Well, there's been a lot more demand recently for empathetic lawyers, so today I thought to discuss the power of empathy and how to utilize empathy to drive businesses and social growth by increasing humanity and connectivity.
Empathy is all about seeing the world from someone else's perspective. It's all about deep diving into someone else's situation to find an appropriate resolution. So how can empathy be beneficial for organizations?
The reality is that we live in an empathy deficit world, and that's a term that was coined by President Barack Obama back in 2006. So almost 16 years ago on a global stage, this has already been recognized and yet very little has been done about it. Today we are living in a world where we continue to experience declining empathy levels.
Fundamentally, when people are disconnected, when people are feeling isolated, they don't perform as well because as humans our greatest need is to be seen and to be heard. That's like at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, right?
I think it's a conversation that's changing in the legal world.
First and foremost, better listening skills can help your client feel more connected. Secondly while working with your adversaries, you can understand them better, of course, there are a host of other benefits as well.
Theodore Roosevelt once said nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And it's so true because if you had the two best lawyers in the world in the room to choose from, everything else remaining equal as humans, we will gravitate towards the ones that we think care a bit more, get it a bit more, understand us a bit more.
As people, we connect with people that connect with us. It's contagious, actually. The most successful brands, they're successful because they're able to establish a form of emotional connection with the end consumers. The difficulty the lawyers have is the legal topics don't really facilitate the use of emotions because they're quite technical, but also, we're trained to write in a very clear, structured, logical way. There isn't as much attention to empathy, I guess. But the reality is the more connected you are to humanity, to human beings, the more impactful that marketing will be.
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