Empathy & Assertiveness

The Art Of Being An Empath: Empathy & Assertiveness

Empathy is defined as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. In other words, Empathy is the abilityto share in another person’s experiences, perceptions and emotions.

There is an art to being empathetic toward others. This is because it takes great compassion for another person to willingly step away from their own personal perceptions of the world, essentially setting aside their ego, enough to step into another person’s perceptions of the world, which include emotional levels, physicallevels, and intellectual levels. The willingness to do this, as much as the actual ability to do this, take great conviction, because it then asks the person empathizing to open themselves up to a whole new way of seeing the world, through someone else’s eyes.

Assertiveness is defined as being confident and direct in claiming one’s rights or putting forward one’s views. In other words,Assertiveness is simply standing up for yourself, speaking up for your rights, and effectively expressing your wishes, ideas and concerns. But in doing this, one does it with consideration to others through the act of being respectful of other people’s personal boundaries and emotions.

There is an art to being assertive. This is because it is a kind of balancing act between being considerate and respectfulof other people’s feelings and your own needs. It is very distinct from being passive and aggressive because of this dual focus of balancing your needs with those of others.

Wikipedia describes Assertiveness, in more detail, this way:

As a communication style and strategy, assertiveness is distinguished from aggression and passivity. How people deal with personal boundaries, their own andthose of other people, helps to distinguish between these three concepts. Passive communicators do not defend their own personal boundaries and thus allow aggressive people to abuse or manipulate them through fear. Passive communicators are also typically not likely to risk trying to influence anyone else. Aggressive people do not respect the personal boundaries of others and thus are liable toharm others while trying to influence them. A person communicates assertively by overcoming fear to speak his or her mind or trying to influence others, but doing so in a way that respects the personal boundaries of others. Assertive people are also willing to defend themselves against aggressive.
Empathy and Assertiveness

At first glance you might think that these two ideas have little incommon. Empathy is ‘other’ oriented, meaning its focus is always centered around other people. Whereas, being Assertive appears to be more ‘self’ oriented, meaning it’s focus is centered on one’s own needs and desires. And through this association, one might even suppose there is a negative connection between these two ideas.

Beneath the surface, though, both of these concepts share similar traits.Both attempt to further human understanding. Both allow for recognition of another person’s thoughts and feelings. And both involve the idea of appropriateness and flexibility in manifesting empathic and assertive communication. In other words, these things allow one to be ‘other’ oriented by being considerate and respectful of the other person.

Why then is this such an important topic, asidefrom the obvious sharing of information here? These two ideas, by themselves are both extremely wonderful ideas. But at the same time, they tend to reek havoc on highly empathetic people (Empaths, HSPs, INFJ). You see when someone is highly empathetic, they can become so ‘other’ oriented that they begin to exhibit unassertive behaviors. Thus, they can lose sight of their own goals, needs and...