts, then you will want to practice empathy in all of them. If you are lucky enough to be represented in a number of galleries, if you acquire a substantial number of collectors, and if you become known in the wider world, then you have the job of maintaining those many important relationships, bringing some forward as circumstances dictate and letting others temporarily recede, and learning strategies that allow you to keep in touch with marketplace players and with your audience without pestering them to death.
Begin by identifying in your mind your most important contacts. These are the folks who matter the most to your art career: the collectors who buy often and/or who buy your largest and most expensive pieces, the owners of the galleries where you sell the most regularly, the one art writer who has taken an ongoing interest in you and done a substantial article on you.
There may be no more than a dozen people in this category, and you want to treat each of them as an individual, sending Mark and Mary, your two most loyal collectors, an email about your latest work before you announce it to anyone else, or letting Jill the art writer know that a show of yours will be in a church space in Italy and wondering if that might make for an interesting article. You want to keep these folks in your mind, and you want to contact them regularly, even when you have nothing particularly special to announce, to remind them that you are actively working and that you are thinking about them.
You might also think of visiting them personally, especially if you have never met them. If your biggest collector lives in Hawaii and you are trying to decide between a beach vacation in the Bahamas and a beach vacation in Hawaii, let the fact that collector Mark resides in Hawaii be the tipping point. Contact him to see if he would like to meet, and, if he says that he would, choose Hawaii over the Bahamas.
If your most important gallery is in Manhattan and you know that you’ll be traveling to the Lake George region of upstate New York, see if you can pencil a visit to the city into your schedule. You do not need to see folks in person all that often if you are maintaining regular contact by other means (like email and phone), but seeing them every once in a while is both smart and personally rewarding.
It would be wise of you to manifest your confidence and go a step further. You might jokingly wonder aloud to collector Mark in Hawaii (who, remember, is on your side, having purchased a number of your paintings) whether he might want to throw you a little party while you’re visiting to introduce you to his collector friends. Similarly, you might ask Frank the gallery owner in New York if he’d like to invite some collectors to have drinks with you and him when you hit the city.
Use opportunities of this sort not only to renew acquaintance with this important person in your life but also to allow this person to extend your circle of acquaintances while you’re in town. You may well discover that he or she is more than delighted to do so and that you rise in the estimation of these influential people with your willingness to promote yourself.
It is in your best interests to maintain contact with the large number of people who cross your path. The easiest way to do that is to maintain an email list and to send out periodic announcements, perhaps monthly. You might maintain one list of collectors, one list of gallery owners who don’t show you yet but whom you want to approach again and again until they show you, one list of local and nearby folks who would be interested in knowing about your local shows and open studio times, and so on. The longer these lists grow, the better.
Nor do you have to strain to think of things to say to these folks: you can send a simple one-line email (which busy people appreciate) that says “latest work” and show one new painting in that email. You can mention a sale you’ve made or a show you’ll be in months from now, send along a quote or a video that’s moved you, or share a bit of personal news. You don’t have to wait for big news before contacting them; contact them regularly so that you never leave their consciousness for very long.
Try to spend a little time every day maintaining contact with some of the many people out there who matter or who might potentially matter to your art career. This is a great way to practice empathy in a business context. Today you might contact Jim; tomorrow it might be Mary; the next day it might be someone you don’t know but whom you want to know. The day after that it might be everyone on your list. If you can’t manage to do this work every day, set aside some real time every few days or at least once a week to think through what contacts you want to make — and then actually make them.
Empathizing with Marketplace Players
Next let’s look at some concrete tips for empathizing better with marketplace players. Let’s consider a singer/songwriter, Jane, who is in the process of making her own CD — that is, she is paying for it out of her own pocket. Jane has hired a well-known and very busy freelance producer, Jack, to work with her.
