 So, a while ago I had this real important early meeting with an investor. And it took me months to get on in the schedule. It was an exciting time. So, the night before I went to bed early, I said not one, but two alarms, because the responsible adult that I am. And the next morning I woke up before either of those two went off. So, I tiptoed to the bathroom, not wanting to wake up my wife to release myself. Shit! So much for not waking up the wife. Going back into the bedroom, apologizing first, then picking up various pieces of alarm clock all around the room. I go into the shower to take a nice relaxing shower to wash the sleep out of my eyes. I turn on the water. Oh, that is fucking cold! Sure that heating unit is 20 years old and I should have been replaced a few years ago, but hey, if it works, it works. Unless when it doesn't. So, I go up into the attic, shivering cold, butt naked to reset the whole system, wait for 10 minutes, go downstairs again, step into the shower, and finally defrost under now hot, nice running water. Alright, these things happen, I factored in some time, so I can still make my train and grab a coffee at the station. It's gonna be all good. So, I go downstairs, eat a quick breakfast. Pretty proud of myself for not spilling anything on my shirt. And I hop on my bike to the train station. Traffic is low this time of day, it's early morning, so plenty of time, we're all good. A flat tire. Alright, so there's no buses along my bike route, so I guess I will just walk. So at the pace, a bit faster than comfortable at my fancy dress shoes, I walk to the station, all sweaty, just in time to see my train leave. But hey, I'm a poster thinker, right? So upside, I have like 20 minutes to spare now, so I can buy that coffee, buy some deodorant, because I don't want to be like the smelly dude. And 20 minutes later, I actually like catch my train. No more issues there. So once I get to where I need to go, I make sure to be the one out of the train first, run up the stairs, grab the first cap and say, you're all to the district, business district. So I get out and traffic was okay, so it even made up five minutes of those 20 minutes I was late. And I texted the investors assistant along the way, so we're all good. So I report to the front desk, I'm ushered into the meeting room, and then the investor walks in. Like a seven foot tall, fit male, with a three-piece suit, and like this double winster knot in his tie. And we shake hands, or better, he gives me this stare, and then he applies this death grip handshake for just a bit too long. And before I can even apologize, he says, if this is how you fell in my time, we should probably end this meeting right now. Wait, what? I coped with the alarm clocks, the ice cold shower. I walked to the station. I even made up five minutes of last time while smelling nice. So what did I expect? That I would just set up a tent the night before the front lawn? I mean, I did my best. And sure, I hated when I need to explain how things are not my fault, but sometimes life just gets in the way. Why can the dude just be a bit more nice about it? Maybe it should be a bit more empathetic. All right, so let's do an experiment. You, sir. I'm just going to throw you the pen and then you try and catch it. All right, so what just happened? You got it. Let's do this step by step, right? So I'm Roy. So Roy, through the... Right? Yeah, you're doing awesome. And then you... A plus. Okay. Now throw it back. Bam. So what happened? Yes. You're the best. Let's do it again. See, so that's it. All right, so what just happened? Oh, that's not what happened. What actually happened is the pen was thrown. It flew through the air, and then I saw it fall on the ground. That's what happened. And I chose this example in perfect because after one just asked, he didn't catch it, or so it's not you. It's the human race who have this human reaction to focus on the negative or was not there. We compare what has happened to prior experiences we've had. So why am I telling you this? Because I want us to be nicer and more understanding of others. And that's not always easy. When walking over here this morning with giving a talk on empathy on my mind, the driver who almost ran me over, well, I didn't think, well, there must be a valid reason for this person's actions. I thought, what an asshole. I too often assume the worst in people. And it's time to change that. So as you guessed by the title of the talk, it's not just about empathy. It's also about providing a framework to enable you to be more empathetic by using acting. So what if instead of playing a scripted character, we use acting techniques to play a different person, a real human in our lives? This is a framework based on the notion that all acting essentially boils down to faking a situation. While bad acting also fakes emotion, great acting uses genuine emotion to apply that to a fake situation. This framework is about recognizing the emotional state someone is in and then use your emotional memory, things you've lived through and then relive them and apply them to what they're going through. This important thing, and I'll be reiterating this in various ways throughout the presentation, that good acting is a may-believe situation plus a recalled emotion. This does not make sense yet, but in the end this will all fall into place. I'm Roy. You can tweet me if you want. I have been taking acting classes for the last nine years, both on scripted and improvisational theater, and during