The Most Powerful Word in the English Language
ARE YOU LOOKING for an instant tension buster? A way to stop gossips and backstabbers dead in their slimy little tracks? Want to turn snarling antagonists into personalities as sweet and smooth as honey sliding from a jar?
The answer lies in one word, which represents the single most powerful concept in the English language: empathy.
To have empathy for someone does not mean to sympathize with him. It does not mean to love or even to like somebody. You don’t have to approve of him. And you are certainly not required to agree with what he says or accept his invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.
Empathy has Latin and Greek roots. Em, from the Latin, means “to see through,” and pathy, from the Greek, means “the eye of the other.” So to empathize means to understand, to see through the eyes of another. It is the most crucial skill in both physical and Verbal Judo. That’s because the moment you stop thinking like your spouse, you’re headed for divorce court. The moment you stop thinking like your employer, you’d better start looking for another job. The moment you stop thinking like your friends, you’d better find yourself a new crowd to run with.
Empathy is the quality of standing in another’s shoes and understanding where he’s coming from.
Here is the bottom line of all communication: Empathy absorbs tension. It works every time. I have seen it even save a life.
The most dramatic example of this I have ever witnessed occurred one cold, windy night two years into my police career. I answered a call about a guy threatening to commit suicide. I had been on another call, and when I arrived I found a bunch of policemen standing around a man lying nude in a bathtub full of water. His toe was hooked to an electric heater, which he was threatening to jerk into the tub. It would, of course, have electrocuted him before our eyes.
“You pigs don’t understand!” he screamed. “I want to kill myself!”
The officers pleaded with him, “C’mon, friend, you don’t want to do that. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Things will look better tomorrow.”
The only problem with that is that the guy knew better. He was the one with the problems: money, love, job, whatever. And Murphy’s Law tells us things aren’t going to be better tomorrow. A guy talking suicide thinks Murphy was an optimist anyway.
One of the officers turned to me and said, “This is your beat. You handle it.”
I pulled another cop close and whispered, “Find the fuse box and cut off the power.”
Meanwhile, I turned to the guy in the tub. Despite what he had said, I believed he was looking for a way out of his predicament. If he really wanted to die, he’d have killed himself. He wanted to be listened to, and now he needed to save face. Instead of trying to talk him out of frying himself in the tub, I decided to move with him. That meant I had to try to think like him. I quickly contemplated what it must be like to face imminent bathtub electrocution. It struck me as an especially horrible way to go.
I said, “You know, it’s really too bad that of the hundred and five ways you can kill yourself, friend, you’ve picked the hundred and fifth most painful. You think it’s going to be quick, right? You think all you have to do is pull the heater in the tub and you’re gone. Let me tell you something. Research shows that death by electrocution in water can take anywhere from eight to twelve minutes—minutes of excruciating pain.
“You’re going to smell your hair burning. You’re going to see the water bubbling and boiling, your skin peeling back from your knuckles, your sternum split. If you think life’s been tough up to now, friend, you’ve got eight to twelve minutes to consider real toughness. You have never felt such pain.”
I paused as it became clear they were having trouble finding the fuse box or figuring how to cut the power. “It’s a shame,” I said. “There are a hundred and four easier and more efficient ways to do it. Why don’t you step out of that tub and I’ll tell you about them. Some are so quick you’re gone before you know it.”
It may seem that telling someone how to kill himself is anything but empathetic, but it was the only way I knew how to walk in the guy’s shoes. And it worked. Just before they cut the electricity, he sprang out of that tub.
The truth is, I don’t know how many ways there are to kill yourself. And I know very little about death by electrocution, except I understand it’s pretty quick. I know I’m not right about the eight to twelve minutes, but squatting there in uniform next to a desperate man, I must have looked and sounded like the world’s authority on the subject.
Okay, I was lying, but because I tried to empathize with the guy, I got in sync with him. He listened because I was working with him, trying to help him—if not to live then at least to die with less pain. He thought he wanted to kill himself; I promised I could help him get the job done better.
Admittedly, lying and trickery are not things that easily transfer into your everyday relationships. I don’t recommend them. In this case, however, subterfuge was the only thing I could think of to empathize with the man. Though my story was fake, my concern was genuine, and he sensed it. My goal was to help him. Because I focused on him and his predicament, I was able to choose language that allowed him to see the situation as he hadn’t seen it before.
He wanted to be understood.
I am not a social worker. I was never the best cop in the world. But I can try to understand. And then, by the way I use language and tone, I can buy someone another twenty-four to forty-eight hours. That’s enough time for a man to have a cup of coffee and chat with a professional—somebody trained in helping him reconsider his life.
What I did for that guy is what police officers, teachers, parents, ministers, and others do all the time. We help people think as they would a day or two later, without the influence of fear or depression or temporary brain damage they bring to the situation.
A friend told me of a rash decision by his son that could have resulted in a regrettable act. In a typical circle of gossip, the boy’s girlfriend heard some things he was supposed to have said about her. She called to break up with him. He was so hurt by being dumped that he fumed around the house, threatening to say about her the very things she had accused him of saying. “There are things I could tell about her,” he wailed. “And since she already thinks that’s what I’ve done, I might as well.”
