From “Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community” by Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen
Jamil Zaki, a professor at Stanford who runs the Social Neuroscience Laboratory, has written about empathy in a book entitled The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. In brief, what Zaki walks the readers through is a compelling body of research that demonstrates empathy is not a fixed trait, but rather it is a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time. The catch? You have to be willing to sit in the situations that require your empathy. Unfortunately, much of the time people avoid situations that require the effort to empathize and so instead of strengthening this skill, they stagnate.
If you are eager to strengthen your empathy muscles, we are here to help. No matter how empathic a person you are, there is always room for growth in this area and we all have blind spots we will need to overcome. Besides exposing yourself to empathy- including scenarios, empathy can be learned or trained in several ways.