If you have ever finished a conversation thinking I should have handled that better — said the wrong thing to a friend who was hurting, or argued past someone instead of understanding them — you already have the one thing empathy requires: the wish to understand another person well. The good news is that the rest is a skill, not a fixed trait. You can get measurably better at it, and the steps are more concrete than most advice admits.
Here is the short version. Empathy is not a single thing you either have or lack; it has parts, and you can be strong in one and weak in another. It can be grown — and simply believing that changes how hard you try. The most reliable way to understand someone is not to imagine their point of view but to ask for it and genuinely listen. And empathy works best when it includes care without drowning you in the other person’s distress. The rest of this guide unpacks each of those, with the research behind them and something to practise today.
What empathy actually is (and why the parts matter)
Psychologists generally describe empathy as having a few distinct components rather than being one ability. It helps to name them, because knowing which part you are weak in tells you what to work on.
- Cognitive empathy — accurately understanding what another person is thinking and feeling. This is the “reading the room” part: grasping why someone is anxious, defensive, or quiet.
- Affective empathy — actually feeling something in response to their emotion. This is what makes a friend’s bad news land in your own chest.
- Compassion — the warm motivation to help, the part that turns understanding and feeling into a kind word or a useful action.
These can come apart. Someone can read people precisely yet feel nothing (cognitive without affective). Someone else can be flooded by others’ feelings but freeze rather than help (affective without compassion). When you notice where a conversation went wrong, it usually maps onto one of these: you misread what they needed, you didn’t let it move you, or you understood and cared but didn’t act. That diagnosis is the first practical step — empathy improves fastest when you stop treating it as a single dial.
Can you actually become more empathetic?
Yes — and how you answer that question for yourself turns out to matter. In a series of studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki and Carol Dweck found that people who believed empathy is malleable — something you can develop with effort — put in more empathic effort precisely when it was hard: spending longer listening to someone of a different race, staying more engaged with a person who held opposing views, and showing more willingness to help in difficult situations. People who believed empathy is a fixed trait gave up sooner when it got uncomfortable (Schumann, Zaki & Dweck, 2014).
The lever here is subtle but real. Empathy is effortful, and most of us have plenty of it for people who are easy to care about. The challenge is summoning it for the difficult colleague, the relative you disagree with, the stranger whose story is hard to hear. Believing the skill can grow makes you more likely to try in exactly those moments — and trying is most of the battle. So the first thing to change is not a technique but a belief: treat empathy as a muscle, not a fixed amount you were handed at birth.
Ask, don’t assume: the mistake almost everyone makes
Here is the most useful and most counterintuitive finding in this whole field. We are taught to “put yourself in their shoes” — to imagine how the other person sees things. It feels like the empathetic move. But across 25 experiments, Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley found that being told to take someone’s perspective did not make people more accurate about what that person was actually thinking or feeling. If anything it slightly reduced accuracy — while making people more confident in their guesses. Imagining someone’s mind mostly tells you about your own assumptions (Eyal, Steffel & Epley, 2018).
What did work was almost embarrassingly simple. When people asked the other person and listened to the answer — what the researchers call perspective-getting rather than perspective-taking — their accuracy went up. Understanding someone requires new information about them, not a more vivid imagination of them.
This reframes empathy in a freeing way. You don’t have to be a mind-reader. You have to be curious enough to ask, and present enough to take in the answer. The practical move: when you catch yourself assuming you know how someone feels, replace the assumption with a genuine question — “What’s the hardest part of this for you?” or “What do you wish people understood about it?” — and then resist the urge to jump in. Let them tell you. You will be right more often, and they will feel understood, which is half of what they wanted anyway.
How to listen so people feel understood
If asking is the first half, listening well is the second — and it is a specific, learnable skill, not just staying quiet until it’s your turn. The core of it was described decades ago by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, who coined the term active listening: listening not for the facts alone but for the feeling underneath, and reflecting it back so the speaker knows they have been heard. Modern coverage in the Harvard Business Review echoes the same handful of moves. A few that reliably make people feel understood:
- Reflect the emotion, not just the content. “It sounds like that left you feeling sidelined” does far more than “so they didn’t include you.” Naming the feeling — and being willing to be corrected — signals you’re tracking what matters to them.
- Ask open questions and then make room. Questions that can’t be answered with yes or no invite the real story. A few seconds of silence after they finish is not awkward; it’s an invitation to go deeper.
- Resist the fix. The instinct to solve is well-meant but often arrives too early. Most people want to feel understood before they want advice. Understanding first; solutions later, and only if they’re wanted.
- Give them your attention, visibly. Put the phone down, turn toward them, let your face respond. Presence is felt, and its absence is felt even more.
None of this is about performing empathy. It’s about slowing down enough to actually receive another person — which, conveniently, is also the thing that makes them feel cared for.
Empathy without burning out
One honest caveat. Feeling with people has a cost. If you absorb every hard emotion you encounter — soaking up a friend’s grief or a colleague’s panic until it becomes your own distress — empathy can tip into exhaustion. This is real, and it is why some caring people quietly pull back.
Research by Olga Klimecki, Tania Singer and colleagues offers a way through. Comparing two kinds of mental training, they found that empathy training alone — practising sharing others’ suffering — increased negative feeling and activated brain regions tied to pain. But compassion training — practising warmth and the wish to help — produced a different pattern: more positive affect and a different brain network, and it could counteract the distress that pure empathy stirred up (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard & Singer, 2014).
The practical takeaway: aim for compassion, not just absorption. You don’t have to feel a person’s pain in full to help them — and trying to often helps no one. Notice what they’re feeling, let it matter, and then orient toward warmth and what might actually be useful. That stance is both kinder to them and far more sustainable for you.
A simple way to practise this week
Empathy grows with reps, the same as any skill. You don’t need a workshop — you need real conversations approached a little differently. Try these, one per day if you like:
- Catch one assumption. Notice a moment when you’re sure you know how someone feels — and ask them instead. See how often the answer surprises you.
- Reflect before you respond. In one conversation, name the other person’s feeling out loud before you say anything else. Watch what it does to the tone.
- Hold one silence. After someone finishes, count to three before replying. Let the space invite more.
- Stretch for a hard case. Pick someone you find difficult and spend two minutes genuinely wondering what their day is like. Effort toward the difficult ones is where empathy actually grows.
- Rehearse a real conversation. Before a charged talk, think through not just your points but their likely concerns — then plan the question you’ll ask to check whether you’ve got it right.
That last one is where a thinking partner helps. Talking a tense conversation through out loud before you have it — naming what the other person might be carrying, testing how your words might land, catching your own assumptions — makes you noticeably steadier when the real moment comes. This is one of the things people use aidx.ai for: an AI coaching and therapy space to rehearse a difficult conversation, untangle what you’re actually feeling, and prepare to show up the way you want to. It’s a private, judgment-free place to think it through — not a stand-in for the human relationship, which is the whole point of getting better at empathy in the first place.
If you’re working on the emotional self-awareness underneath all of this — noticing and naming your own feelings so you can stay steady when someone else’s are running high — our guide to emotional intelligence coaching is a natural next read.
The short version
Empathy isn’t a gift some people are born with and others aren’t. It’s a set of skills — understanding, feeling, caring — that grow when you treat them as growable. The fastest improvements come from a few honest moves: ask people about their experience instead of assuming you already know it; listen for the feeling and reflect it back; aim for warm, useful compassion rather than raw absorption; and practise most on the people you find hardest. Do that for a week and you’ll feel the difference. Do it for a season and so will everyone around you.
Last reviewed: June 2026.
