I gave two talks this month to two different sets of educators about the role that compassion can play in increasing student learning at any academic level. One set of educators were college professors and staff in Michigan and the other set included K-12 teachers, social workers, school psychologists, and administrators in Rhode Island. While our conversations in both groups focused on how compassion builds successful learning environments for our students, we also discussed the importance that compassion has in building a positive and productive workplace culture for ourselves and our colleagues. Earlier this year, I was interviewed by the host of “Making Positive Psychology Work Podcast” and Psychology Today correspondent Michelle McQuaid specifically about the connection between workplace success and compassion. With many of us ending our summer vacations and heading back to work, I thought it was an appropriate time to share Michelle’s piece in Psychology Today as well as the link to our podcast interview:
Posted Apr 19, 2018
Do you ever wonder if being too kind could be holding you back from success? Let’s face it: It’s a competitive ‘survival of the fittest’ world. So, could being too understanding and considerate of others leave you standing at the bottom of the career ladder watching others climb to the top?
“Success is often associated with the individualistic idea of only looking out for number one,” explained Chris Kukk, Professor of Political Science and Social Science at Western Connecticut State University and author of The Compassionate Achiever, when I interviewed him recently. “However, even Darwin suggested that the most efficient and effective species have the highest number of sympathetic members.”
Chris suggests that rather than compassion standing in the way, it can actually fuel your success. For example, a number of studies have found that compassion not only helps to build your resilience and improve your physical health, but it’s also a consistent characteristic of successful and resilient people. As a result when your organization has a compassionate culture you’re more likely to be engaged, be innovative, collaborate with others, and perform at your best.
Chris also points out that while compassion is often confused with empathy, they’re not the same neurologically or practically. For example, when you experience empathy, you understand what the other person is feeling, so if they’re upset or down, you feel sad, and this triggers the same neuralpathways as if you are in pain. Unfortunately, over time this can drain your energy and motivation. On the other hand, when you show compassion, you experience feelings of warmth, concern, and care for other’s suffering, and you’re motivated to take action to solve their problems or improve their wellbeing. This triggers the release of the same types of chemicals that come with feelings of love – oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, that can help you feel optimistic, positive, and primed for achievement.
“You can think of compassion as the Cadillac version of kindness,” explained Chris. “And it can power you along to achieving a life you’re proud of, much more effectively than any short-lived bursts of energy you may get from other motivators of success such as power or money.”
How can you develop more compassion at work?
Chris has developed a four-step program for cultivating compassion. This is represented by the acronym L-U-C-A: Listen to learn; Understand to know; Connect to capabilities; and Act to solve.
What can you do to nurture more compassion in your workplace?
Click here for the original Psychology Today article.
Click here for the “Making Positive Psychology Work Podcast” interview.
The host of iTunes top rated “New & Noteworthy” podcast, The Science of Success with Matt Bodnar, interviewed me for an episode called “The Surprising Power of Compassion.” Matt’s questions guided us through a discussion about how compassion can fuel creativity, build emotional resilience and help us achieve personal and professional goals. We took a ‘mindwalk’ with great thinkers ranging from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Charles Munger on compassion’s role in achieving success in the boardroom, classroom and living room.
The episode can be listened to at the following link:
http://redorbit.podbean.com/e/the-surprising-power-of-compassion-with-dr-chris-kukk/
Compassion, Neuroscience and Society: A Radio Interview in 4 SegmentsThe host of WS Radio’s The Enrichment Hour, Mike Schwager, interviewed me on January 28, 2016 for a show called “Weaving Compassion and Neuroscience into the Fabric of Society to Make a Better Future.” We talked about a wide range of topics and issues including education, neuroscience, self-improvement, counter-intelligence, Charles Darwin and my work with the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement on social-emotional learning. The interview is split into four 15-minute segments. Click here to listen to the interview.
Note: Scroll down when on this page to find the 4 segments of the complete interview.
Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
If you are into any aspect of neuroscience or simply a zombie, this is one of the best weeks of the year: it’s Brain Awareness Week (March 16–22, 2015). Brain research, especially over the last decade, has provided unique and helpful insights into problems and questions in many areas and disciplines including computer science, economics, education, philosophy, politics, psychology and robotics. An area of neuroscience research with the potential to profoundly change the way we think and interact in society (from classrooms to living rooms to boardrooms) is the work being done in labs focused on understanding the difference between compassion and empathy. The compassion-empathy difference is more than semantic; the consequences are pragmatic. The distinction is real and so is its effect on society: knowing the difference can help individuals build resiliency and avoid burnout as well as turn “empathy gaps,” which have recently made headlines, into junctures for local community and national strength.
Compassion and empathy are not synonymous. Empathy is feeling the same emotion as someone else and compassion is feeling kindness towards another person. Where empathy is about stepping into the shoes of another to understand and share their feelings, compassion is about acquiring a 360 degrees understanding of the suffering or problem that a person is experiencing and taking action to resolve it. Compassion is a two-step process of understanding and acting but empathy is only one step and it is about emotionally absorbing the feelings of another.
Our brain knows the difference between compassion and empathy even if we aren’t aware of it. Tania Singer, director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Lepzig, Germany has used MRI scanners to show that compassion and empathy “are two different phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” When we think compassionately we “light up” the same regions of the brain as love but empathetic thinking lights up regions associated with pain.
The neuroscience effect of having compassion at the forefront of our thinking is positive for each of us as individuals and for our communities. The effect, in very basic terms, is that when we think from a compassionate mindset, we release the peptide hormone oxytocin, which then activates the neurotransmitters of dopamine (brain reward) and serotonin (anxiety reduction) contributing to happiness and optimism—two characteristics that contribute to success.
Compassion’s strength as a power source for fostering communal as well as individual success is that it is not only derived from the same neural networks as love but it is centrally focused on the concern and care for others. When empathy is used as the source for helping another, the central motivation is to alleviate your own pain and stress. And that egocentric motivation is, I believe, one of the keys for understanding why burnout occurs much easier when we think empathetically. Emotionally absorbing another’s feelings, which empathy entails, is physically draining and can make you feel metaphorically stuck in quicksand. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps the emotional quicksand at a distance by using a more cognitive understanding of a person’s suffering when attempting to alleviate the pain: understanding without absorbing. We have confused compassion fatigue with empathy fatigue and that confusion has been reflected repeatedly in major media outlets over the last few months. If our society’s caregivers (i.e., nurses, paramedics, doctors, social workers, police and fire personnel, etc…) could learn how to harness the power of compassion, they would be helping themselves just as much as they are helping others. Their resiliency is an important source of our community strength.
Research has clearly shown that compassion can be taught and learned. Envision a world in which economics, education, medicine and even politics are infused with more compassion. Practicing compassion in politics would not only help Congress to act but act constructively. Imagine politicians who do more than say “I feel your pain” (empathy) but actually understand and do something about it (compassion): we would have more politicians who act with principles rather than for principal. Our modern political world could reflect the words of President Lincoln: “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar; but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar.”
Let’s fill in life’s empathy gaps with the compassion two-step. Let’s ride the neural networks of compassion to stronger and more resilient communities. While Dr. Singer and others are researching “whether it is possible to transform people’s empathetic reactions into compassionate action,” shouldn’t we just simply create waves of kindness that our neural networks naturally want to ride?
(NOTE: This piece is based on an entry I made last year on the difference between compassion and empathy with more emphasis on how neuroscience and social science interact in honor of Brain Awareness Week.)
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Cognitive Neuroscience Society, “Feeling Others’ Pain: Transforming Empathy into Compassion,” (June 24, 2013).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Jason DeParle, “Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam,” The New York Times ( March 4, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “Where’s the Empathy?” The New York Times (January 24, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “How do we Increase Empathy?” The New York Times (January 29, 2015).
Kai Kupferschmidt, “Concentrating on Kindness,” Science (September 19, 2013).
Helen Y. Weng, et. al., “Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering,” Association for Psychological Science (May 2013).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
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