the day I'm a co-founder of ADAPT Signal, the best APM for Ruby and Elixir. And I'm a human, and I also tend to interact with other humans. And I've learned that that is way easier when you get to practice empathy once in a while. By the end of this session, you will understand why you should be empathetic and you want to practice empathy all day, every day. And in addition, you will be better method actors than Marlon Brando and Daniel de Lewis combined. I definitely will not succeed, but I'm going to get my best shot anyway. So let's first establish some ground rules to what empathy actually is in this context. According to dictionary.com, empathy is the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another. Or to keep it simple, empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And I mean this in the broadest possible sense. To be empathetic, you need to let go of any baggage you're carrying around. Your values, the way you were raised, your abilities, anything you consider to be normal. Because you want to create this blank canvas which we can build upon to create our character. So we can finally see through their eyes and more importantly feel what they're feeling. Before diving in deeper, a quick thought on sympathy. Sympathy versus empathy. Like sympathy is to empathy what thoughts and prayers are to taking action. Talk is cheap. Being sympathetic is cheapish while being empathetic takes serious effort. And even though those two terms, sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, there are two totally different things. I get why people confuse them. Because both of them deal with the relationship we have to feelings and experiences of others. Sympathy means you feel sorry for a situation someone is in. That doesn't actually improve the situation someone is in. And it doesn't give them the confidence that you actually understand that. Now don't get me wrong, being sympathetic is okay. It's probably better to feel sorry for a situation someone is in than not acknowledging the situation at all. But you shouldn't stop at being sympathetic. Showing pity focuses on weakness while through empathy your goal should be to lift someone up. Prexing empathy is also about self-care. Of course empathy should be about anyone but ourselves. But we like it if there's something in it for us too, right? You're a luck because practicing empathy is also beneficial to the practitioner. So let's say your colleague does something stupid. It's real easy to get irritated and worked up. He's fucked that idiot. And then maybe complain to others about him or her or they being an idiot. Because again, it's easy to focus on a negative. We focus on negative emotion instead of improving the situation. And empathy turns it around and enables you to not drag others with you as well. So before getting into a off the setting, let's look at a classical movie, TV example. Good cop, bad cop. The purse grabbing perp sits in this interrogation room. And then one dude hovers over him shouting like, you're going down. And they start crying. He's obviously the bad cop. Then in the back of the room, there's the good cop. He stands there and watches, walks over there, pushes the bad cop away. And then in a soft spoken voice says, well, if you just help us out and give up your crew, then we can make a deal probably and tell the DA you cooperate it. This is a classical example of the drama triangle. The drama triangle is a social model for destructive human interaction that can and often will occur in conflict. And it's all too common in office culture as well. The theater on the social model was published in 1968 by Carpman. He was a doctor of medicine, or he is a doctor of medicine. And back in 68, he also was interested in acting and a member of the screen actor field. So he wrote about the drama triangle and the three phases of drama. First as a victim, a victim feels or acts like a victim. Whether others consider them a true victim or not. They feel helpless and powerless. And it could be by circumstance, but also by choice. Some victims want or need to feel victimized. At the office, Bob is the victim. Bob does the dishes every single day. Alice drinks coffee too. She never does the dishes. Bob always cleans his cups and Alice's cups. The victim is enabled by the rescuer. The rescuer feels guilty when not helping the victim. But on the other hand, they also want to keep the victim helpless. It's often a mechanism to not having to cope with one's own issues. Now Carol, Carol is the rescuer. Carol brings her own cup of coffee from home. So Carol does not make any dishes dirty. But still she offers Bob help. She says to Bob, you know what Bob? I'll help you out and twice a week, I'll do the dishes. Because Alice is a meanie. Then there's the persecutor. The persecutor blames the victim. They're angry at them because it's all their own fault. Alice hates Bob and his whining. Seriously, Bob comes in early every single day just so he can get the dishes done before she comes in, which enables him to complain to Carol. Bob is an asshole. These kind of drama triangles appear in the office way more often than you would probably think when you start looking at it from tomorrow on. In workplace, make sure you don't become the bad cop. Don't become the persecutor. Because she will reinforce the victim, involve a rescuer, and then shit hits a fan, basically. So what I do when I see a conflict arise, I just step back, reflect on my role. Am I the rescuer, the persecutor, the victim? And