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Handle with Care: Empathy at Work


Oct 13, 2020

 

 

Liesel Mertes

It's been a pretty eventful and emotional week and a half in my house now with six people in the house. There's always high emotion throw into the mix that two of my children are preadolescents. And you can guess all of the back and forth that go on. But this last week and a half has had some particular inflection points. We had a beloved family pet die.

 

We've been quarantined because of a possible COIVD diagnosis. And there's just been a lot of general stress in the ER. So today, I want to take a break from our normal cycle of interviewing a guest and having them talk about a disruptive life event to just give you some real talk about empathy and October 2020 in the thick of the COVID pandemic,

 

MUSICAL TRANSITION

 

Liesel Mertes

Now, there are a number of you who might know me just as the voice behind the Handle with Care podcast interviews. But I actually have a broader business outside of this. I'm a workplace empathy consultant. And what that means is I help companies and individuals come alongside people in their workplaces to help them survive, stabilize and thrive as they go through disruptive life events.

 

One of the ways that I do this is I teach them about these empathy avatars. These are these identities that we can take on. They're shaped by all kinds of things. They're shaped by your culture of upbringing. They're shaped by your personality. And they are the tool kit that you go to to respond out of when people are going through a hard time. So some of the names of these characters are people like Commiserating. Candice, you're always sharing your own hard story or Cheer Up Cheryl.

 

Liesel Mertes

And I want to share with you in today's episode two things that happened in the stress of the last week and a half.

 

 

And I want to we've you know, usually we have three takeaways that are always at the end. I want to weave the three takeaways throughout my comments and tell you how I found myself responding during these times of high stress and anxiety, hopefully connect with you. OK, so first I want to talk about this COVID diagnosis, so my son Magnus, he goes to the nurse's office more than any of my other children.

 

I think he likes the care that's there. He's very in tune with pain and his body. And I sent him off to school on Monday and he was experiencing some sinus congestion, no fever.

 

Liesel Mertes

 

I gave him a Claritin, but he was tired and he headed off to school till around nine 30. I received a call from the nurse. I'm in the middle of a training and I get this call from the nurse who tells me she has Magnus in the nurse's office and she thinks that maybe there's a chance that he has COIVD. Now, I'm really glad that people are taking COVID seriously, that they are all of these procedures in place in schools.

 

Liesel Mertes

And she told me that he checked off enough boxes that he needed to go to a 10 day quarantine unless he came back with a negative COVID test.

 

So baseline, this is sad news, my hope Magnus does not have covered, but really my first response was just to be so frustrated that I was being called into the nurse's office.

 

Liesel Mertes

What was this going to mean for me, for my schedule, for all of the things we had planned for the other children for the rest of the week, if we all had to quarantine? And I find myself just being irritated. And frankly, I was so glad that I was wearing a mask in the nurse's office so she couldn't see all of the aggravation and irritation that I was feeling towards my son manifest on my face. So I have to go.

 

I have to pick him up. And as we're walking to the car, I find myself going full on Buck-Up Bobby, which is one of these empathy avatars that I introduce people to Buck-Up Bobby wants you to be able to tough it out because that's what he expects of himself and that's what he expects of you.

 

Liesel Mertes

And as I was walking out to the car, here's what I find myself saying to my son, Magnus “Magnus, I can't believe that you can't deal with any pain or discomfort in your body.”

 

“All you had was a headache and a stuffy nose. You have it all the time this time of year with your allergies.” And I just read him the riot act. Do you know now that we're going to have to go get you tested and do all kinds of things?

 

And I'm so frustrated with you and I'm not proud of this, but I mean, he was he was in tears by the time we got home. This poor kid who is not feeling good anyway. And I really had to reflect on this because it was a parenting failure moment. And lots of times I work with companies, I work with H.R. executives or managers, and this little microcosm of an interaction is playing out in workplaces all the time because, frankly, it's inconvenient to the business of business to have someone going through a hard time to have to extend them care, to have to pause in the normal workflow and care for them.