This process of making a CD is almost always fraught with plenty of difficulties, because Jane has to get studio time scheduled far in advance, because she is tied to Jack’s availability, and so on. But a lack of empathy will only make this hard thing even harder. Here are ten tips for empathizing with marketplace players, using Jane and Jack as our example:
1. When you want someone to understand you, be clear. For example, Jane could say to Jack, “Can we get together some time in mid-March and work on the album a little?,” but that doesn’t really communicate enough about her needs or his reality. It would be better if Jane said, “I can book studio time on March 7, March 8, or March 9 at the following hours. Does one of those times work for you? If none of them work, can you give me some times that might? But I hope that one of these times does work, because the studio is booked up and it’s going to be really hard to find other dates. So if you could possibly make it on March 7, 8, or 9, that would be great!”
2. When you want someone to understand you, be brief. It is empathic to understand that people are not helped when they are bombarded by a ton of information. For example, Jane could write Jack a long email about all the reasons she is having trouble getting her last few songs written, or she could say, “Ten songs are done and the last two aren’t. How do you think we should proceed?” Not only is the latter more helpful and more empathic, but stating herself that briefly and clearly will help clarify matters for Jane herself.
3. When you want someone on your side, be affirmative. For example, it is not empathic to think that people don’t notice when they are being criticized or that they won’t get defensive. Jane could say to Jack, “I don’t think you are hearing me when I say that I need the drums to be less assertive,” which is a criticism. On the other hand, she could say, “I’m loving our process together! I only wonder if I’m being clear enough about the drums. I’d love it if they could be a little less assertive. Do you think that would be okay?” You try out the honey approach until you are forced to turn to vinegar — you don’t lead with vinegar.
4. Make sure that you’ve been heard by checking in and by asking questions. Often just checking in isn’t enough — you need to make sure that you’ve been heard and understood. Jane might write to Jack and say, “Did you get the long email I sent you the other day?,” or she might write and say the more effective, “In that email I sent you the other day, I fear that I might not have been clear on a couple of points, specifically on the timing of our next recording sessions and on the matter of your hourly rate going up in June. Were my thoughts on those two matters clear?”
5. Don’t let your nerves stop you from delivering your message. Jane may have something very important that she needs to get clear with Jack, but the thought of dealing with him might make her very anxious. It isn’t going to pay her to let her nerves get the better of her since he is producing her album and at some point she really must deal with him. Her best bet is to recognize that dealing with him makes her anxious, accept that reality, make use of one of her anxiety-management strategies, bite the bullet, and deal with him. When people matter to us the way that the producer of our album matters to us, we mustn’t let anxiety keep us from communicating with them.
6. When warning bells go off, hold your tongue, at least long enough to gather your thoughts. Let’s say that Jack says to Jane in the middle of a conversation, “Oh, I think I’ll be bringing my rate up to market rate in June.” Jane would want to think about her reply rather than to blurt out, “But we agreed to work through the end of this album at your current rate!” or “I’m not going to be able to handle a higher rate — this is a disaster!” By holding her tongue and taking the time to gather her thoughts, she will do a better job not only of saying what serves her but also of intuiting where Jack is coming from — that is, a better job of empathizing with him. Having done that careful work, she can send Jack an email that is affirmative, brief, and clear that either asks for clarification about his passing remark or spells out her arguments for his continuing to work with her at his current rate.
7. Never treat marketplace communications cavalierly. If you are Jane and during a recording session you’re disappointed with the way your bass player played, you don’t want to say to Jack, “We need a new bass player!” — not if you are just beginning to think the matter through and haven’t really decided whether or not you want a new bass player. If you bring it up before you really mean to, you’ve made internal work for Jack, who now has to worry about the whole bass player question. Empathizing in this instance means realizing that when you bring something up, the other person is likely to begin thinking about it. If you don’t want him to begin thinking about it yet, don’t say it.
