Early empathy practice feels clunky and awkward. Baby giraffe legs, not a smooth upgrade. That friction is normal. You’re not failing; you’re installing new code.
The story
🟢 When Empathy Feels Awkward, You’re Probably Doing It Right
You learn a new communication skill. You try it with your partner. Suddenly they look at you like you’re reading from a script or running empathy flavored manipulation. Strong start.
Early Practical Empathy Practice, PEP, often looks like this. Not a smooth upgrade. More like baby giraffe legs – wobbling, a bit embarrassing, occasionally face planting in slow motion. I went through this stage too. Conflatulations.
The friction is real. When one person practices empathy while the other runs old habits, tension ramps up fast. You sit there filtering blame, guilt, and sarcasm through your new “human decency patch,” while the other person fires from the hip. Notice how resentment starts simmering? Classic resentment stew.
More empathy also increases awareness. You start seeing your own unmet needs with uncomfortable clarity. Useful skill, yes. Stabilizing at first? Not always. Once your brain sees a pattern, it refuses to unsee it. Your inner lie detector wakes up.
Then comes the temptation to fix everyone’s language. New tool in hand, you turn into a walking PEP infomercial. “Ah yes, I notice you used blame language.” People love this. By love I mean they want to throw a shoe at you. Focus on needs under the words.
And the slowness? Normal. Pausing before speaking feels strange because your brain ran old autopilot for years. Now you installed new code and the system needs a moment to process input.
You’ll suck at this for a while. Good. Chapter 2 in “A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind” exists for this stage.
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