Nikolas Fragkias “Empathy” is a word used widely, especially in recent years, both in therapy and in the corporate and professional world.
What is empathy?
First, let’s define Emotional Intelligence, which contains the idea of empathy. Emotional Intelligence rests on four pillars:
- Awareness of my own emotional state: I become consciously aware of my own emotions before I speak or react.
- Managing my own emotional state: when I become emotional, I choose behaviour that serves my goals without harming others.
- Awareness of others’ emotional states: I become (more) sensitive to how other people feel.
- Managing others’ emotional states: I use the information about how others feel, carefully.
Empathy, then, is the combination of the last two pillars: the ability to perceive how other people feel and to behave accordingly.
How do facial micro-expressions help?
Without the right training, people usually project their own perceptions, beliefs and emotional states onto others. They guess how someone feels and thinks from the behaviour they see.
After training, they can recognise the emotions that flash across the face of the person they are talking to, lasting less than 1/25 of a second: micro-expressions of emotion. These tiny facial movements are involuntary. No one can fake or hide them, and that is exactly what makes them special: they are the authentic expression of a person’s inner emotional state at the moment we observe them.
Our trainers bring this into their work directly. Nikolas Fragkias was the first Greek psychotherapist accepted by Paul Ekman to train in micro-expressions. If you would like to learn more about training in micro-expressions and body language, get in touch with us.
