Compassion.
It’s one of the best communication skills you can master. It’s a fundamental component of high emotional intelligence. And it’s a key part of the very best leadership examples, illustrated most recently by this email, regarding mental health days, that went viral.
Compassion energizes human interaction, and encourages relationships to thrive.
Yet for all of its natural benefits, researchers are finding that compassion is not something we’re born with. The good news is that we can develop it, and cultivate it within ourselves and our interactions with others.
One of the most effective ways I’ve found to do this is through a method called CBCT, or Cognitive Based Compassion Training, which is a meditation and mindfulness practice that I learned during an eight-week course at Emory University in Atlanta.
The biggest, most surprising takeaway for me?
The seat of the training is in our minds (rather than our hearts), and in developing new neural pathways.
It’s easy enough to have compassion for people you know well, and for long-term colleagues with a shared history. Focusing on a past experience of compassion is where the early phases of CBCT’s mindfulness practice begins: being “in the groove” of recalling that experience, and dwelling on it, prepares the mind for the next phase.
If we think about the first phase of compassion – personal experience with people we know – as the core of a series of concentric circles, the next phase is to practice extending that sense of well-being to people in circles further and further out, that is, people we know less well, to people we don’t know at all, to people we find challenging, to people we simply don’t like.
That’s where the challenge takes hold – toward new or unfamiliar employees, for example, or cranky customers, or people whose personalities don’t seem to jive with the familiar company culture.
Researchers continue to weigh in on how it works. Here are three applications for everyday business situations.
Handle Stress Better
Compassion-based meditation practices modulate the impact of stress. They may also impact physiological pathways, including the immune and neuroendocrine systems, which are modulated by stress. Self-compassion, moreover, was associated with less anxiety in response to a mock job interview and less distress after receiving neutral feedback.
Handle Criticism Better
The impact of meditation training overflows to non-meditative states. Even when we aren’t actively meditating, the beneficial effects of meditation persist. These include improved attentional skills, improved emotional regulation, reduced anxiety, and decreased ego-defensive responsivity under threat. In other words, we handle criticism and perceived danger better, and in a more even-keeled, less reactive way.
Understand Others’ Emotional States
Compassion meditation positively impacts empathic behavior. Even relatively short-term training programs for novices enhance positive regard for the others and prosocial behavior toward strangers. This includes the key skill of accurately identifying and understanding the emotional states of other people.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.