 You guys have, I say guys, this is a problem. Who wants to yell at me every time I say guys? I'll do that. Don't even need to just go, eh. You have a guys jar? Yeah, I don't do jars. Do you have to just tell me? OK, so all day people have been working on empathy and why and how. So I'm thinking, well, what do I do with my half hour, since that's what we're talking about all day long, right? And so what I want to make sure I do is that I actually get to the real stuff, the real reason I'm here. And when I'm prepping a talk, I always come up with this well-organized and thought out series of slides and stuff. And that's really all bullshit. So I'm going to see how the slides fit in. But I really want to make sure that I talk about the real stuff, OK? And the real stuff is, what the hell is wrong with people? Right? OK. So and also I also debated coming in and saying, hi, I'm Alex and I'm an asshole, which is also true. And I kind of found a workaround. So sometimes I'm less of an asshole than I might have been otherwise. And that's what I want to talk about. And it really involves shutting up my inner dialogue and choosing a different dialogue. That's really the big part of it. And that is hard as hell to do when you're standing in front of an asshole, right? And often it's two people. One of them is like, can't you see I'm hurting? And the other one's like, oh, you're hurting. And so then it just goes back and forth, right? And we don't get anywhere. So what do we do with that? What do we do with all the hurting that we're surrounded by? And how do we make it into a life that we can stand? So that's what I'm hoping that I will end up having talked about when this is all over. Oh, you know what else? I can't see my presenter notes because I didn't arrange it so I could see them. So we'll see what happens. The first thing that I want to ask of you is if you are willing and comfortable to participate in a little exercise. And if you're not comfortable, conveniently, you can just sit there and no one will know the difference. No one can tell who's doing the thing and who's not doing the thing. So if you're comfortable doing it, I would suggest putting both feet on the floor. Sitting up so that your gravity is holding you comfortably, but you're kind of upright. This is something that the Zen Buddhists teach us, that we can balance on a particular point that will make us upright, but still relaxed. Sort of like a stack of stones, if you've ever seen those stack up. Okay, and so your hands would be on your lap if you chose to move your hands. And I want to invite you to take a few breaths, noticing what kind of breaths they are, without doing anything to change them. Just watch your breath going in and out. Notice whether it's shallow or deep, rapid, slow. And if you'd like to, you can close your eyes. This will be no more than five minutes. While you're noticing your breath, see if you can feel whether it stops at your chest or whether it goes all the way down into your belly. Again, without judging it or trying to change it. Just let it happen. Notice any sounds that are happening around you. You hear air flow, people, your own stomach, any smells or tastes, bodily sensations. Just notice and then turn your attention back to your breath. Breathing slow and deep. See if you can breathe down into your abdomen. Feel your chest and your stomach both rise when you breathe. Let yourself fall into a rhythm. And then turn your attention back to the sounds around you, smells. Maybe the feeling of the air on your skin. The feeling of your feet on the floor. Notice whether you have ideas in your head. Thoughts. See if you can notice the thoughts and then let them flow down past. Maybe your thoughts are on an earlier talk or something that's gonna happen later. And maybe they're right here. Just notice. Turn your attention back to your breath. Let yourself keep that slow rhythm. And then notice if you have any emotions or anxiety. See if you can identify emotions and give them a name and then let them go. Keeping their rhythm of your breath going. One more thing. With all your attention on all of these things. See if you can notice what you want most in the world or what would bring you joy. Okay, so why did I do that? I did that because empathy to me is a really visceral practice. It's not a bunch of ideas or instructions. It's not a phrasing of things that you can plug in words and you'll say it correctly and it'll be empathy. It's knowing yourself really well and having the ability to turn your attention to someone else and learn them in a similar way. So hopefully that will bring us all into the same sort of mind space and see where we go from here. What time is it? Okay. So there's a lots and lots of conversations about empathy going on. So I wanted to try to explain what I mean by it. What I mean is when you come to another person and you recognize in that other person your shared human experience. So if you meet up with someone in there upset about something, you notice that upset and you think, oh yeah, I can understand that, right? We