 

Liesel Mertes

And sometimes, truly, it's easier to care for people who are fathers. Here's your take on point number one. Sometimes we treat people who are further away from our sphere of influence better than we treat people who have a direct effect on our schedules and our workflow.

 

So for me, it's way easier to show empathy and care if doing that doesn't affect or inconvenience the details of my life. But Magnus felt inconvenient. He was creating a lot more work for me, and I went right into a default response system. Takeaway point number to interrogate your own experience when you find yourself going into these default behaviors, ask why am I treating this person this way? Because this is something I had to do, I'm reflecting on my own experience.

 

Liesel Mertes

Oh, my gosh, I'm someone who teaches and practices empathy towards other people. I know how important this is. I actually love my son and I don't want to make him cry. Why am I doing this?

 

Buck-Up Bobby is one of the avatars that I go to for those of you who have been through training with me. I also can be a Fix-It Frank or a Commiserating Candice. More on those perhaps in another episode. But as I interrogate my own experience, here's what I find. So, part of this comes from my household of origin. This was a super important message that was given to me that I was part of a family where you could do hard things and that that mattered.

 

Liesel Mertes

And, in fact, that that was an important part of being an adult, that you needed to be able to do hard things. And we weren't whiners. My dad modeled this. We celebrated this in conversation as we talked about our days are things that we liked about ourselves and had an even deeper level.

 

I was a kid who was just like Magnus. I was a kid who loved going to the nurse's office. I liked being taken care of. I got easily bored in class. I would make up kind of these, you know, phantom sorts of maladies that would get me sent home when I didn't really have a fever. And I can even remember my mom telling me how inconvenient this was. Was there a part of my own self judgment or shame that I picked up that I'm now taking out on Magnus?

 

As you interrogate your own experience, realize that the voice that goes on in your own head is often the energy that you are directing at other people. And as I look at that experience, I think I can ask myself as an adult, is resting really wrong? Does that really mean that I'm a failure? Does it mean that Magnus is a failure? And as I examine that experience, I can say, you know what? Magnus is an 11-year-old kid doing what?

 

Liesel Mertes

11-year olds doing what I as an 11 year old did. And maybe he doesn't need to fully model all these, you know, adult aspects of being able to push hard and persevere. And maybe those aren't even the highest values. And I'm treating him with a lack of empathy because of the messages that go on in my own head. So some reflections from the COVID experience with Magnus, I'm going to share one more story with you that will lead to a third take on point and reflection that will perhaps be helpful for you as you are interacting with and managing others.

 

And this has to do with the death of our beloved pet. So, by a strange confluence of circumstances, we ended up bringing bunnies into our home for a long time in life. If you're a parent of young children, you might resonate with this energy. There was no way I was getting a pet at all while my kids were in diapers like no.

 

Liesel Mertes

And finally, a few years ago, we got a really low-key rescue dog already, you know, good with children already housetrained.

 

And I thought, this is a pet we're going to have. But the children wanted something a little bit cuddlier and we brought bunnies into the home. And these three bunnies were wonderful. They're so great to hold at the end of a stressful day. And especially the bunny. Bluebell was just such a lover. And I had a bunny as a kid. I had a very typical non cuddly bunny. But Bluebell was the best. Bluebell belonged to Jemima.

 

The neighborhood kids loved Bluebell. She would just sit and receive stroking and attention. She was spectacular.

 

Liesel Mertes

But remember, I also have a dog, this rescue dog, who is a predator through and through and on Friday of last week was able to open the side of the rabbit cage and was playing with the bunny. There were no puncture marks by this bunny was so terrified that it went into shock and died. Really sad. There was a communal burial service by the neighborhood kids. There was working through the sadness and all of the triggering emotions with my children as it related to feelings about the death of their youngest sister, Mercy.

 

I mean, this deep stuff, things like this, bring up really deep waters for me, for my children. This all happened over the weekend. The same child, Magnus, goes to school on Monday and they're doing a weekend catch up in one of his classes as students will do, and this teacher up front asks, So who has the story from their weekend?

