Empathy Mirror?
Empathy Mirror?
Empathy is a prime competency for effective leadership. When people move up, but don\’t know how to relate and communicate well, and thus appear insensitive, cold, and authoritarian, their careers often end badly, and their organization pays a great price in time, money, and morale.
A strong feeling of (will)power can shut down someone\’s mirroring system via a genetic on/off mechanism in their DNA, or via a shift in the dominating Identity.
The fact that powerful people mirror much less is consistent with studies that show that powerful people can be more superficial, because of different priority systems.
Their system is responding less to circumstances of others, thus they pay less attention to individual differences. This may lead to stereotype or categorize people based on more superficial signals. Leaders often don\’t see themselves as similar to their followers.
People who activate their mirroring system more, score obviously higher in empathy. The more similar or relevant someone is to you, the higher the empathy. Compassion training may make a huge difference in empathy responses.
Self control problems, such as overeating and overspending, can be the result of poor willpower or impaired ability to pre-commit to some agreement about something, or both.
Voluntarily restricting one\’s access to temptation can be more effective than pure willpower.