maybe I just step out. Because a triangle needs three corners. As soon as you take one corner out of the equation, the whole thing collapses. All right, empathy, drama triangle, so acting, right? Well, acting offers a bunch of useful traits you can use like every day, whether you want to practice empathy or not. And a lot of those I'm about to show apply to improvisational theater, and some of them also apply to scripted work. So what does acting teach? Acting teaches you to truly listen. All of our actions are based on the actions and the emotions of others. When acting, you need to truly listen to whatever you're playing with. You can't get away with like checking Twitter and then nodding and mumbling. That will never advance a scene. A reaction is required and expected to keep going in theater. So acting teaches to listen. Acting also teaches to be accepting. Often, especially in improvisational theater, everything is made up on the spot. So if I say there's a door here, and the other one isn't paying attention, it's really just like walk through the door. Yes, it was open, that's okay. But the door is here. If you don't acknowledge that, you're in denial. And being in denial in this context means you're rejecting the information or ideas or emotions of others. And if you're in denial in theater, audience won't believe you. So everything is accepted as the absolute truth. You can't ignore input and still come across as a genuine character. Acting also teaches to let go of status, to not be afraid to speak up. In real life, your status is pretty much fixed. Your boss is going to be higher in status than you are. The bastard who almost ran you off the road is going to be lower in status, at least to you. And these differences in status don't constantly influence the way you interact with others. And if it does, you're probably in an unhealthy relationship. When there is a conflict, though, difference in status becomes a key ingredient. In acting, status is actively determined. Your status in relationship to others. You work together to determine who has a high status and who's a low status. And by switching roles, you're unable to speak up instead of keeping quiet. Because of that, acting also teaches to work together. Actors feed of each other. Through play, they learn who has a high and low status. And the beauty is that, contrary to real life, none of them need or want to win. It's about the process and not about the end result. When acting, status may shift at any time if it's beneficial to the scene and it just happens spontaneously, which often doesn't happen in real life. Acting also teaches to work what is there. What isn't on stage doesn't exist. And what hasn't been said doesn't exist either. Acting requires to let go of everything to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. So blah, blah, acting. What is acting? That's a great question, and I do not have the answer. You can ask ten actors what acting is. You'll get ten different results or ten different answers, and they're all equally valid. To me, acting is feeling a genuine emotion in a make-believe situation. But what all actors do agree on is that acting is always about conflict. And a theater conflict has a broad meaning. Sure, a fistfight is a conflict. But going through rehab is also a conflict. Or not being able to decide on a name for your baby. That's also a conflict. In real life, we're not looking for conflict. Or I hope at least we're not constantly looking for conflict. But if conflict does arise and you don't stop it in its tracks, it will snowball into something big and unstoppable. And practicing empathy helps to resolve conflict. And I'll show you how in a bit. Acting is a craft. And there are many approaches to how to train actors. And there are many variations on those approaches. And not even going to try to touch any of them apart from the method. Well, the method you probably know because of a handful of famous method actors. One of them, Daniel Day-Lewis. You may know him from movies like Genghis New York, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Threat, The Last of the Mohicans, and much more, but not that many. Day-Lewis describes acting as the gravitational pull of another life that fires one's curiosity. Day-Lewis almost literally becomes his character. And as you compare his roles, there are little similarities. Day-Lewis learned Czech just so he could speak Czech, or he could speak English with a Czech accent. He spent months in a wheelchair when playing a disabled person. Had to be lifted on set across lighting cables because he wouldn't come out of his wheelchair. Before playing a Native American, he learned how to track and skin animals. When he played a wrongly convicted inmate, he spent 48 hours in jail without food, without drink, followed by a nonstop nine-hour police interrogation. Heck, he even texted his co-stars in character. As Abraham Lincoln. He becomes the character when he's on set. He's Lincoln in a period setting. When he steps off set, he's like a 21st century Lincoln. He has his iPhone. Start texting co-stars and signs law of ape. He is that person. Some good news. This is not the kind of method acting you need to employ. It would help, but it may not find like a rabbit to skin in time and things like that. And I want to do justice to Day-Lewis. He is probably one of the best actors out there. But he's also the most common illustration about what method acting is about. Well, there are also less visible layers to it. So