 

Liesel Mertes

Magnus, who is a this was right before he went to the nurse's office to go home. But he's not he's a really emotionally in touch young man. And he raises his hand and he said, well, my sister's bunny died over the weekend. And right away, this teacher cut him off and says, no, no, no, sorry. That's too sad. We only want happy stories. We'll return to that in a moment, because Magnus's chastened and he he's been cut off, but a little bit later, maybe about five or 10 minutes later, Magnus is again sharing in a general sharing time.

 

And now he knows he's not supposed to share about his sister's dead bunny, but he's just sharing about his buddy who's still alive. And he says, you know, my, my bunny is this type of bunny. It's so cute. And the same teacher cut him off and says, Do you know what my favorite type of bunny is? A dead fried bunny. And then he moves on and changes the subject and Magnus is telling me about this at the end of the day, and I am so saddened and horrified because this teacher is manifesting another avatar that you either we can either call Joking Julie or a Jackass Jared, because the same sort of energy comes from both of them.

 

Liesel Mertes

This is the type of person that their response to somebody else's pain or to their own pain is to minimize it and close off a painful interaction by making a joke or by just pretending that everything is OK and it happens. A ton in male interactions is not only a male, you know, characteristic, but especially happens in groups of guys.

 

And I had to take the moment to tell Magnus that was so wrong, what he did to you in front of everyone you know, he he publicly minimized through humor any sort of engagement with your pain to make himself feel better, to get through the interaction.

 

Liesel Mertes

So point three, a take home message number one, don't be that guy or that girl, if you have a tendency to be a Joking Julie or a Jackass Jared, you need to ask yourself some questions.

 

Why am I so uncomfortable with my own emotions or with the emotions of others? And maybe maybe you're just doing it within your own story. Maybe even when you talk about something hard, you always feel the need to close it out with a joke.

 

Maybe you learned distressed early on that actually other people couldn't hold your strong emotions and you needed to wrap it up that way, but, you know, as a as a sub point, point three, B know that we're always being shaped by what is modeled for us and especially for younger people, whether that is someone who is a couple of decades younger than you in the workplace or if you were in a parenting relationship or just in a power dynamic, you are modeling what is acceptable behavior.

 

Liesel Mertes

And it requires intention or else you're going to get these bad unintended consequences, you know, if Magnus encounters enough of that sort of jocular dismissiveness again and again, what he's going to think is this is the way I need to interact in order to be heard in this setting and is going to set a trajectory for him to think that he also needs to do that. And then the cycle just perpetuates itself again and again.

 

So thanks for listening to this little mini-series of real time reflection about the sort of stuff that covid is bringing out for people.

 

Liesel Mertes

Every day you are going to have the opportunity to be able to move toward someone and be a caring, supportive present person or move away from them, and there's a lot of levels to that. There's all kinds of things to unpack.

 

[00:15:15.150]

But just now, today, take a moment to think about some of the interactions that you had this week. What are they saying about you? You know, for me, it touched on some things that I'm not proud of that manifest in the midst of my stress response that I'm trying to with intention change in my interactions going forward.

 

[00:15:35.600]

And as you think about your experience, if you have missed someone, if you think, "Oh, my gosh, I was a Buck-up Bobby to my co-worker or to my child or I was a Jackass Jarred and I don't want to do that. And I don't want to be that." One of the most powerful things that you can do is go back and say you're sorry to someone. That's what I did within 15 minutes with Magnus. I went back and I said, "I'm sorry.

 

[00:16:02.150]

I did not treat you fairly or well. I shamed you and that was wrong of me. And I'm sorry I did that. And I don't want you to carry that energy. It's not right and it's not true for you." You'd be amazed at what a difference that can make. In our next episode, we'll be back to interviewing guests. Thanks for your time. Have a good day.

 

MUSICAL TRANSITION OUT