The Empathic Response

No, you didn't miss a blog. I took time off for the family last week and I hope you did too. So to pick up where I left off two weeks ago, I wrote then about gratitude and how, when publicly demonstrated, has a way of evoking the same sentiment in others. Let's take it to the next level.

One good turn, it seems, not only deserves another, it causes it. There appears to be a kind of generalized empathetic response at play that very well may lie beyond our ability to control. We can't help it. It's the human condition.

In fact, research has shown that two people left alone together and monitored by scientists soon begin to breath at approximately the same rate, mirror each others posture, and eventually speak with similar tonality. Don't believe it? Have you ever heard married couples who finish each others' sentences? That's the empathetic response.

Even more fundamental, have you ever noticed on the social page of the newspaper photographs of couples celebrating their Gold and Silver Wedding Anniversary? Honest to gosh, sometimes I cannot tell the husband and wife apart. I fully expect someday to see Deb in the mirror and discover it is me (apologies to Deb).

As is my wont, I hope to leave you with a leadership lesson. Here's my best effort: I am a leader and I am thinking about everyone in my life that has influenced me for the good. At some unconscious level,  I believe that I sought to be like them, to say what they said, think what they thought, do what they did. I am not unique. I believe that all of us are an amalgam of all the experiences and influences that have ever come our way. We make the world and the world makes us.

When I was talking to my son, Chris, tonight about this Friday blog, he suggested the take-away lesson be, "Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas." Well, maybe that's part of it. But as I have recently been reminded, I am a kind of purist. I strive mightily to see the ideal, the good, and the hopeful in every circumstance. Even as I write these words, I regret whatever I have written that could have been perceived as whining. That is not who we are.

Yes, TLA is threatened by the economic cliff off which we are all falling. But in truth there are far bigger issues about which we may chose to worry--like families losing their homes, parents without incomes, and students without teachers. I am truly convinced that we will think ourselves out of this hole. But first we must stop digging. I am putting down my shovel today to advance a new vision:

For as long as the regional leadership academy has life, I want it to be the protector of the hapless man on whom the stack of boxes is about to fall, the woman who pushes the cup of coffee from the edge of the table, the guy who raps on the back of the SUV headed blindly into the parked motorcycle. I want TLA to influence all of us for the good. I want to evoke in others the empathetic response. Let's get moving.