Hey Everyone, Happy Friday! I hope you've had a wonderful week! Something I've been thinking about recently, and often struggle with, is developing empathy. I am sure it is partially genetic, and partially learned, but I think it is something that we can all develop and improve. I have never been an empathetic person by nature, and my father is even worse. Perhaps I got it from him, though unlike him, I have tried on and off to improve it. It's tough though! I often struggle to feel what others feel, or to see things from their point of view. If I've had the same experience as someone else, it is easier, but still perhaps not as easy as I would like it to be. That said, I know I'm not a psychopath because I certainly tear up from time to time during an emotional movie scene, etc. 🤣 So I definitely feel what others are feeling, to some extent. Plus, I care about others and their well-being, and am quite a good person objectively. I just struggle to feel what they're feeling, or see things from their perspective... I know my relationships with others would be better if I had a good sense of empathy, so it is something I need to keep working on. Are you empathetic by nature? What have you done to increase your ability to empathize? What advice would you give someone who is trying to improve in this area? Looking forward to your responses! 🙏😊

That’s something I heard years ago, and have thought about it on and off ever since. Perhaps it’s common sense, but I think some of us forget it at times… “You can have everything in life, but not with one single person,” to put it slightly differently. Why is that? Well, everyone is unique, after all. Even identical twins raised in the same environment are seldom identical in terms of their likes and interests. And that should be celebrated! How boring life would be if we were all exactly the same, no? That said, there have been times when I wished people close to me would get interested in the things I am interested in… For instance, I could never get my wife (nor anyone in my family thus far) into chess, haha. During the first couple months of our dating phase, she feigned interest in it, and even studied it with me on a few occasions, and seemed to be really into it! That caused me to get her a chess book for Christmas that she never read! Later, she told me that she feigned interest just to spend time together, and to get me to like her more. Despite that, a part of me still thinks she was genuinely interested in it for a short while…It is hard to say. Anyways, the lesson here is not to expect to get everything you need from one single person in your life. It just doesn’t work that way. If it somehow does, you have found an incredibly rare person! In a way, that’s a good thing, because it forces us to go out into the world and meet other people. I have my chess friends, none of whom are family members, and that is fine – it’s always been that way. Furthermore, we shouldn’t push others too much to be like us, or to like the things that we like. Plenty of parents try to get their kids to play the same sport they played growing up, etc., but sometimes the kids just aren’t into it, and that’s fine. Our job as parents is really to help our children discover their passions and natural talents, and to support them in whatever those things might be. “Everyone child has a natural gift,” as my father-in-law said recently.