8. Respond to marketplace messages in a calculated way. Let’s say that Jack mentions to Jane that he is getting married in June. Jane can congratulate him and think nothing more of it; or she can reckon that with a marriage comes a honeymoon and that he is going to be much less available in June than he otherwise might have been. That is simple empathy, to understand that a person who is getting married is likely to get busy, both externally and internally. So she can congratulate him and say the following thing that is calculated to help herself: “Wow, Jack! That probably means that May and June are going to be awfully busy for you, so I wonder if we could maybe book some extra hours in April to make sure that the project gets done?”
9. Get brilliant about hidden agendas. Let’s say that Jack says to Jane about a song that he previously seemed to like, “This song about horses isn’t quite there yet — I wonder if you want to take some time and get it ready before we go into the studio again?” If Jane takes this message at face value, it will probably sound like criticism and it may, in fact, affect her relationship with Jack and even make her doubt her song and her album. But if she is smart about human nature and the extent to which people carry hidden agendas, it may occur to her that perhaps something else is going on. So she might reply, “That’s an idea — but I wonder if something is going on in your life and you need some time away from my project? Is that why you’re wanting me to take another look at the horse song?” She may have guessed right, or she may have guessed wrong; but by checking with Jack in this way, she has a shot at unearthing Jack’s secret agendas, if there are any, while at the same time not getting down on the song or herself. Jack’s comment may in fact have had nothing to do with her song, a fact that she won’t learn unless she inquires.
10. If you can’t decode an important communication, ask for clarification. Let’s say that Jack says to Jane, “You know, I was working on Sarah’s album yesterday, and I’m really falling in love with the way she holds her notes over the fade-outs.” Jane may suspect that this message is intended for her, but unless she asks for clarification she won’t actually know. If she doesn’t ask she’ll probably brood about whether or not Jack was trying to tell her something. Her best bet is to frankly ask, “Is what Sarah’s doing applicable to my album, or were you just saying something nice about Sarah?” Whatever Jack’s answer is, it is bound to clarify what, if anything, he intended by his remark.
Reading People
Martin came to see me because he “wanted to become a more creative entrepreneur.” I asked him what he meant by this, since businesspeople tend not to mean the same thing when they use the word creative as writers or painters do. Sometimes they mean that they want to make more money; sometimes they mean that they need to think more innovatively in order to compete; sometimes they mean they have problems that need solving, having heard the phrase creative problemsolving bandied about.
Martin replied that he loved business but kept failing at it. His high-concept restaurant failed. His tech start-up failed. His consulting business failed. He claimed to have learned a lot from these failures, and he knew that the bios of successful businessmen were littered with such failures. But what he hadn’t learned was why he kept failing. He wanted help thinking creatively about that.
“It sounds like you were able to raise money for these projects,” I said.
“I was. They were good ideas, and other people thought so too.”
“Then what would happen?”
“Well, the main thing was that I would always have partners who were impossible to work with. I’ve read every book there is on difficult people, but difficult people are way more difficult than the books let on. We’d get into power struggles, they wouldn’t honor agreements, they had their own agendas — and the business would crash and burn.”
“You knew this going in?”
He stared at me. “Knew what?”
“That these were difficult people and perhaps people to avoid?”
He thought about that. “No. I didn’t know that. I must have terrible radar. I always think these guys are great!”
I nodded. “Why is that?”
“Why is what?”
“Why would you imagine that a fellow businessman was great, as opposed to just human? Especially after the second or third time of experiencing them in the real world?”
He thought about that.
“Human, how?” he finally said.
“Good and bad. Generous and selfish. Human.”
“I don’t think of people that way.”
“You don’t?”
He shook his head. “I give people the benefit of the doubt. I like to think that people are pretty much okay, if you treat them with respect.”
“Your parents were okay?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We don’t need to go there.”
“We don’t need to be real?”
“I just want some. . . creativity exercises,” he said. “Maybe a way to brainstorm problems when they arise. Like creative communication skills. Maybe something along those lines.”
“Uh-huh.”
I let the silence lengthen.
“You can provide me with some of those?”
“No.”
Martin stared at me. I could see him debating whether to stick with avoidance or accept the challenge.
“You’re saying I’m naive,” he finally said, frowning. “That I’m letting people walk all over me.”