have things in common that we want. We have, we want food and shelter and we want the companionship of other people and we want to feel good about ourselves. All of these things are across the board human traits. Okay, I'm not gonna bother with like 100% or 99.9%, I'll let you worry about that, but it's something that other people have in common with you. So I don't mean what I call sympathy, which have you ever dreaded telling your mom that you lost your job? So like if I told my mom that I lost my job, her reaction would be, oh no, oh, and suddenly I would be taking care of her, right? Because she has feelings about my problem. And so that's different from empathy. Yeah, it's feeling about somebody's feelings, but it's not the same thing as reflecting their feelings, understanding where they're coming from and be like, oh, that must be really hard for you, right? You don't take on, you don't lose yourself. Yeah, that's what I said. I don't know if you guys can read this, if not, don't worry about it because the slides aren't important. So recognizing in another person something that's inside you, that's what I mean by empathy. And even though there are so many assholes out there, all of them are people like me and like you. They all find babies to be inspiring in some way, whether they think they're cute or want to throw them across the room. Okay, babies was a bad example. They all long for the same sorts of things that we long for. They all have frustrations and they all get scared and they all lash out, most of us lash out. I think there are some people who don't, I'm not them. So a teacher once suggested to me that I try on this idea. What if everybody I meet is doing the best they can to get through this life, given their skills and whatever. A lot of people have really, really bad strategies, right? Like abusive partners, for example. Time out. Strand, hand up. You guys all know Strand. Who else is here that's staff? Anybody? Who are you? I can't see who it is. Okay, these people all love you and if you get triggered by something I say they would love to talk to you if you want company. So all you gotta do is get up and walk out and maybe wave, they will be watching to see if you want attention or not. And I might say trigger things. So okay, I was gonna say that at the beginning, I forgot. Okay, so you have an abusive spouse, right? And they have horrible strategies for getting their needs met. But what their needs are are like trust, care, right? Safety, a lot of people use safety as a bad one that results in some nasty strategies. My point is I was given this idea what if everyone is doing the best they can to try on and I tried it on and it changed everything. It meant that I could meet all kinds of people and I could see them as people, right? I also, I was given this idea of unconditional love which Karl Rogers who's a psychologist, a humanized psychology, I don't know if you guys know. Anybody know Karl Rogers? He's a really cool guy, you should look him up. He said that what people need for a growing relationship for a relationship in which they can grow and blossom. They need empathy, authenticity and unconditional positive regard. And that like that last one stuck with me, apparently that means people actually need to be loved. They need unconditional acceptance which must mean it's possible for us to do that. Anyway, so this has allowed me to get closer to that. Oh, and even you. So I back up. What if everyone is doing the best they can? How often do you not find it easy to forgive yourself? Does that ever happen? Anybody? What if you're doing the best you can to get through this life and sometimes your strategies kind of suck? Self empathy. Self empathy is a term that comes from, as far as I know, the creator of nonviolent communication which you're gonna hear about tomorrow. Self empathy is the ability to sit with yourself and listen to yourself the way you would listen to a close friend. So after you're an asshole, right, and you're off by yourself and you're like, God, right, you're either looking for something to kill the pain, right, or you're actually thinking about it over and over again in your head what you just did or what you did five years ago or whatever it is that gets to you. You could sit there and you could listen to that story and you could say, God, that must have been so hard. Right? I mean, what would you do if your friend was in that position? That's the idea of self empathy. You listen and you care. We have a meditation that we teach at my TRIA called befriending which involves sitting with yourself for a long time and just having a conversation where you say things like, I'm so sorry that happened to you and you did the best you could. So does empathy come naturally? Right? We're told that babies automatically have empathy, right? And to some extent, it does come naturally. And then shit gets real. Right? And then what we do in that circumstance is we create distance instead of drawing people together. So it comes naturally up to a point but then after that, that's when