Empathy in the Face of Resistance
Excerpt from panel discussion at Inova Heart & Vascular Institute’s Patient Experience Conference 2018. Transcript modified slightly for ease of reading.
Attendee: I’m a relatively new nurse and I have this opportunity to ask a question of a magician and somebody that works with CEOs. One of the things that I experience is, you know, everybody in this room has the best of intentions, wants to make their patient’s day go great. But often the people that need that empathy and compassion the most put up the biggest wall. So like a heckler or a CEO that’s kind of ground into his position.
But often the people that need that empathy and compassion the most put up the biggest wall.
Are there simple strategies, relatively simple, that I can use over the course of the day to make progress with somebody that needs my empathy, but is resistant because they’re hurt, or sad, or in a position of resistance?
Brian: That was a great question. And like you said, it’s interesting: I’ve never been a kid’s magician, but when you watch kids magicians, you don’t have to do much. You know, they have imaginations where anything’s possible. So actually it’s incredibly difficult to fool a kid because they still believe it’s possible. It actually makes it very difficult as a magician. There’s a weird paradox performing for kids. People think it’s the easiest. Well they’re fun, but not necessarily easy.
What’s difficult about adults, and you associate CEOs with the highest level of this type of hardened thinking, is that as we get older we learn what the world actually is, or at least we think we do. Right? We start to learn “This isn’t possible. It really isn’t all open to me. I have to make these compromises to live and do the things I want to do.”
So the more we get that hardened sense, and you do see it: it’s the CEOs, like you said. It sounds like a stereotype but they’re all just like, you know, when I walk up on stage to start a 1-hour magic show where I’ve been hired by the corporation, they’re like [arms crossed]: “All right magic boy. Good luck.”
You’ve already done the hard part, which is recognizing it. Recognizing that they’re in that situation that they’ve put the wall up is a huge step. Because if you don’t recognize that, you just kind of keep slamming your head against the wall that they put up.
And trusting that the little things that you’re already doing, that, you know, just checking in, saying hello, and expressing something. You ask them a question. After you ask a question, just go silent. A lot of people ask a question and keep talking.
Ask a question and go silent and just wait… people will talk. And they’ll tell you things.
It’s amazing: if you really let them, people want to talk, especially when they’re hurting. But you have to let them. I think it’s very scary to ask a question and go silent. And then you count, three… two… one… and then you just start talking again, trying to get them to say
something again, and you lose it.
So I guess the easiest thing I can say in this kind of a timeframe here is just to understand that you’re already doing it, and have faith that those little interactions matter. That when you do mention something that they said earlier, you know, they mentioned they
went bowling or they mentioned their uncle or something, and you go, “Hey how’s your Uncle?” That little thing can go a huge way.
You may never see their wall come down, but it’s affecting them. And you have to kind of trust that.