a real short history. Konstantin Samolsky came up with what he called the system back in 1930s Russia. Then he took it to the U.S. And there he met with Strasburg, Adler, and Meisner. So Lee Strasburg focused on the psychological aspects, Stella Adler on the sociological, and Samford Meisner on the behavioral. Today I'll be talking about the Strasburg approach, which revolves around what he called effective memory, but it's also known as memory recall. It's the ability to summon emotions from your own life and apply those to your role. So how does method acting help with practicing empathy? What I said, practicing empathy is being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. See where we're getting. Method acting enables you to put yourself in someone else's shoes. So in theater, there's going to be a character in a script. For us, there's going to be any real-life human being. We're going to approach situations as if they are played by an actor. And we already do this subconsciously. We switch roles during the day all of the time. By using acting techniques, we're enabled to actively choose how to react. Instead of subconsciously switching roles, we'll be consciously switching roles. So this is our own method, I think, I came up with. So let's call it the empathetic acting method, because there is no I in team. You can use team with people you know at least something about. You can't use this with a random stranger in the street. You need to know enough about something, but usually you know enough about your coworkers. You know where they live, some of their background, their relationship status, whether they have children, things like that. We're going to use that information to kind of like guess initially their emotional state of mind. We'll then use that to determine where conflict comes from and how it makes people feel. And our goal is not to solve a problem, or at least not a primary goal. The goal is to identify and learn how someone reacts and use that as input to potential problem-solving. So there are five steps to team. The first one is to let go, to determine the basic emotion, to listen and learn, to determine the complex emotion, and to apply memory recall. So first let go of everything. And this is by far the hardest step, especially if you're part of the conflict yourself. I'm late to a meeting, and it sucks for me that I had a cold shower and a flat tire, but I'm imposing a problem on you too because your schedule is off for the rest of the day. Too bad you need to shake that off. When you have those intertwined conflicts floating around in the back of your mind, you cannot be truly empathetic. You cannot try to feel what I'm feeling by also thinking what an asshole was screwing up in my schedule. And of course your emotions are equally important, right? So later on we'll go harder on the issue, but for now we're going soft on the person. Let go of everything. Your status as well. Like we're all humans and we're all equals on a personal level. There may be a bunch of other valid conflicts going around, even unrelated. There may be a stone in your shoe that's bothering you. Wishing this context is a conflict, but unless you know that the other person also has a stone in its shoe, you should ignore it for now. Second, you need to determine the basic emotion. We want to use this to kind of like build our character on. And you're all grown-ups. You've all experienced a wide range of emotions, so you are all able to use memory recall to summon them from the depths of your brain. In this step, we're simplifying the whole thing by sticking to the four basic emotions. We use anger, fear, sadness, and happiness. So relating the foundation by kind of like guessing the emotional state someone is in and choose one of those four emotions for them. So I walk into the office breathing like this. I probably could be sad or it could be in fear. I'm probably not angry or happy. I want to come in smiling. I'm probably happy. And when I come in cursing, I could very well be angry, right? So now we've determined the basic emotion. Next, we want to dig deeper. We're going to learn more about the conflict by applying active listening techniques. Again, I come in with my high chest breathing and you pay attention. Just by looking at me, that may give me the confidence to open up to you and tell me about the conflict I'm experiencing. If not, you could just walk up to me and give me your undivided attention. That means not checking your phone, not saying hi to a passing colleague. Just look at me and that may get me to open up to you. And if not, encourage me. Just ask, hey, what's up? Keep an open posture. You can use a bunch of gestures. When I open up and I'm talking to you, you cannot. You can mirror my facial expression. You can slant your head slightly. You can give formal reinforcement. But these could also be tricks you can abuse. You can pretend to be actively listening by slanting your head, nodding, saying. With some practice that may come across as a giant reaction or you're actually being an asshole. So let's just don't do that, right? Give me feedback so I know that you actually understand me. And if you don't feel you understand me, then ask questions. Don't make any assumptions. Don't make any judgments. Don't offer a solution. We just want to find out which conflict caused my emotion. So basically my breathing is fear or sadness, right? So you ask me what's going on and I tell you that I heard, in the hall, that a company is about