He went to the phone. “What are you doing?” his father asked.
“Evening the score,” he said. “I’m going to tell a few of my friends things about her.”
“Things said to you in confidence? Things between a boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“That’s right.” He was dialing.
“Could you give me just a minute?”
“Don’t try to talk me out of this, Dad. She’s already found me guilty, so I might as well do it.”
“But you were innocent.”
“That doesn’t make any difference now.”
“I can understand how hurt you are, being accused of something you didn’t do by someone you care about. Do me a favor, will you? Give it twenty-four hours. If you still feel as strongly then, we’ll talk again.”
Notice the father didn’t give him permission to spread gossip and break confidences if he still felt strongly the next day. He simply said they would talk again. He knew how quickly things change in kids’ lives and that there were myriad reasons why his son might feel differently the next day.
The next morning, when he dropped his son off at school, the boy was still incensed. “Remember, you’re giving me twenty-four hours and we’ll talk again tonight.” The boy nodded.
That evening the son was beaming. “She asked me to forgive her!” he announced. “She said she should have believed me, because when she called her friends they all said I had never broken my word or told stories behind her back.”
The father resisted the temptation to take credit for keeping his son from having done just that. “So, you’re back together?”
“Of course, Dad. Nothing can tear us apart.”
This is the communication warrior’s real service: staying calm in the midst of conflict, deflecting verbal abuse, and offering empathy in the face of antagonism. If you cannot empathize with people, you don’t stand a chance of getting them to listen to you, much less accepting your attempts to help—sincere as you may be.
If you take a moment to think as another might be thinking, then speak with his perspective in mind, you can gain immediate rapport. Ill-fitting as his shoes may be, walk a few steps in them. Only then can you provide real understanding and reassurance. Only then can you help that person see the consequences of what he is doing or is about to do. Only then can you help him make enlightened decisions.
RODNEY KING
In the most famous police brutality case to date, Rodney King was kicked and clubbed at least fifty-six times on March 3, 1991, in Los Angeles. I wasn’t there, but like just about every fully functioning citizen of North America, I’ve seen the video more times than I care to. I’ve heard the testimony that King was bludgeoned and kicked because he ignored verbal commands to get down and stay down, and apparently one jury was convinced the staggering, lumbering, dazed offender was a mortal threat to the officers.
I don’t want to be naïve, and nothing I say here should be misconstrued as condoning the violence that broke out with the announcement of the first verdict, but I believe the police officers could have used words alone to take King in. I was training members of the LAPD at the time, and several of the officers on the scene that night were scheduled to be in my Verbal Judo class the week after the incident. When you’ve finished this book, ask yourself how you would have handled that dangerous, volatile situation, and see if you don’t agree with me.
Fortunately, the vast majority of us will never find ourselves in such an explosive environment. Our verbal tussles are just as unsettling to us, however, so every tool we can employ, every skill we can master will only make our lives easier.
The highly trained adult professionals who resort to brute force no doubt consider themselves effective communicators, people who don’t need to learn anything more about how to talk. That is the attitude of nearly every professional I teach, at least at the start. I find that it takes some in-your-face challenges to get them to sit up and listen. I need to earn the right to be heard, show that I’ve been where they are—in dangerous street situations—and convince them that there are indeed verbal skills that will make them better at their jobs.
Chances are that you, too, consider yourself a successful communicator. You have no doubt occasionally demonstrated impressive verbal skills, whether that meant getting your parents to let you stay up past your bedtime, persuading your dog to stop harassing the neighbors, or sweet-talking your spouse into forgiving you for yet again getting home late without calling.
We’ve all, at one time or another, savored the results of having said the right thing at the right time to the right person. We may have even been able to congratulate ourselves for having kept our mouths shut when it was appropriate but difficult. At least once or twice in our lives, we’ve responded to insults with a comeback either so funny or so gracious that it was worthy of Billy Crystal or Mother Teresa.
So, such responses are possible. With a little luck, they’re even repeatable. The question is, Are such situations predictable? If they are, if they can be anticipated, then we can be trained and prepared to respond appropriately and effectively every time. Now there’s a worthy goal.
Can we speak convincingly on those all-too-frequent days when we’re overworked and exhausted? Can we expect the right words to tumble gracefully from our lips when we’re negotiating a raise or trying to steer a child through negative peer pressure?
Do we know what to say when the plumber says he can’t get to our faulty water heater for two days? Can we confront our spouse about a problem without irreparably damaging the marriage? Can we speak up at a staff meeting to make an unpopular but vital point without losing our fragile standing within the organization?
Do we know which words and inflections produce desired results? Have we any idea when to use them and when it’s smarter to simply keep quiet?
And if we know these things, are we capable of using them when under pressure? Can we access them when situations turn ugly or potentially violent? Do we know what to say to keep a love relationship from sliding down the tubes? Or is that when we’re likely to take the cheapest shots, to make those statements that can never be taken back?
In short, can we get up in the morning and expect the right words to come out of our mouths that day, no matter what occurs? Or will we be taking our chances?