“Naive is an interesting word. What do you mean by it?”
He shook his head. “What I just said. Letting people walk all over me.”
“If that’s how you mean it, then I don’t think you’re naive. Because once you see that someone is walking all over you, you do something. You don’t just take it. So let’s find another word.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
He gave that some thought. “It isn’t a word. It’s that I don’t read people well. That still feels like naive.”
We sat in silence.
“You have a new business idea?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And a prospective partner?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about him or her.”
“He’s great!” Martin exclaimed. “He —” He stopped.
“Exactly,” I said.
“What do I mean when I say ‘he’s great’?” Martin said speculatively, speaking to himself. “What is it that I’m doing?” He sat pondering. “I think. . . this is funny. I think I have the idea that to know what another person is thinking is an invasion of his privacy. We had so many rules about that growing up! My parents needed their privacy. We kids had precious little. I think I’ve equated knowing what you’re thinking with invading your privacy.”
I nodded. “That realization is so smart. Now — what would you like to do?”
“What can you do?” he exclaimed. “How do you know what a person is thinking?”
“You can’t, really.”
“So? Then where are we?”
“Let’s say I’m your prospective business partner. I say everything you want to hear, so you think I’m great. You can’t read my mind — so how can you know who I really am?”
“That’s the question!”
“That is the question. But you’ve never tried to answer it. You agree that the question matters?”
“Yes!”
“Then you must answer it.”
He thought for a long time.
“It has to do with getting the baseline right,” he said. “My baseline is off. Right now when I meet one of these guys, someone who’s good at presenting himself, glib, confident, fast-talking, who has an answer for everything, I give his style a kind of mental check mark. Rather than saying, ‘Wow, he is very glib,’ I say, ‘Wow, he is great.’ I ignore the warning signs — I even take them as pluses! My baseline is off.”
“Is there a simple way to articulate your new baseline?”
He stroked his chin. “It’s . . .maybe it’s . . .people are people.”
“Excellent!”
“That doesn’t mean that they’re automatically jerks.”
“No.”
“But it does mean they’re not automatically great.”
“Exactly.”
“And they have to be. . .watched.”
“And read. I need to read people better. And I need to read them faster! And watch them when we interact.”
“Because creative work like building a business requires it. You don’t build a business only with bricks and mortar or ideas — you need people.”
He nodded. Then he smiled. “So you weren’t going to give me some brainstorming exercises? Or give me something ‘creative’ to do? You weren’t buying my presentation?”
“Nope.”
“Well, thank you.”
I’ve had this same conversation with orchestra musicians, with documentary filmmakers, with scientific researchers, with dancers, with countless creative people who had never thought to include reading people among the skills they needed to cultivate. As if empathy were a luxury! Martin thanked me again and left deep in thought.
Empathy and Self-Consciousness
Sometimes we can’t practice empathy because we are too anxious and self-conscious to be really present. If this rings true for you, it will pay you to try to reduce that self-consciousness. To learn this skill, you might begin to write conspicuously in public places, to find or create more opportunities to be your artist self out in the world, and, if you are a painter and even if it isn’t your style, to paint en plein air. Here are some tips for doing just that: for venturing out, setting up your easel, and painting outdoors. If you work in a different art discipline, you’ll need to think through how these tips might apply to you.
1. Deal with your self-consciousness. Most people don’t enjoy looking and feeling conspicuous. Even exhibitionists prefer blending in most of the time! So you need to talk yourself into a willingness to be seen, watched, pointed at, gawked at, criticized, and all the rest. You may turn out to be much more invisible than you fear you will be — but if you aren’t, if people gather and watch you and gawk, so be it!
2. Get ready for an infinite amount of visual data. When you’re in front of your canvas, you have only whiteness to look at, which can be its own problem. But that’s a very different problem from the staggering amount of visual material available to you as you wander through the world and see forests or forests of buildings. Wherever you turn your head, there is more to see! Accept this reality and talk yourself into the belief that all this visual data is a special kind of abundance, not some sort of problem.