the difficulty comes in and that's when we learn to go back to our breath. One of the practices that I've adopted gradually over time is to come back to the breath automatically. So when I get faced with something like this, ah! You take a deep breath and that rhythm because you practiced for years comes to you automatically and you're able to start noticing what's going on. That was a loud noise, right? As opposed to what an asshole that was or whatever I do to create distance I can do instead. I can go, I just heard a loud noise. What's that about? This person seems to be upset, right? I get more access. To me the point of empathy is not that it's an obligation or that it's gonna help everybody else but that it helps me make sense of the world so that I can choose what I wanna do next. There's a lot of times I don't choose, right? A lot of times I react. Somebody comes up to me on an airplane and says you're in my seat and I think you're an asshole and that gets us nowhere, right? If I can somehow manage in that moment to take my breath to go, this person is upset. Then I can take a whole different approach, right? But it doesn't take being a saint. You can be an asshole like me and still do that. Seriously, I mean, I know people who are nice all the time and consider it and they just automatically empathize and I just don't even, I don't know. I have to work at it. I make it hardest to empathize with me when I need it the most, right? Because that's when I'm weird lashing out, yelling, whatever, or some people yell really quietly. Has anybody had a relationship where the yelling is really quiet? Anyway, empathy is the hardest when it's most needed, which is why we need that ability to change our perspective, right? You know on Twitter, right? What happens on Twitter? Like your fingers have already sent that tweet out before you have a time to even breathe sometimes, right? Do you ever read the long threads or people are just like talking past each other and like, and I'm not even talking about Gamergate. I'm talking about like people talking about some intricate part of TDD, right? How much do you mock? And that's Twitter, you know, you could take a minute to breathe. Nobody would even know. Breathing's not enough though. I don't know what the next slide. Nope, nope, let's get that. Breathing's not enough. You have to have resources. You have to be able to either sometimes get some empathy from someone else or do some self-empathy practice, which I will say is an advanced skill to be able to just pull yourself away and do it all by yourself. But having good friends to go to is useful. I'm curious if this has ever happened to anybody else. Yes, it's become a joke in my family even though it's only half a joke, because it always happens. So this is like an everyday thing, right? An everyday occurrence. You have somebody express as a feeling and the other person comes back with, oh yeah, I'm totally disregarding your feeling. We're gonna talk about my feeling. That's part of how we get ourselves in trouble. And you can see this. You can see this in GitHub threads, right? You can see it on Twitter, you can see it everywhere. And I think the problem I run across most often in trying to talk about this with people when it has to do with software is that they don't want to acknowledge that they have any feelings. That wasn't a feeling, right? So somebody puts up a pull request, somebody responds to it, right? And there's just like no acknowledgement that there's any feelings in there. But that's part of what the breathing exercise is about. There are feelings, we just need to identify them and let them come out and talk through them, right? See what we wanna do with them. So in a circumstance like that where there's two people having feelings, the question is, you can ask yourself, this really doesn't work if you try to make somebody else do it. It's all about your own practice. But you can ask yourself, right? Can I step back and listen? You will amaze yourself. If you take on this practice and you do it for a while, you will amaze yourself because you will be in a fight with someone you love and you will suddenly start listening to them. And you'll be like, dang. But if you don't have the emotional resources, then you don't, right? You go somewhere else, you get your needs met. So I don't, sometimes when I'm working on empathizing with someone, 22, sometimes when I'm working on empathizing with someone, they are telling a story about me that I don't like, right? You always do this, you never do that. You can't possibly understand where I'm coming from, whatever. I don't have any control over that. I only have control over the story I'm telling myself, right? And so I can listen for judgments and I can replace them with curiosity about who they are and where they're coming from. But I can only do that if I can let go of their story about me. I have to just let it roll on past. I can go, oh, I hear this is a story about me. You're probably not into discussing that right now. I do that in my head. Let it go. Maybe later we talk