The 3 Types of Empathy Your Audience Needs Now More Than Ever | The Copy & Content Podcast with Jon Cook. Presented by Keynote Content.

Hey, it's Jon Cook with Keynote Content. I wanted to connect with you today because specifically when you look around the world with COVID-19, it's disrupted virtually every industry in the world. And then with the recent U.S. Elections, and there's still some uncertainty about kind of the fallout from that, what that might mean from a change standpoint, opportunities, loss opportunities, whatever it might be. There's just a lot of stress. And what your audience is needing right now is that they need to know. Does anybody care about what I'm feeling? Does anybody care about what I'm experiencing, what I'm going through, what it means for my coworkers, my family, for my business, whatever it might be and what they need right now is empathy.

You've probably heard this term of empathy before several different times. It's a popular word that I hear many different speakers, many different service experts and authors use this idea of empathy. But what does empathy actually mean? And what does that actually convey to your audience that they need to know from you? What I want to share with you is this definition first of what is empathy. I've seen a number of different definitions, but the best definition I've seen so far comes from the Cambridge English Dictionary. Empathy is defined as "the ability to share someone else's feelings by imagining what would it be like to be in that person's situation." Very simple definition, but it's so accurate.

What can I share from a feelings, from an experience to standpoint, if I could just picture myself in their shoes. You've heard the term about walking a mile in someone else's shoes. There's a lot of truth to that because it says, how do I know what somebody is going through? How can I be able to identify what they're feeling, unless I can imagine myself in that situation. Now I will say that empathy is far more natural for some of us compared to others. And some people might even ask like, can I even nurture empathy? Can I even cultivate empathy? I absolutely believe that you can, but there are different types of empathy. I want to look again with empathy, there are three different types. Really there are five different types and I'll mention two of the five types first that we won't really focus on today.

The two types I won't really focus on is somatic and spiritual empathy. Somatic empathy is really tied into that feeling somebody else's physical pain by inflicting that same physical pain on yourself, or giving yourself license to experience the same physical pain. There's also some weird phenomenon like somebody can say like identical twins, there've been reports in different studies that show an identical twin can sometimes almost sense when their twin experienced some physical taints and saying where it's like, Oh, my sister hurt her knee.

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Being an expert doesn't mean you automatically have an audience, especially with so much noise in the digital marketing space. You need to break through the noise and establish your message as a rising thought leader in your industry. Jon Cook has worked with over 1,100 coaches and consultants and 800 speakers to make their messages remarkably clear and compelling to the right audience, and today he wants to help you. If you want greater clarity and even better results with your message, visit workwithjoncook.com.