3. Be prepared to choose. You can’t paint everything you see! Even if you could, what would be the point? Isn’t the artistry in the choosing? Choosing provokes anxiety, and having to make strong, clear choices about what to paint may well raise your anxiety level. Be prepared for this anxiety, know what you’re going to do to combat it, and accept that you have no choice as an artist but to choose.
4. Create your kit. You need a painting setup that works for you. This may take repeated tries, since the first setup may be too cumbersome, the second too meager, and so on. Learning how to feel comfortable en plein air is a process, and there is no reason why you should nail your setup the very first time. Consider your first tries experiments, and learn from them.
5. Be clear about your intentions. Are you planning to make finished paintings while you’re out? Or loose sketches? Or something in between, something that’s more than a sketch but that still requires work back at the studio? Maybe you don’t know your intentions — in which case, try to learn them as you go. Maybe you’ll discover that you can complete things on the spot, and maybe you’ll learn that your real goal is to capture a sense of place and finish up at the studio. Learn as you go.
6. Think about partnering. Would you enjoy going out with a friend? Maybe several of you could travel together? You don’t have to confine yourself to one way or the other — usually Van Gogh went out alone, but sometimes he went out with Gauguin. Think through the pros and cons of painting en plein air with a buddy, and if the pros tip the scale in their favor, find a painting partner.
7. Schedule real time. Most people are so busy nowadays that they can’t find three or four hours unless they consciously pencil those hours into their schedules. Look at your schedule and make some decisions about where you might find your en plein air painting time. If you can’t find the time, that means that in order to get en plein air painting on your schedule, you will need to rethink how you spend your time.
8. Focus on the joys and benefits. Remind yourself of the potential joys of en plein air painting. You may be focusing on the difficulties associated with it, and by focusing on those difficulties you may have forgotten how joyful it is to be out in the world looking, seeing, and creating. Think back to how much you’ve enjoyed sketching in parks and cafés. The studio is great — but so is the world!
9. Keep it simple. Do not overdramatize the process. It isn’t as if you’re going to the ends of the earth! We can easily convince ourselves that something is far more difficult than it really is. Have a quiet conversation with yourself about how easy it will prove to gather up a few things, go out, and find some fascinating vistas to paint. Don’t exaggerate the difficulties!
10. Remember its importance. Have a conversation with yourself about the importance of en plein air painting — and learning to be conspicuous — to your creative life. Honor your understanding of its importance, and make sure that you get some en plein air painting on your schedule — and soon!
Remember the central point here: that you want to do an excellent job at empathizing with people, that your self-consciousness can easily get in the way of your desire and your ability to practice empathy, and that en plein air painting is one way to learn how to deal with your self-consciousness. However, there are countless other ways. If you are not interested in en plein air painting, or if you are not a visual artist, then figure out your own way to become conspicuous, create your own tip list, and then endeavor to reduce your experience of self-consciousness through actual practice.
Simple Empathy
Empathy is not the callous reading of people for personal gain — the kind of empathy that psychopaths possess — nor an indiscriminate giving away of ourselves because we are “feeling so much” in our interactions with others. It is not a cold skill or gushy relating. It is simply our ability and our willingness to understand what is going on with other people.
To learn more about your ability to empathize, answer the following questions:
• What difficulties have you experienced by not understanding where another person was coming from?
• What in you prevents you from empathizing with others?
• What do you see as the best ways of dealing with difficult people?
• What kinds of relationships do you want to maintain with the people important to your creative life?
• How will you get better at empathizing?
It is very easy to get lost in our heads and to stay there and not have a very good idea of what other people, including marketplace players, are thinking and feeling. It may be that we think we can go it alone, but in fact every artist needs an audience, marketplace advocates, and other actual human beings who have their own thoughts, feelings, needs, and wants. When you get better at empathizing, you also get better at collaborating and at forging the relationships that serve you.