about it. Hey, you remember when you said I had horns? Did you mean that? Like later, but not now. Okay, oh, this is important. Okay, I could just stand here and say this for 30 minutes and I'd be pretty happy. But really, okay, let's make sense out of it though. What do you do about being right, right? Okay, you're a white guy and you're talking to a feminist who is really pissed off and she says, I don't know, some statistic that you know is wrong. What do you do? You say, here's a person who's having strong feelings. How can I help? That's what you say. If she says, shut up, don't talk to me, then guess what you do? You shut up and you don't talk to them and then you go get your needs met elsewhere because you have no control over the story they're telling about you. Right now in the world, there are hundreds of people who are telling a story about me that I don't like. Maybe not hundreds. But I mean if I think, my parents, my parents are in the middle of living a story about me that I don't like. They're not interested in my opinion of that. They're interested in a lot of things I'm not interested in and so I know what's mine and I know what's theirs and they get to keep theirs and I get to keep mine. And there are other people who think that I'm full of shit and they'll talk about that is not my problem. And I can't fix it and I can't own it and I can't take it from them. I can't insist we're gonna talk about your story about me if that's not what they're into. So when somebody's having strong feelings, I don't think they give a shit what your opinion of the statistics is. And if they don't give a shit, guess what? I was wondering how I was gonna get consent in here. You can empathize with someone without their consent because that's in you. Telling them that you're empathizing with them when they've told you not to speak to them, not the same thing, right? Okay, I won't belabor. Wonder how much more is left, I totally have no notes. Okay, so these are your strong fields, right? You have ideas about the statistics and you have feelings and you have defensiveness and you have all this stuff. You come back to the breath and you notice what's going on as best you can and then you make a choice because you have a choice all the time. We have a choice. Okay, I say this, I have already said I'm an asshole, right? So just to be clear, I don't mean it's an easy choice and sometimes it's too hard. And so instead you scream or whatever it is that you do when you're triggered. But ideally, take a breath and you notice and you choose do I want to be present for this and what do I need to be present for this? So if I go visit my mom, which has been known to happen and she starts saying things that I don't like hearing, fill in the blank, you all have moms. Okay, that's probably not right. Fill in the blank, you can all imagine my mom. Okay. The question, do I want to be present for this is an important question. I get to choose. There are people who are not people I spend time with, although I do spend empathy on them because that's for my own well-being, my ability to see the world and figure things out. But there are people that I don't engage with. I don't say, oh, bring me more of that diatribe so I can empathize more. Because I mean, I did that for a while with you know who. And then I said, this is getting old. I'm sure there are other people I could practice on. Anyway, you get to choose, that's the point of that. If you choose empathy, it's time to get curious, start exploring what's going on. And if you choose self-protection instead of empathy, then get the hell out of there. Don't just sit there and keep taking it, right? If you don't want to do it, don't do it. Being able to make that mental shift from, you know, what the fuck are you doing to, wait, what are you actually doing? Right, that shift just changes everything. How much time do we have? Oh, no time, good. All right, you cannot see these, but I will send them to you if you want. This is important. I want to reiterate, this is not a moral obligation that I'm offering you. It's a way to feel less frustrated and confused about the world, right? It's a way to live in a world where what the fuck is wrong with people, right? It's that, it's for you, it's a choice. Huh, 29, although I have a last slide. This is a homework slide. Nothing, dead silence. Okay, I go in my head, what's the reaction gonna be? That was not one of the ones I thought it was. Okay, so there are lots of people you can practice on, right? Do I have a mouse? No, I don't have a mouse. There's a little baby. You could try to empathize with the baby, make some guesses. You can empathize with pretty much any of those people. You can make up stories about them. You can make up alternative stories, three or four separate stories, and then say, I wonder how I could find out which one is real, or if it's a different one. Then there's a person in blue over to the right. You wanna really work, you could work up some serious empathy for that person. You can do that. Okay, that's all I got to say. Thank you.