to downsize. I may be losing my job. My wife lost her job a month ago. She's already down to a single income. If I lose my job, I won't be able to make my mortgage payments. I'll be kicked with my house. You already know I have two small children, so that's a big thing for me. So you say you understand. You summarize the issue. You ask how I found out. Don't apply anything, so you may want to ask, well, who did you over her? You may not want to say, take your over here, Jack, because he's always bullshitting, right? So keep it like an open thing. Don't lead, don't imply. So now you know my basic emotion. You know some more details about my conflict. You can now determine the complexity of motion. You now know my high chest breathing came from fear. I know why. As a spoiler alert, it's not because I'm afraid of losing my job. It's because I'm afraid of not being able to provide for my family. Now each basic emotion contains a wide range of complex emotion. If I'm in fear, I could be alarmed, frightened, in shock, a panic, mortified, anxious, nervous, et cetera. Those are all fear at different amplifications and in different appearances. I fear not being able to provide, which I would say makes me anxious. Anxiety, according to the dictionary, could be caused by a situation that seems uncontrollable and unavoidable and a mood state of not being ready to cope with upcoming negative events. Well, I'm not kind of physical enough. Now with that in mind, you're ready to become truly empathetic. Because on step five, we'll be applying the memory recall technique. Again, being empathetic means you're vicariously experiencing the feelings of another. So you take this blank canvas. You've let go of everything. And now you turn into me. A middle-aged white man with two small children, an unemployed spouse who's about to lose his job, or at least afraid he is, and that will get him kicked out of his family home. You have likely never experienced this. And even if you did, you will have felt different emotions than I'm feeling right now. So think of a time when you were anxious. Maybe you traveled to the U.S. for a real scant and were afraid you wouldn't be admitted into the country because of a travel ban. Maybe you got here this morning anxious about not being able to make a connection and spending three days all on your own. Maybe you're anxious because you had to do this presentation and your laptop wouldn't boot. Now the amount of anxiety you've felt is going to be different from me. To me, it always feels like the end of the world, like losing my job at 80% anxious. So now think of what you went through, what triggered your anxiety, and try to amplify that emotion up to 80%. Now you're feeling a real, still real, but amplified emotion. Now, and this takes time and training, don't think about your trigger anymore. Don't think about what caused this emotion for you. Instead, remaining in that mood state, think about my problem, my conflict. So now you're officially being me, going home, telling my wife, oh honey, let's sell the place. And while you do that, you're still feeling the 80% anxiety that was triggered by something totally different, but you now apply to this specific situation. This should prevent you from ever thinking that someone is overreacting. You can't blame someone for their true feelings. By doing this, you'll be able to really step on my shoes and really feel what I'm feeling. And then congratulations, you just discovered empathy through acting. As a bonus, optional sixth step conflict resolution. So empathy reached, you can stop here, go home, that was it. But sometimes you just want to resolve an issue, right? So in this case, you may tell me, maybe we should first figure out if they're actually downsizing. And so whether your job is at stake. If you're part of the conflict, you should go hard on the issue. Empathy should never be used to sugarcoat anything. I can be empathetic towards you and say, well, yeah, I feel how it sucks to lose your job, but hey, you punch your boss in the face at a Christmas party. I can be empathetic towards you and your feelings, but still, let's say, it's your own fault. So in the end, I guess you just want to say that I want you to be nice. I think practicing empathy leads to new insights in how to prevent and resolve conflict. And though conflict resolution is great, the goal of the exercise is to let people know that they're understood at a personal level. People can only flourish in a herd of humans when they know they are being understood while being themselves. And that is what being empathetic enables. I can share with my colleagues what makes me tick and I don't want or need any preferential treatment. But knowing of all of us was going on in our lives. Now we feel about that. It's all in our shared interest. It's a shared interest to be open to our feelings as a base for conflict prevention and resolution and keep going where we all need to go and which enables growth. I believe that by practicing empathy, we can make life better for the people around us and for ourselves. And when enough people practice empathy, that should make society as a whole feel more inclusive. So maybe you're not the new Daniel Deleuze. Maybe you do not want to practice empathy all of the time. But maybe, just maybe, the next time when that colleague is late again to a meeting, eyes health, health shut, seemingly zoning out, don't yell at him, why are you late again? Maybe just ask, how's your newborn doing? Thank you very much.