The skills you need guide to interpersonal skills

Political awareness
Many people view ‘political’ skills as manipulative, but in its best 
sense, ‘political’ means sensing and responding to a group’s emotional 
undercurrents and power relationships. Political awareness can help 
individuals to navigate organisational relationships effectively, allowing them 
to achieve where others may previously have failed.
TYPES OF EMPATHY
Psychologists have defined three different types of empathy: 
cognitive, emotional and compassionate.
Cognitive empathy, also known as ‘perspective-taking’ is not really what most 
of us would think of as empathy at all. It is basically being able to put yourself 
into someone else’s place and see their perspective.
It is a useful skill, particularly in negotiations, for example, or for managers. 
It enables you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but without necessarily 
engaging with their emotions. It does not, however, really fit with the definition 
of empathy as ‘feeling with’, being a much more rational and logical process.
Effectively, cognitive empathy is ‘empathy by thought’, rather than by feeling.
Emotional empathy is when you quite literally feel the other person’s emotions 
alongside zhem, as if you had ‘caught’ the emotions. It is also known as ‘personal 
distress’ or ‘emotional contagion’. This is closer to the usual understanding of the 
word ‘empathy’, but more emotional.
Emotional empathy is probably the first type of empathy that any of us feel as 
children. It can be seen when a mother smiles at her baby, and the baby ‘catches’ 
her emotion and smiles back. Less happily, perhaps, a baby will often start to cry 
if he or she hears another baby crying.
Finally, compassionate empathy is what we usually understand by empathy: 
feeling someone’s pain, and taking action to help. The name, compassionate 
empathy, is consistent with what we usually understand by compassion. 
Like sympathy, compassion is about feeling concern for someone, 
but with an additional move towards action to mitigate the problem.
Compassionate empathy is the type of empathy that is usually most appropriate.
As a general rule, people who want or need your empathy do not just need you to 
understand (cognitive empathy), and they certainly do not need you just to feel their 
pain or, worse, to burst into tears alongside them (emotional empathy).
Instead, they need you to understand and sympathise with what they are going 
through and, crucially, either take, or help them to take, action to resolve the 
problem, which is compassionate empathy.

---

42
2.
ADVANCED COMMUNICATION SKILLS
2.